The Center for a Better South
Overflowing trash bins like this pair at the southeastern tip of Emanuel County near where it joing Bullock and Candler counties seem more common in rural areas of the Southern Crescent where garbage pick-up is limited.
This photo was taken just north of the intersection of U.S. Highway 80 and Georgia Highway 121 in Emanuel County, which has almost 23,000 people and a poverty rate of 24.5 percent, according to the U.S. Census.
Photo taken Sept. 22, 2013, by Andy Brack. All rights reserved.
Orange dirt roads. Pine trees. Cotton fields. This photo evokes the writing of Georgia’s Erskine Caldwell. It was taken in Georgia’s cotton country just north of the intersection of U.S. Highway 80 and Georgia Highway 121 in Emanuel County.
According to the Cotton Council International 2013 Buyers’ Guide, Georgia farmers grew more than 15 percent of the nation’s cotton in 2011-12 by producing 2.465 million bales. The only state that grew more cotton was Texas, which produced 3.5 million of the nation’s 15.573 million bales in 2011-12.
Emanuel County,located north of Statesboro, Ga., has almost 23,000 people and a poverty rate of 24.5 percent, according to the U.S. Census.
Photo taken Sept. 23, 2013, by Michael Kaynard. All rights reserved.
Cotton is bustin’ out all over the South, but particularly in the fields of middle Georgia, the state that grows the most cotton in the Southern Crescent region. According to the Cotton Council International 2013 Buyers’ Guide, Georgia farmers grew more than 15 percent of the nation’s cotton in 2011-12 by producing 2.465 million bales. The only state that grew more cotton was Texas, which produced 3.5 million of the nation’s 15.573 million bales in 2011-12.
This photo was taken just north of the intersection of U.S. Highway 80 and Georgia Highway 121 in Emanuel County, which has almost 23,000 people and a poverty rate of 24.5 percent, according to the U.S. Census.
Photo taken Sept. 23, 2013, by Michael Kaynard. All rights reserved.
From Better South President Andy Brack:
My Great Uncle Gordon Brack used to be a clerk in this store in Allentown in rural Wilkinson County, Georgia, where my father was a boy. Thanks to Brian Brown of the Vanishing South Georgia project for letting us republish the photo.
My dad, Elliott Brack, recalls the store in the 1940s:
“We used to buy soft drinks for five cents out of a cooler chilled by ice, pulling the drinks out of the cold water. If we had another nickel, we would buy peanuts and pour them into the Coke or RC or Pepsi for added pleasure.”
Dad says the store had a butcher and a meat market. “Items were on shelves and you told them you wanted something and the counterman reached up and got it. No self-self service much. They were general merchandise, which meant they sold feed and overalls too.”
Brown notes in his post about the store that Allentown is known for being at the intersection of four Georgia counties, although it mostly is in Wilkinson County.
Today, Wilkinson County has fewer people (9,577 in the 2012 Census estimate) than it did in the 1940s (11,025 people) when my dad was a boy here before moving to the “big city” of Macon with his family. About three in five people are white, with most of the rest being black. Poverty is about 20 percent.
Copyrighted photo by Brian Brown. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Vanishing South Georgia photographer Brian Brown offers this 2010 Pepsi image from Bartow, Ga. The photo serves to balance an earlier post of a Coca Cola advertising mural in Mount Vernon, Ga., which is about an hour south.
“The mural at Bartow is on a building that was once a thriving local grocery store,” Brown says. “Bartow has always been a small town, with a scattering of churches and businesses, but as is the case in so many of these places, all that remains is the advertising to even suggest that it was once a gathering place.”
Bartow (population 286) is in Jefferson County, a Crescent county with an estimated 16,432 people in 2012. Some 54 percent of residents are black, with almost all of the remaining people in the rural county being white. About 29 percent of people live in poverty.
2010 photo, copyrighted by Brian Brown. All rights reserved.
Vanishing South Georgia photographer Brian Brown offers this photo of a pedestrian walking down a Lumber City, Ga., street that has a medical clinic behind the bright red doors.
Lumber City has about 1,300 people, a third of whom live in poverty. It’s on the eastern tip of Telfair County, which as 16,349 people, according to the 2012 Census estimate. Just over 60 percent of residents are white. About 36 percent are black. About 13 percent of people consider themselves to be Hispanic or Latino. As with Lumber City, a third of the county’s population lives in poverty.
2012 copyrighted photo by Brian Brown. All rights reserved.
For Georgia photographer Brian Brown, this family farmhouse near Owensboro, Ga., represents the heart of small-family farming operations.
“Owensboro is a ghost town today, with nothing but fields and farming, but once supported several businesses and many more families lived there fifty years ago than do today,” Brown writes.
Owensboro is in Wilcox County, one of the Peach State’s smaller counties with 9,068 residents, according to the U.S. Census. About two thirds of residents are white and a third black. Estimates by the U.S. Census are that 27.4 percent of county residents live in poverty.
2008 photograph courtesy of Brian Brown, VanishingSouthGeorgia.com. All rights reserved.
Yes, this is a photo of one of those crazy Burmese chickens in Fitzgerald, Ga., crossing the road to, ahem, get to the other side. These chickens, pests to some and paragons of community pride to others, roam the town’s downtown streets. While they mostly scamper away from prying photographers, some like this rooster occasionally to taunt vehicles with face-offs on the streets.
Just over 9,000 people live in Fitzgerald, the county seat of rural Ben Hill County. Some 31.6 percent of people live in poverty, according to Census figures. More.
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Photo by Andy Brack in May 2013. All rights reserved.
If you want to visit a place where the chickens and roosters roam free in the downtown, check out Fitzgerald in Georgia’s heartland. Burmese chickens, introduced by state officials in the 1960s to be a game bird like turkeys and quail for hunters, didn’t make it the public’s mind. And despite an attempt to get rid of the colorful birds, they survived. (More on their history.)
Locals apparently then thought of them as pests for their free-range habits (they’re so, pardon the pun, cocky that they face off with cars in the street), but grew to embrace them so much that there’s now a Wild Chicken Festival in March in the town’s downtown historic district.
Not everyone in Fitzgerald loves the chickens, but talk about an innovative way to bring in tourists and bolster the local economy!
Just over 9,000 people live in Fitzgerald, the county seat of rural Ben Hill County. Some 31.6 percent of people live in poverty, according to Census figures. More.
Links:
Photo by Andy Brack in May 2013. All rights reserved.
Today’s photo marks the first of a five-part series focusing our lenses on Leary, Ga., a small agricultural village in southwest Georgia in Calhoun County near the Early County line. Pictured above is an abandoned store near the railroad tracks at the heart of the downtown.
Leary, which had 610 people in the 2010 Census (56 fewer than 10 years earlier) is predominantly poor and black. Three in four residents are black. Some 36 percent of the people in Calhoun County live at or below the poverty line, according to the 2010 Census.
There’s not a lot of businesses in Leary. Its train depot is closed. Across the street from a busy convenience store is a full city block of deserted businesses and homes. More than anything, Leary seems old and tired with little hope of a prosperous future. Notes photographer Michael Kaynard, “The downtown area had been deserted and the jail, post office and other businesses moved away and followed the highway.” Other than the store, the only thing that appeared to have some activity was a peanut plant, which operates seasonally.
Photo by Andy Brack of the Center for a Better South, May 2013. All rights reserved.