This is the old T.W. Tison Grocery in Doles, Ga., in rural Worth County. Stores like this used to dot rural landscapes but many, as highlighted by Brian Brown in VanishingSouthGeorgia.com, are wasting away and closed.
Worth County, which is located between Albany and Tifton in the central part of South Georgia, is home to Peter Pan Peanut Butter. Every jar made is produced in the county seat, Sylvester. The county had about 21,300 people in 2013, according to the Census with whites representing 68.7 percent and blacks being 29.6 percent. Some 22 percent of people live below poverty levels, according to Census figures.
Retired editor and photographer Linda W. Brown remembers when Greeleyville, S.C., had a busy IGA grocery store. When it closed, a Super G Foods opened in the same location. Now, that store closed and the parking lot appears to be just a place where big rigs get parked at night and on the weekend.
And so Greeleyville has become a food desert — a place lacking in consumer choices for food, much like the store we profiled earlier this year in Allendale, S.C. Without a full-service store, Greeleyville residents have less healthy and fewer close options (think convenience store) and have to drive at least 12 miles to Kingstree to shop at a full-service grocery store.
Greeleyville, population 438, is in southwestern Williamsburg County. Just under 34,000 people live in the county, which is about the number who lived there in 1900, according to Census figures. Population peaked in 1950 at 43,807, but has dropped slowly since then.
About two-thirds of county residents are black, with almost all of those remaining being white. Only 2 percent of those in the county are of Hispanic descent. Some 32.8 percent of residents live in poverty, according to the Census. Of the county’s 1,921 firms, 36.5 percent are black-owned — a percentage that is three times South Carolina’s average.
