Tag: Hale County

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Rural Studio, Hale County, Ala.

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Corrugated cardboard pod, Rural Studio, Newbern, Ala. Photo by Bill Hawker, March 2009.

 

Hale County, Ala., the locale for the 1941 book “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” by James Agee with photographs by Walker Evans, remains poor today.  Some 26 percent of people in Hale County live in poverty, according to the U.S. Census.

But also today, Hale County has Auburn University’s Rural Studio, an undergraduate architecture program that has been designing creative houses and public structures throughout the county since 1993.  Above is the outside wall of a corrugated card building built in 2001 on the Rural Studio campus in Newbern.  Click here for more. 

In 2013, students worked on four structures, including a solar greenhouse and converted an old bank building into a community library in Newbern.  More.

Photo taken in Marcy 2009 by Bill Hawker, Sydney Australia, for the Center for a Better South.  All rights reserved.

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Tenant house during Depression, Hale County, Ala.

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Tenant farmhouse, Hale County, Ala., by Walker Evans. Image courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress.

 

The new publication of a 70+ year old unpublished essay by James Agee on the terrible poverty of the American South during the Great Depression has folks looking anew at the issue that has plagued the region since the Civil War.

“Cotton Tenants: Three Families,” published this week, chronicles the lives of people in rural Hale County, Ala., as outlined in this story in The New York Times.   Along with stunning documentary photographs by Walker Evans, Agee eventually published the 1941 work, “Let us now praise famous men,” which garnered more attention in the early 1960s than it did when originally published.

Agee originally was hired to write an essay for Fortune magazine, but apparently argued with editors about a 30,000 word draft, which was first published in full this week.