The Center for a Better South
This mural, depicting the hand-harvesting of tobacco and located on Main Street in downtown Hemingway, S.C., is a reminder of the Williamsburg County town’s past as a major tobacco center.
Copyrighted Jan. 2015 photo by Linda W. Brown. All rights reserved.
Built in 1924, the Salters Brick School in Williamsburg County, S.C., served grades 1-11 when it opened in 1925 with 100 students, photographer Linda W. Brown of Kingstree writes. “After it was consolidated with a larger school, the building was used from the late 1970s to the early 1990s as the hub for Black River Glads, a wholesale gladiolas farming and sales operation. The building is currently for sale.”
Copyrighted photo by Linda W. Brown. All rights reserved.
This is one of a number of derelict motels along U.S. Highway 301 in Clarendon County, writes photographer Linda W. Brown of nearby Kingstree, S.C.
“Some of them have been converted into long-term residence facilities for migrant workers—and I think in some cases, people who have had their homes foreclosed on. Others are rotting away.” This one, she noted, appeared to be for sale.
— Copyrighted photo by Linda W. Brown taken March 21, 2015
This apparently abandoned building is at New Holland Crossroads in Aiken County, S.C., writes photographer Linda W. Brown of Kingstree, S.C.
“There is an old ‘A’ food service rating on the door, so I would guess that it was some sort of eating establishment, or bar that served food, at one time or another,” she observed.
Aiken County, longtime home of the federal Savannah River Site, is not a Southern Crescent county but it is adjacent to impoverished Barnwell and Orangeburg counties. Rural areas in Aiken County look much like those in the impoverished areas.
Copyrighted photo by Linda W. Brown taken March 21, 2015. All rights reserved.
On S.C. Highway 261 in western Williamsburg County,S.C., this rusty mailbox, though leaning, still serves its purpose, says photographer Linda W. Brown of Kingstree.
Copyrighted photo by Linda W. Brown. All rights reserved.
Country stores like this one in the Salters community of Williamsburg County, S.C., are a dying breed.
Kingstree photographer Linda W. Brown writes that J.A. Ferrell opened a store in his Salters home in 1880.
“Some years later, he built this building on the edge of his property and moved the store operations there. He continued to run the store until his death in 1918. Three other merchants have operated a general store on the premises. The last, Frank Moseley, closed the store in 1990.”
Photo by Linda W. Brown. All rights reserved.
Located in northern Williamsburg County, this old house, with its chimneys beginning to collapse, sits across a field of broom straw from the road, writes Kingstree, S.C., photographer Linda W. Brown.
Across the house, once the bastion of family farms, rural houses like this are as fallow as the fields they surround as people left the country and moved to the city.
Copyrighted photo by Linda W. Brown. All rights reserved.
This old tobacco barn in Florence County, just off the Vox Highway, is beginning to lean and is losing its tin as age, sun, wind and rain take their toll, writes Kingstree, S.C., photographer Linda W. Brown.
You can spy hints of three three modes of transportation in this December 2014 taken by Kingstree, S.C., photographer Linda W. Brown. There’s a white horse, wagon wheel and old white sports car.
“We here in the country tend to hang on the past,” Brown writes, adding that the photo was taken Dec. 26, 2014, on Highway 341 between Johnsonville and Lake City.
Copyrighted photo. All rights reserved.
It looks like a rehab is in the works at this old barn in the Browntown community in lower Florence County, writes Kingstree, S.C., photographer Linda W. Brown.
Copyrighted photo taken Dec. 26, 2014. All rights reserved.