Main Street – Building a better South

January 24, 2014November 16, 2014

“Im still here,” North, S.C.

Two guys walk past an empty building on Main Street in North, S.C., on a chilly January day. What caught our attention about the deteriorating grand-looking commercial building was the red sign of the establishment at the right — a church that appeared to be closed. Emblazoned at the top: “Im Still Here and Still Standing For Jesus.”

North, which has an old military air strip outside of the town limits that is still used for military touch-and-go landings for C-17 Globemaster transport jets, seems to be a tired, rural town. The reason: It got its oomph more than 100 years because of the railroad, which isn’t a player these days. [History.]

North, which has a population of about 800, is in Orangeburg County, which is South Carolina’s largest. Some 91,476 people were thought to live in the county in 2012, according to the U.S. Census. Almost two in three residents are black. Some 24.5 percent of residents live below poverty.

QuickFacts about Orangeburg County from the U.S. Census

More about North via Wikipedia.

December 4, 2013December 4, 2013

West Main Street, Timmonsville, S.C.

For every business that is open on West Main Street in the Pee Dee town of Timmonsville, S.C., some six businesses are shuttered, including those pictured above. Open on the lonely street are a church, town hall, furniture shop, small chain general store and a bank. But there were 18 closed businesses along three blocks of the city’s hub street last month.

Fortunately for the community, Honda Motor Company located a facility several years back that builds all-terrain vehicles and personal watercrafts nearby, which helped employment levels. Still, per capita income for the town was $11,714 in 2000. In 2010, the town had 2,315 people. Ten years later, it had grown by five people.

Timmonsville’s poverty rate was 26.6 percent in 2000, much higher than its home county, Florence, which had 19.4 percent poverty in 2010. Florence, just a few miles away from Timmonsville, is the largest city in the Pee Dee with 37,498 people in 2012. Florence County had 137,948 people, according to a 2012 estimate.

More on Timmonsville from Wikipedia.
QuickFacts about Florence County and the City of Florence.

October 29, 2013November 17, 2013

Main Street, Rocky Ford, Ga.

Rocky Ford, Ga., a circa 1870s town with “untold treasures and endless opportunities” according to this site, is home to about 200 people in rural Screven County in eastern Georgia.

According to photographer Brian Brown, “After putting much of her personal wealth and energy into the restoration of her beloved hometown of Rocky Ford, Greta Newton is now offering its historic commercial core for sale. Without her passion for the history of this place, it would have suffered the same fate as so many of our forgotten small towns in Georgia.”

Rocky Ford is in Screven County, which had 2,675 people in 2000, according to the Census. Screven County got its start after the Revolutionary War and soon became part of the Black Belt of Georgia where cotton became an important staple crop tended by enslaved African Americans.

The county’s population jumped from 3,019 in 1800 to 8,274 by 1860, according to Census figures. While it had 14,593 people in 2010, the county lost an estimated 391 people — 2.7 percent — by 2012, according to the U.S. Census. In 2010, Some 25.4 percent of county residents lived below the federal poverty level, 9 points higher than the state average.

More QuickFacts from the U.S. Census

Screven County in Wikipedia

September 1, 2013August 26, 2013

Main Street, Greeleyville, S.C.

Once upon a time, Main Street in Greeleyville, S.C., was a thriving place, but shops have closed along Main Street, leaving a lot of it abandoned. Businesses that open now often locate on U.S. Highway 521, the three-lane main road through town.

“Several stores on Main Street that are beginning to deteriorate as can be seen in the missing bricks at the top of the store on the right of the photo,” former newspaper editor Linda W. Brown writes. “I think many downtowns are not only losing businesses to the big box stores but to the nearest U.S. highway.”

It’s much the same in small rural towns like Greeleyville, population 438, 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.