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.
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.