The Center for a Better South
Kingstree, S.C., photographer Linda W. Brown sends a long this “tired, worn-out Farmall tractor, complete with very flat tires, [that] sits beneath a shed in the Sandy Bay community of Williamsburg County.
Copyrighted photo taken Feb. 15, 2015, by Linda W. Brown. All rights reserved.
You can find storage sheds like this throughout the eastern Carolinas. Kingstree, S.C., photographer Linda W. Brown snapped this shot in November in the New Zion area of Clarendon County.
Copyrighted photo by Linda W. Brown, 2014. All rights reserved.
In late December, we met Travis Starkey, a Greenville, N.C., resident who is trying to focus attention on strategies to deal with endemic poverty of his part of eastern North Carolina — which fits right in with what the Center for a Better South seeks to do.
As the second post of the new year, we offer his June 2014 photo of an old shed near Rocky Mount, N.C., to highlight Starkey’s online effort, dubbed “Greenfield Southeast.” (Rocky Mount is a town of about 57,000 people that is part of Edgecombe and Nash counties in eastern North Carolina. About 19 percent of its residents live below the poverty line.)
Starkey explains in this post that there’s potential in the rural South in places like Rocky Mount that people often don’t see:
“It’s reasonable to assume that every community has unique assets and potential to create. Communities are collections of people, anchored around a place or other connective element. So my first assumption flows logically from another — all individuals have unique assets to share and deep potential to create. A community’s power, therefore, lies in its ability to generate opportunities as an outgrowth of the connections its residents share. As a country, though, we tend to ignore the potential of towns like Plymouth [and Rocky Mount] to generate growth, assuming that growth is somehow impossible anywhere outside of a major city. …
“There are nearly 24 million people living in towns smaller than 20,000 in the South. Casually ignoring the potential of those towns, not to mention the growing disparities between urban and rural quality of life, is a perilous habit that we must break.”
Copyrighted photo by Travis Starkey taken June 2014. All rights reserved.
An equipment shed sits on the back of a plowed field in rural Williamsburg County. writes Kingstree, S.C., photographer Linda W. Brown.
Williamsburg County, which is about 75 miles north of Charleston, S.C., has a population of just under 34,000 people. 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.
Copyrighted photo by Linda W. Brown, taken in June 2014. All rights reserved.
Retired editor Linda W. Brown of Kingstree, S.C., spied this leaning shed and rusty equipment in the countryside of Clarendon County near Davis Station. Both, she said, “speak to the condition of small farms in rural communities in 2013.” See another picture from the area.
Clarendon County, split in half by Interstate 95, had almost 21 percent of residents living in poverty, according to the 2010 Census.
Photo taken Oct. 20, 2013 by Linda W. Brown. All rights reserved.