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.
Although tobacco no longer dominates the agricultural landscape in the South Carolina’s Pee Dee region, there are still a number of acres of the golden leaf planted, photographer Linda W. Brown of Kingstree writes.
This field, ready for harvest, is located in the Vox community of rural Florence County.
Florence Countyhad 137,948 people, according to a 2012 Census estimate. Its poverty rate — higher in the rural areas than the county seat of Florence, averaged 19.4 percent in 2010.
Copyrighted photo taken in August 2014 by Linda W. Brown. All rights reserved.
A vine-covered tobacco barn in the middle of a cotton field signals changing times in agriculture in the South and in the Cedar Swamp community of Williamsburg County, S.C., where this barn is located.
Photo taken June 29, 2014, by Linda W. Brown. All rights reserved.
You don’t have to drive too far in the rural Southern tobacco belt to find an old tobacco barn like this one in the middle of a field west of Lake City, S.C.
As photographer Linda W. Brown notes, “It’s interesting to see these old barns that once, at this time of year, would have been surrounded by ripening tobacco and now are not. ‘Forlorn’ is a good adjective to describe it.”
Tobacco once ruled farming in many parts of the Carolinas, Virginia and Kentucky because it was a high-price cash crop. But the production and sale of tobacco in the South has changed dramatically over the last 30 years in the South. Tobacco auctions, quotas and government price supports dominated prior to 2004 when reforms eliminated government intervention into the market and allowed growers to produce as much as they wanted [Learn more]. These days, auctions are rare — with only one in South Carolina according to this story — and growers enter into direct contracts with buyers.
Lake City, which recently started an annual arts festival to inject new life into its community, is in the Pee Dee’s Florence County near Interstate 95 in northeast South Carolina. One in five people in Lake City, population 6,715, is white, while some 77.5 percent of residents are black. The city’s poverty rate is more than 32 percent, according to the U.S. Census. The high poverty rate is a testament to Lake City’s rural nature since its home county, supported by the regional city of Florence, has a 19.4 percent poverty rate.
Photo courtesy of Linda W. Brown, 2013. All rights reserved.
You can see a trailer of flue-cured tobacco, at right, being taken into the Growers Big 4 warehouse in Hemingway, S.C., a small town in northeastern Williamsburg County near Florence and Marion counties.
The production and sale of tobacco in the South has changed dramatically over the last 30 years in the South. Tobacco auctions, quotas and government price supports dominated prior to 2004 when reforms eliminated government intervention into the market and allowed growers to produce as much as they wanted [Learn more]. These days, auctions are rare — with only one in South Carolina according to this story — and growers enter into direct contracts with buyers.
Williamsburg County, located in the middle of the Southern Crescent, is about 75 miles north of Charleston, S.C. 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.
Copyrighted photo taken on July 26, 2013 by Better South President Andy Brack All rights reserved.
Tobacco is maturing in fields across the Southern Crescent, including this patch in rural Valentines in the southeastern part of Virginia. In the background is Wright’s Gen. Mdse., an old-time country store that doubles as a post office. Much of the store is an homage to how old country stores used to be, but you can still buy some stuff like cold drinks and crackers.
Tobacco production remains a viable business across the South, particularly the flue-cured tobacco of the American South that is used in higher-end tobacco products across the world. While China outpaces American production four-fold or more, American tobacco apparently is preferred to help flavor products. U.S. production in 2012 was about 500 million pounds and is expected to be in high demand again this year. More info.
This photo in the unincorporated Valentines community is in Brunswick County, a farming area on the North Carolina border with more than 17,000 residents. Like most Southern Crescent counties, poverty exceeds 20 percent.
Copyrighted photo taken July 24, 2013, by Andy Brack, Center for a Better South. All rights reserved.