The Center for a Better South
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.
An old tobacco barn, still standing on McIntosh Road in Williamsburg County, has given way to less production and new methods of processing what is grown, retired Kingstree editor and photographer Linda W. Brown observed recently.
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. Of the county’s 1,921 firms, 36.5 percent are black-owned — a percentage that is three times South Carolina’s average.
Photo taken March 30, 2014, by Linda W. Brown. All rights reserved.
Charleston architect Steve Coe sent along this picture of an old tobacco barn falling down on S.C. Highway 403 just north of Timmonsville, S.C.
“Every time I drive past, this the building leans just a little bit more,” he writes. “It’s as if the earth is slowly taking it back. It represents a time long since passed, but also it reminds me how everything is ‘of the earth.’
“As much as I like the building, I also feel something nostalgic about the piece of farm equipment discarded in front of the barn — how it got there, the last time someone touched it. Just something interesting about this ‘decay’ that goes on day in, day out as I go about my life.”
In 2010, Timmonsville had 2,315 people. Ten years later, it had grown by five people. Per capita income for the town was $11,714 in 2000. 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.
Copyrighted photo was taken January 2014 by Steve Coe. All rights reserved.
Retired editor Linda W. Brown of Kingstree, S.C., snapped a photo of this old tobacco barn with a bushy roof along S.C. Highway 261 just outside Manning in Clarendon County. “It doesn’t show in the picture,” she writes, “but there is a fairly new fiberglass basketball goal right in front of the old tobacco barn. Changing times, changing lives.”
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.