Back in North Carolina

Town & Country – the North Carolina countryside in monochrome.

Williamston, in Martin County

In my current series on the American South, the last post got us as far as South Carolina’s Grand Strand just below the North Carolina state line. I had said that the next following post would get us to the North Carolina barrier islands and the Outer Banks. That will have to wait. I wanted to do a black and white set, and this is it.

This is a continuation of a few posts I have done now in black and white of my photographic journeys in rural America. The Lincoln Highway post I did in October 2017 “In my little town – crossing rural Nebraska” is here. The post “The Grapes of Wrath” of rural Oklahoma along Route 66 from February 2017 is here. Now the South gets the monochromatic treatment.

These fading towns and disappearing farms in the vastness of the American countryside lend themselves well to black and white photography. All of the pix in this set were taken in April 2019, in North Carolina, using a Fuji X-T3 and the superb in-camera Acros black and white film simulation. Limited post-processing adjustments were done in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

The weather didn’t always cooperate on that trip, as you will see. On the down side, it meant I didn’t always get the contrasty light one wants in black and white, but on the upside, the cloud cover works much better than clear blue skies, and the darker, moodier light seems appropriate to the images. Anyway, when I had good high overcast the light was just fine.

As you will see, and as we saw elsewhere in rural America, the towns and smaller cities are depopulating, and the main streets are challenged. Small and midsize family farms are disappearing. The factory closures have hit these places especially hard. In North Carolina (as elsewhere on my drives on these roads less traveled) I saw many small towns and cities hanging in there and some real gems (such as Mount Gilead in the Piedmont and New Bern and Beaufort at the coast), but I also saw a lot of hard hit places with all too many abandoned houses and boarded up storefronts.

Why not more people in these photos? These fading little country towns can be very, very quiet. Sometimes there was an utter lack of people. Stores all closed down, no one on the streets…

In some of these places another thing has contributed to their challenges – devastating tropical storms. There is a grouping in this set of Pollocksville and New Bern in Jones County on the coastal plain, for example, which regularly get slammed by storm after storm. In one of the photos you’ll see a boarded up storefront in Pollocksville with some names on the plywood boards: Floyd, Bertha, Fran…those aren’t people. At first I did a double take when I saw the signs. Wha’? Then I figured it out. It’s Hurricane Fran (1996), Hurricane Floyd (1999) and Hurricane Bertha (2008). Fran and Floyd were huge storms and together resulted in over $10 billion in damage in North Carolina. Last year it was Hurricane Florence which slammed Jones County and elsewhere. North Carolina bore the brunt of that storm, with an estimated $22 billion in damage in the state. This short PBS clip has one of the signs in it and video of most of Pollocksville under water.

In this set we will start out in the Piedmont on the southward portion of the drive to Charleston. Some of this may look familiar; there is a bit of overlap with a few photos I also took in color and posted in July and August. Otherwise, the remainder will be from the Coastal Plain on the northward drive. Some of these places are otherworldly and particularly in the Inner Banks region in Robersonville, Everetts and Williamston in Martin County which seemed to be particularly hard hit by the wrenching changes there in the rural economy.

North Carolina has some lovely countryside, that’s for sure. In this set is scenic Brock Mill Pond in Trenton which was an incredible find. There’s a beauty to the surviving family farms and the little towns as well – even the fading ones.

See you again next post (back in color) for more from the North Carolina coast: historic New Bern (birthplace of Pepsi Cola!), Beaufort, the barrier islands and the Outer Banks. After that one more from coastal Virginia and then the Epic Southern Road Trip series will be a wrap.

Click on (or tap) an image to expand it (and use the arrow to the right on an expanded image to go through the set, if preferred over scrolling down in the post).

To those of you here in the US and abroad celebrating, happy Thanksgiving!