Once upon a time, Main Street in Greeleyville, S.C., was a thriving place, but shops have closed along Main Street, leaving a lot of it abandoned. Businesses that open now often locate on U.S. Highway 521, the three-lane main road through town.
“Several stores on Main Street that are beginning to deteriorate as can be seen in the missing bricks at the top of the store on the right of the photo,” former newspaper editor Linda W. Brown writes. “I think many downtowns are not only losing businesses to the big box stores but to the nearest U.S. highway.”
It’s much the same in small rural towns like Greeleyville, population 438, in southwestern Williamsburg County. 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 30, 2013 by Linda W. Brown All rights reserved.