Behind the Four Corners Bank in Allentown, Ga., is this decaying facility, the old Hardwicke-Etter Ginning Systems building.
It’s located in Wilkinson County across a field from the old Melton store, also closed.
Today, Wilkinson County has fewer people (9,577 in the 2012 Census estimate) than it did in the 1940s (11,025 people) when my dad was a boy here before moving to the “big city” of Macon with his family. About three in five people are white, with most of the rest being black. Poverty is about 20 percent.
Years ago, the Cooper Brothers Gin in Kingstree, S.C., was one of Williamsburg County’s most important businesses, writes photographer and retired editor Linda W. Brown.
“Today, it sits abandoned just off Longstreet Street/Highway 52. Many longtime residents are not even aware it’s there behind Cabbage’s Tire Service, although it is visible both from Longstreet and from the Kingstree Police Department parking lot.
“To me it exemplifies that we live such fast-paced lives that we are often not aware of the past or of parts of our history even when they’re visible to us every day.”
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.
