Broken Lands: Scenes from Rural NC, an Introduction

I once spent a summer in the mountains of Vermont and went on a tour at a historic site and remember the leader saying that all the forests we saw were less than a hundred years old, that all of this land used to be cleared farms but that the forest reclaimed the land once it was no longer actively farmed. I drive a lot in the surrounding counties as part of my volunteering as a Guardian ad Litem and I always enjoy looking around. 

I have always been fascinated with the idea of the stories and histories of buildings. When we lived down on the Outer Banks it was a trek of a couple of hours to the airport for pickups and drop offs. I remember watching a single house on the side of the road go from abandoned to falling down, to just the chimney, to, when I drove past the area the last couple years, no trace at all remained. 

I am interested in how stories and histories can be read in the parcels of land, the houses built on them. A lot of the land here is close to water, sounds, rivers, creeks. Even if you can't see it you can smell it. Most of the land around here has spent the last three hundred years as farmland, although the changes of the last hundred years is clear in the plots, the houses that are now on them.

In some cases you can trace the decline of local farms plot by plot. It's pretty easy to spot the older (original) farmhouses. There are the smaller houses, less well built, spaced out, that are probably connected to sharecroppers, existing at the same time as the older houses, but in totally different universes. You can see the big sell offs during the 1940s and 1950s with the groups of brick ranches as farmers sold edges of land to pay taxes, make it to another year. The decades since of economic ups and downs are seen in the huge houses spread out, with lots of several acres, the smaller simpler wood homes, the rows of trailers. You can see which places were once communities, neighborhoods, but now are abandoned, slowly disappearing back into the woods.

Because so much of this land is still farmland, although not what it once was, you can tell a lot from the plots that remain. You can see the small plots that people have managed to hold onto, the smaller crops they manage, probably selling at smaller markets if not at the corner of their property, making what they can. It's also really easy to see just how precarious all of it is. The last week or so we've finally gotten some rain, and the corn is having a growth spurt, now about three feet high. But a couple of weeks ago the land was dusty, the precious soil blowing away, the corn barely six inches high and whole crops in danger of not making it.

Lots of places live on a razor's edge, I just think it's a little easier to see here, to be aware of it.

It's gorgeous country. It's rich in awful, buried, ignored history, both big events and small. The enslaved labor camps that while smaller here than most people see images of, are still awful sites that continue to be romanticized. The history of an area that depended so often through its history on unsustainable commodities- river transportation, rosewood harvesting, things that are overexploited, obsolete, leaving towns broke, empty, ghost towns. Here history is known by some, but rarely shared and known by all. History here is a lot of secrets everyone knows. And ignores.

Anyway, I think I might start taking my actual camera on trips and try not to risk my life stopping on narrow two lane country rows where people drive 60 plus mph and start documenting some of these things, writing things up, maybe researching some of the history of these plots, the people who lived here. Not big stories, but all the small stories.