A friend of mine, Randy Hester, grew up in Person County, North Carolina down the road from the country store that Dorothea Lange photographed in 1939. “My great uncle owned that store,” Bess Whitt, Randy’s cousin, born a Hester, told me. Randy still owns the family farm and knows how to grow tobacco, although he has been a professor of landscape architecture for thirty years, now at the University of California at Berkeley; his son Nate, an artist, lives with his wife on the farm. Though many farms have been sold as estates or for new subdivisions, the large Hester clan seems to hold on to theirs even though most are no longer farmers. I stayed with Randy and his wife Marcia in the house they had just bought in Gordonton, a few miles from Wheelers Church.
30 Jun 2006
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