8:20AM flight to Raleigh/Durham. Arrived 10:15.

Flying in over the Research Triangle area, an overwhelming number of housing developments under construction. Don’t these folks know there’s a housing/mortgage crisis? Who will buy all these new homes? What’s fueling the growth here? Many of the houses are McMansions: way out of scale compared to the more modest existing houses from the 1960s, post-war1950s, and earlier.

Same story on the ground, driving south from the airport on Davis Drive. Many, many new communities, each with a single gated entrance, each with its own name, “Wellesley,” etc. I peek into some and often there is an old farmhouse among the newer homes. (I meant to come back and photograph these).

I’m on the way to find the site of Zollie Lyon’s farm on the old Stone place. Dorothea Lange photographed sharecropper Lyon, his family on the porch of their “dog-run” house, and tobacco barns on June 30, 1939. According to Lange, the property is 6/10 mile east of Upchurch, so I take a right on High House Road to find Upchurch in order to track back. But I drive right past Upchurch, past the Cary Fire Station, and hit Route 55. Too far. Like the rest of this area, the High House/55 intersection has the raw look of the recently built. An incipient strip: Starbucks, a tire company, a Rite-Aid and a CVS in a cata-cornered standoff.

Dorothea Lange. “Refer to General Caption No. 18. Tobacco barns on the Stone place.” June 30,1939.

Dorothea Lange. “Refer to General Caption No. 18. Zollie Lyon, Negro sharecropper, home from the field for dinner at noon time, with his wife and part of his family. Note dog-run.” June 30,1939.

My atlas shows a railroad line running north south next to the name Upchurch. Headed back east on High House to a bridge – the railroad tracks at Upchurch? Hung a right just before the bridge along a linear opening in the woods, and there are the tracks. Down the road, new houses under construction, an extension to an existing subdivision: “Now Selling…Single family Homes…Upchurch Farms,” says a sign. Young Hispanic men dressed in T-shirts of chartreuse green are digging and planting the strip along the road.

Back on High House, heading east, clocked 6/10 mile from the railroad crossing: the intersection of Davis Drive and the new shopping center on the northwest corner, still under construction. Davis Drive marks the expanding front of new development: shopping centers on the west and open fields to the east. But further east on High House, beyond the fallow fields, are a country club, homes arrayed around a lake, a soccer field. I double back, turn south on Davis Drive past the fields along its eastern side, a few barns, an old house. I pull into a drive to a newly built house, a sales office for a new development to be built here and climb up an eroded bank where the slope was cut to site the curving driveway, my goal to photograph the old white house and abandoned barns against the new shopping malls in the background.

“Excuse me! Excuse me!” A woman back on the asphalt drive, calling to me, waving. “This is private property!” I approach her, explaining that I am here because this place was photographed by a famous photographer in 1939, the photos now in the Library of Congress in Washington. I chatter away until she relaxes. Would she like to see the photographs made in 1939? I have them in my car. She invites me to come see the model home, and I show her the notebooks with Lange’s photographs and her texts. After a few minutes of looking at story about Zollie Lyons and his landlord named Stone, she calls in her boss, the sales director for the retirement community being developed here, which will include provision for both independent and assisted living as well as a nursing facility.

This is indeed the site of the Stone property. The current owners are named Sears, but the wife’s maiden name was Maggie Belle Stone. In 1941 she married John Winston Sears, and they raised five children here. Their eldest child, William Winston Sears, is the man behind the new development, called SearStone. Bill, now in his sixties, is an architect who graduated from NC State in Raleigh a year or two ahead of my friend Randy Hester; Bill’s son JD (John David) is working with him on the project.

The sales director calls Bill Sears on his cell phone, and Bill and JD arrive soon after to give me some background on the place and their vision for its future, including a tour of the large scale model of the new community. Bill emphasizes its walkability and openness, with onsite shopping and dining open to the larger public. He describes the five-acre lake (an expansion of a spring-fed pond) as a water theme park with elaborate fountains and a piazza alongside the lake as “Italian” and “formal.” More information is on the SearStone Web site. This demonstration unit, which looks like a large one-story house, is actually two units. One unit is furnished as a home, the other serves as the sales office. Very spacious, much more so than the apartments at Brooksby Village, an Erickson retirement community where my own parents moved last month.

In 1999, when Davis Drive was widened and extended, what was Stone Road became Davis Drive, and the Stone family home was torn down; of wood-pegged construction, it was too fragile to move, so Bill’s parents moved to Apex, a town further south on Route 55. The plan is for them to move into SearStone once it is finished. Bill and JD plan to live here too.

The Stones have been here for many generations and once owned 1,500 acres. Over the years, the land was split up among heirs. John Stone, Zollie Lyons’s landlord, was Bill’s granduncle, so the Lyons farm was across High House road to the north, where the family cemetery and the old “plantation house” are. They give me a copy of a 1903 photograph of the plantation house. A relative of Bill’s now lives in that house and runs a “custom car care” (car repair) business on the property. Bill gave the name High House to the road. There was a tall house along the road where a man hanged himself from the rafters, or so the story goes.

Where would you like me to take your photograph? In the field overlooking what would be the future community or alongside the old tenant house or next to the new model home? “The new,” says Bill. We walk outside to take the photos, and the sales director spots the stickers Bill and JD are wearing on their shirts (an American flag and the words “I voted”), so they peeled off the stickers. It was election day; they had just come from the polls.

As I take my leave, Bill tells me that his mother has many old photographs of the property and could tell me lots of stories. “You come back any time and be our guest!”

On the Photographs

The black and white photographs were taken by Dorothea Lange in July 1939, the color by Anne Whiston Spirn in 2007. Read the stories behind these photographs in Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field.

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