To Shoofly via Culbreth, where Dorothea Lange photographed the crossroads. Ethel Oakley Blalock, author of a 700-page history of town of Stem, a few miles from Shoofly, whom I met in July 2006 at the annual “association meeting” at Wheelers Primitive Baptist Church, gave me directions to the Titus Oakley farm where Lange photographed the process of putting in tobacco in July 1939, but I did not find it. Her directions included a pond, which may have dried up, as so many have, given the drought. There’s no tobacco grown here now, mainly houses, many of them relatively new.
Dorothea Lange. “July 6, 1939. Culbreth, Granville County, N.C. Cross road hamlet taken just after and just before a rain. Earth is red colored clay mud.”
Anne Whiston Spirn. Crossroad at Culbreth, North Carolina. October 11, 2007.
On the photographs:
Dorothea Lange’s black and white photographs were taken in 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. Lange’s photograph is in the Library of Congress.
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