Down the road from Wheelers is the Union Grove Baptist Church, which has a Black congregation. This is a big operation. Lots of cars in the parking lot. A large church with many rooms besides the chapel itself. A portico with doors into the church from the side for those who need to be dropped off. The parking lot leads into the back door. Like every home here, the front door is rarely if ever used. People use the side door under the portico or the back door from the parking lot. The original church and school, still standing, was built in 1888.

Four middle-aged men are standing around talking in the parking lot. I walk up to them and tell them why I am here, looking for families in the photos. Would they like to see? Yes. So I hand around the notebooks of large photos and the one of all Lange’s smaller photos. They don’t recognize anyone. It’s more difficult to trace the Black folks than the White folks, I say, since most were sharecroppers and tenant farmers and therefore did not stay on the same farm. Did many people move outside the region, to the north, for example? “They would still keep their family roots here. Everyone keeps their family roots here in North Carolina. They come back.” Should I contact churches? Yes, that would be a good idea. “There are a lot of older folks who might remember or recognize the people.” “Too bad the pastor just left, he would be interested.” I’m going to Wheelers Church tomorrow, otherwise I would come here. There’s a Black Primitive Baptist Church, very old, the counterpart to Wheelers, one man tells me; his father was its pastor, but there are very few members today.

Charlie Monk Road. This Primitive Baptist Church looks much like the Lange’s photographs of the original Wheelers Church: a white frame structure with two doors (one now with a ramp, the other with steps). A sign out front: “Pine Hill Primitive Baptist Church Since 1889, Elder J.L. Wilson.”

Dorothea Lange. “Refer to General Caption No. 24. Church services are just over, shows the first ones to come out.”

To the Harvest Festival at Salem Grove Methodist Church, which is not at the church itself, but at the Community Center at Bushy Fork Park. The building was once the cafeteria of the school that Donald Hester and Bess Whitt attended; the rest of the school was torn down. Out back are baseball fields and a big metal shed.

The auction has already begun when I arrive at about 1:45. I take a seat next to a large older woman. She is curious to know who I am, but satisfied to hear that Nate Hester and Bess Whitt suggested that I come. “Open your pocketbook,” she says. Everyone has a card with a number on it; bids are recorded by number. The auctioneer is in full song at the front of the room. The long table at the front is piled with hand-made pillows, towels, doll houses, doll quilts, painted washboards, canned pickles, strawberry jam, and home-made candy and baked goods (cakes, pies, cookies).

The auctioneer has the cadence of a tobacco auctioneer, so I am told. The crafts are selling for way below the cost of materials and the effort entailed in making them. The baked goods, on the other hand, particularly the cakes, fetch high prices. A pound cake baked by “Cleo” sold for $300! Another cake, a chocolate icebox cake, for $170.

The auction will go to 5PM, followed by the barbecue, but I am restless by 3:00. The weather is beautiful, and light outside is great, and I can’t bear the prospect of another two hours indoors.

To Bethel Hill in search of the hillside farm of Dorothea Lange’s general caption 19 from 1939, where she visited with a black sharecropper couple who told her that they had just moved there that year and that “they treat us better here than where we did live.” “No privy in sight, had to get water from ‘the spring’ so far away that the man was gone about 20 minutes to get a bucket of water.”

Dorothea Lange. “Refer to General Caption No. 19. Negro sharecropper’s house.”

Their cabin was over the hill behind the owner’s house, which was across from Tuck’s Service Station on Route 501. But the road has been realigned, and there is no sign of an old service station. I turn off onto “Old Route 501″ and stop to ask directions of a man, woman, and child who are planting chrysanthemums in front of a Baptist church. Do they know where Tuck’s Service Station was? No. But Mary Jacobs would. Go ask her. She lives in the brick house at the corner. She knows everyone. If anyone would know, Mary would. And she did.

I approach her house. Back door, side door, or front door? There’s no doorbell on back or side, so I go to the front. Not a good choice. The paint around the door is peeling, the door looks unused. The backdoor is off an attractive deck which appears to be well used. Back door it is. A young man with military bearing and crew cut spots me through the kitchen window and comes to the back door. I ask for Mary Jacobs and explain myself, offering the photograph of the owner’s house on Route 501.

Dorothea Lange. “Refer to General Caption No. 19. Route 501 opposite Tuck’s Filling Station. General view of a hillside farm which faces the road, showing owner’s house, out-buildings, and tobacco field. The fields show erosion. The Negro sharecropper’s farm is on the other side of this same hill.”

Mary knows exactly where the photograph of the owner’s house was taken. She lived across the road from the house as a girl (12 years old in 1939). I’ll show you, she says, and takes the lead in her car. A. P. Tucks Service Station is not “opposite” the farm Lange photographed, but adjacent. The garage was moved back from the road to make way for an auction barn, also of metal (Tucks is covered in metal sheeting).

The owner’ house is unmistakable when compared with Lange’s photograph. I follow Mary’s car through a sharp turn into the driveway, a narrow passage between two shrubs. We drive up to the house and park beside various trucks, step out, wooing the dog, a setter of mixed breed. To the back door, of course. Knock.

After long minutes, a man comes to the door. Tall, in a blue T-shirt, very hospitable, his name Greg. I show him the photo of the house. “We have that photo on our refrigerator,” he says. “My wife found it on the Internet.” May we walk around? “Of course.” The tobacco barn is well preserved. Mary walks with me up the hill to the barn, and Greg comes after, opens it up so we can see the tier poles and tobacco-string poles. As for the sharecropper’s cabin, Greg thinks it was torn down.

Dorothea Lange. “See General Caption No. 19. Negro sharecropper’s farm seen from the road, on other side of hill from owner’s farm (19995C). Two tobacco barns on crest of the hill; one a new log barn not yet chinked. Sharecropper is seen chopping in sweet potato patch.”

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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Dorothea Lange. “Refer to General Caption No. 11. Looking down country road in Person County.” July 3, 1939

The location as described in a memo written by a guide who accompanied Lange in the field is quite specific; otherwise it would be impossible to find. One of the houses Lange photographed is still here; the house itself seems abandoned, but there is a trailer out back, a white pickup truck parked along side it. The front of the house is in shadow, the sun shining on the back, best to photograph here in the morning. Across the street is a field of white houses, like trailers.

I believe the house is the one Lange refers to as House No. 2; in her report, she describes it thus: “the one and one half story part of this house (a story and a jump) was built fifty to sixty years ago; the two story part was built in 1900. It is owned by a widow whose husband died seventeen years ago. She says, ‘I run the place myself, and it’s a po’ run.’ she has lived here ever since she has married, but her husband’s people came when the big white oaks in the front yard were so small ‘you could drag a wagon over them.’ her sons lived in the houses nearest on either side, and another married son and a widowed daughter live with her. She told us about the Negro church below, and was very interested in our purposes.”

Dorothea Lange. “Refer to general Caption No. 11. House No. 2.” July 3, 1939

The “Negro church” Lange refers to is Young’s Chapel, “a Negro Baptist Church. The corner stone says ‘organized May 1887,’ Rev. C. J. Springfield. A cross in the yard has an inscription, this stone marks the place where J. W. Bradsher professed faith in Christ October 1891.”

Dorothea Lange. “July 3, 1939. Person County, North Carolina. Negro Church called Young’s Chapel, a Negro Baptist Church. The corner stone says “organized May, 1887,” Rev. C. J. Springfield. A cross in the yard has an inscription, this stone marks the place where J. W. Bradsher professed faith in Christ October 1891.”

5:30. A car is parked outside Youngs Chapel, and there are lights on in the lunchroom. A young Black woman is setting up for a revival meeting at 6:00. I show her the 1939 photographs of the old white frame church, which was torn down “before her time.” She thinks there may even have been another church in the meantime. Would folks be interested in a copy of the photograph of the 1939 church? “I would,” she says and gives me here address.

6:00. To Bess Whitt’s for dinner with Susan and Donald Hester (Bess’s husband is in Florida). Bess is a home economist for the North Carolina State Extension Service, so I brought her a 1939 memo by the chief home economist of the Farm Security Administrations Rural Rehabilitation Program, which I quoted from in Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field. “This is our history,” she says.

We eat on a screened porch with a view over the property, a farm Bess’s father, Robert Hester, once bought. Much talk about her father, an “S.O.B.” and a great guy, a perfectionist who insisted that all the children work on the farm. As a girl, Bess worked in the fields and topped tobacco. After dinner, Bess looks at Dorothea Lange’s photos and texts while Donald, Susan, and I review my photos of tobacco fields, bulk barns, and the tobacco warehouse. As Bess pages through the 1939 photographs, she is struck by how much tobacco farming in Lange’s time resembled that of the 1960s and 70s, and how much has changed in the thirty to forty years since. Bess’s father raised a family on 10-12 acres of tobacco: “in the 1960s and early 1970s that was how much he planted to raise a family of six children, and he made a decent living. That’s not many acres in today’s terms.”

Bess’s father cured tobacco in wood barns like those depicted in Lange’s pictures: “That was a wonderful treat to go and spend the night in the barn when daddy was curing.” “I remember your daddy curing tobacco with wood after bulk barns came out (in the 1970s),” says Donald, “One year the tip leaves were as long as my leg. It was so long he had to hang it on every other tier pole. And when he cured that barn of tobacco, it was like mahogany, it was so pretty.”

Dorothea Lange. “Refer to General Caption No. 20.” July 3, 1939

Anne Whiston Spirn. One of Donald Hester’s bulk barns. October 10, 2007.

Dorothea Lange. “Refer to General Caption No. 6 (section on ‘putting in’) and General Caption No. 7. Sam’s son handing up strung tobacco inside the barn.” July 7, 1939

Dorothea Lange. “Refer to General Caption No. 7. Ten year old son of tobacco tenant can do a ‘hands work’ at tobacco harvest time.” July 7, 1939

Bess’s father’s tobacco always commanded top price at the tobacco auctions. Like some farmers today, he’d put the best leaves on top (“putting a face” on the tobacco), the lesser leaves just below the top layer, and excellent leaves down in the center so if a grader reached down into the core, he would pull out leaves that were just as good as those on top.

The whole process of selling and buying tobacco has changed within the last five to ten years. There used to be auctions, with the whole warehouse full of tobacco and five to six buyers, one from every company. Grading tobacco was done by government employees. “A town like Roxboro would have four tobacco graders,” says Donald, “Those four men would come into the house ahead of the buyers, and they’d grade every pile in the warehouse. And then the auctioneer, he’d line those buyers up, and they’d go down through the rows of tobacco, and he’d sell it as fast as they could walk.”

Marion Post Wolcott. “Tobacco auctioneer (in white gloves) and buyers during auction sale in warehouse in Mebane, Orange County, North Carolina.” November 1939

Marion Post Wolcott. “Auction sale in tobacco warehouse, Danville, Virginia.” October 1940

Tobacco auctions came to an end more than five years ago. Today farmers contract to a specific tobacco company, though they may also sell tobacco directly to an independent warehouse. Grading is now done by the tobacco companies (see journal for October 11, Oxford, North Carolina). Seems like a conflict in interest since the lower the grade the less the company pays. “They have the farmer over a barrel,” says Donald. He signs contracts with two companies for 100,000 pounds each, which gives him the flexibility to take one or the other depending on price (he grows between 100-125,000 pounds per year).

At the tobacco warehouse in Oxford on Thursday, two young men were doing most of the grading, but Donald explains that four older men were also overseeing the grading process. They work for the tobacco companies, including a consultant who was once the head tobacco grader in Roxboro for the US Department of Agriculture.

In the past, with price supports for different grades of tobacco, farmers were guaranteed a quota based on acreage. If a farmer didn’t sell all the tobacco, it went into “stabilization’: the federal government would buy the unsold tobacco, process it, and store it. When the “buyout” of the tobacco subsidy took place a few years ago, farmers were compensated $10 for every pound of tobacco quota they were entitled to. A farmer who owned 100,000 pounds of quota and grew the tobacco himself, got $1,000,000 spread out over ten years. Owners who did not grow the tobacco themselves, got $7 per pound and the farmer who grew it got $3 per pound.

Our conversation turns to American agriculture and its future. Are any of your kids going to farm? I ask. “I hope not,” replies Donald. That’s exactly what this farmer in eastern Oregon told me. He said, “If I had a son and he wanted to farm, I’d run him off.” Donald: “Um hmm. He’d do him a favor too.” Bess: “The only way a young person can actually farm is if they step right into their daddy’s business and they don’t have any capital outlay. And they still are gambling.” But what does that say about the future of American agriculture?

“American agriculture has the ability to produce a lot on a small plot. We’re able to produce so well. We’ve got that technique, that research where it needs to be,” says Bess. But American agriculture is becoming larger farms, corporate farms. “And, with that, farm life is not what farm life used to be. We’re losing some family structure with the family working together on the farm, and we’re losing kids knowing the value of getting in there and doing hard work. And that is one of the saddest things about the state of agriculture today. The kids that actually had to do some hands-on work on the farm have a work ethic and they know how to make things work with what you’ve got.”

For me one of the saddest things that has come from visiting all the places Dorothea Lange photographed in 1939 is that I have met so many wonderful farmers, but few who have kids who are farming. One Oregon farmer told me: “The family farm is dead. It’s already lost. My generation is the last.” “That’s right,” says Donald.. And Bess: That’s sad, but it’s true. There were six of us. None of us are farmers. In fact our farm is pretty much stagnant.”

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.

The black and white photographs of the tobacco auctions were taken by Marion Post Wolcott. Lange’s and Wolcott’s photographs are in the Library of Congress.

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The preliminary layout for my forthcoming book Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field arrived via email just before I left for North Carolina. Given my sixteen-hour days here (working from 6AM to 10PM, out in the field and back at the hotel downloading and backing up photo files, writing in my journal), this is the first opportunity that I’ve had to study the layout. Matt Avery, the designer at the University of Chicago Press, has produced a beautiful book design and rough layout. Fortunately, he is willing to let me comment on the layout at this early stage, to help fine tune the content of facing pages and the relative size of the photographs.

Laptop computers and the Internet are a blessing and a curse. Once it was possible to focus wholly on the subject at hand when out in the field. Or was it, really? My publisher sent the page proofs for The Language of Landscape to Denmark where I was working in June 1998; with a tight turn-around, I mailed them back via Federal Express.

And in 1939 Dorothea Lange juggled fieldwork with review of the proofs for her book, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion. Lange was on assignment in Oregon on October 4 when the publisher sent a telegraph to her home in Berkeley, California stating that they had sent the proofs via air mail and required an immediate turn around of the corrected proofs so as not to jeopardize the publication date of November 17. Lange’s husband and co-author, Paul Taylor, went over the proofs and forwarded them to her hotel in Portland. Lange took off two days from her fieldwork, October 6-7, writing copious notes on the proofs, requesting changes. She was “greatly worried” about the quality of the reproduction since the proofs were not on the final paper. “Photographs can be a very powerful language, or a weak device; the quality of these reproductions decides which it shall be in this undertaking.” She also wrote a note to Eleanor Roosevelt in the White House requesting a blurb for the book. By October 8, she was back in the field on her way to eastern Oregon to meet the farmers who were taking their farms out of the sagebrush on the Vale and Owyhee irrigation projects.

Before I can return to the field today, I must also finish reviewing and correcting the page proofs for my chapter in a book on Landscape Theory (”‘One with Nature’: Landscape, Language, Empathy, and Imagination”), which will be published in Spring 2008 by a British publisher, Routledge. Fortunately, Hillsborough has a Federal Express pickup location, a quick stop on the way to Person County.

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