A cross-stitch map of North Carolina hangs in the Fair Bluff Depot Museum, showing the state’s major destinations — and also Fair Bluff, a town of 951 people on the South Carolina border.
A shrinking town along the Lumber River, Fair Bluff was still struggling with the last decade’s loss of textile jobs and tobacco-farming income before Hurricanes Matthew and Florence flooded its streets.
These images are from an ongoing documentation of Fair Bluff, North Carolina, and the surrounding landscape of Columbus and Robeson Counties. An excerpt of this work has run under the title "The One-Two Punch"in the Oxford American
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The empty showroom of Fair Bluff Ford stands at the north end of town. The dealership’s stock of cars and trucks was submerged by the rising waters of the Lumber River in the days after Hurricane Matthew hit Fair Bluff. The business carried no flood insurance. A GoFundMe fundraiser for Fair Bluff Ford raised just $450.
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Main Street in Fair Bluff is nearly vacant. Elvington’s Drugs, right, has been boarded up since last year’s flooding. The town florist, center, and second hand store, left, went out of business before Hurricane Matthew’s arrival. Main Street doubles as US-76, a two-lane highway connecting northern South Carolina to the North Carolina beaches. This means a steady flow of cars passing through town. The trick, local business owners told me, is giving them a reason to stop.
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“I've been here 70 years. I've seen a boat float on Main Street at least three times,” said Randy Britt, owner of B H Small Co. Hardware.
“Climate's not like it used to be around here,” he said, “I don't care what anybody tells you, things have changed.”
A lifelong resident, and former mayor and city council member, Britt said some light flooding was commonplace in Fair Bluff, but not the multiple feet of water brought on by Matthew.
“I assumed we were about to get an inch or two on the floor,” he said. “I had no earthly idea that the storm would do what it did.”
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“I'm 70 years old,” said Britt. “I’m not going to spend a whole lot of money. I could clean up the front of this right here and I could open back up. I could put some hardware in, I'd probably have a decent business—I'd have a great business.”
“But, like I said, I'm 70 years old, I’d like to do some few things before I pass on.“
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New gas cans sit in front of empty shelves inside B H Small Co. Hardware. Randy Britt has begun selling chainsaws and small motor parts out of the back room of his flooded shop.
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Photographer Jody Johnson stands in what's left of his Main Street home in September.
Of the 111 Fair Bluff residences damaged by Matthew, 71 were deemed eligible for FEMA assistance. Johnson and his estranged wife put their house on the list for a FEMA buyout after the storm. Under that arrangement, the government would buy the property from Johnson and his wife for its pre-flood value, then bulldoze the house. The property would then be given to the city of Fair Bluff for use as green space.
Johnson and his wife are currently trying to change their application to have their house remain intact and be elevated above the flood level.
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After eleven months, Johnson's house still sits in disrepair. He stays at a family farm on the outskirts of town.
"We got $72,000 in insurance money," he said. "We owed $92,000 on our mortgage. So we're 20 short. We're one of, like, three people I've talked to in town who even had flood insurance. It wiped a lot of people out."
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The flood and its destruction come after the one-two punch of the tobacco and textile industries crumbling in the 1990's.
"Sadly, nothing's happening here," said Johnson. "The town was dying. The hurricane just sped us up by 10 or 15 years."
Johnson said the town leadership had been old and set in its ways for too long to allow it to thrive.
"You've got town council that's just older people that wouldn't let anybody else in the town do much or have any control," he said. "They're older, they've made money in town, they've got homes in other places, their kids have no interest in town, and they don't want to turn it over to anybody. That's what's gone on for long enough that now it's like you can't go back."
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The Lumber River, serpentine with tea-colored, tannic water, is an ever-present part of Fair Bluff life. Downriver from the town's river walk, canoes and kayaks pull in from launch points upstream in Lumber River State Park.
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Last year's Halloween decorations still sit on the door to Fair Bluff's vacant visitor's center. Through the open door, the stench of mold is evident from the street.
The town received a $1.8 million grant to refurbish its municipal buildings in June.
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A FEMA flyer sits on an abandoned display case in the visitors center along with photo albums depicting town life.
The old Umbro sports apparel factory sits on US-76 just north of town. Once part of the region’s rich textile industry, the plant closed in the late 90's after Umbro ceased U.S. manufacturing in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
In the weeks after Hurricane Matthew, the building housed a distribution center for food and cleaning supplies.
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Morning frost covers the remnants of a harvested a soy bean field. Ten years ago, this field off of Hinsons Crossroads, along with many others, grew tobacco. Since the collapse of the tobacco economy, farmers in the region have begun to focus on soy beans, sweet potatoes, cotton and corn. None of these crops, however, is nearly as lucrative.
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Johnny's Drive-in on a Saturday afternoon. The sandwich shop is one of the few businesses on Main Street to reopen since the flood.
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The chorus at the Fair Bluff United Methodist Church sings its annual Christmas cantata.
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An unused Powell tobacco curing barn.
Fair Bluff claims to have had the first tobacco market in the Border Belt region around the start of the 20th century.
At the height of the tobacco economy, a town of Fair Bluff’s size would have four or five tobacco markets, where buyers from cigarette companies would deal directly with local farmers.
The industry took a hard decline in the 80’s and 90’s, as tobacco use dropped across the country and federal regulations and subsidies changed. Presently, tobacco companies mostly contract directly only with very large farms.
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LC Soles boards up his windows in Chadbourn, N.C., as Hurricane Florence nears the North Carolina coast.
WQTM Fair Bluff (2 images) >>>
WQTM-AM, on the outskirts of town, has been silent since before Hurricane Florence. On a recent weekend, Bobby Godwin was cleaning up the property atop a large lawn tractor, preparing it for sale. A man from nearby Elizabethtown plans to turn it into a gospel station, Godwin said, and possibly add an FM transmitter into the mix. The asking price for the station and the 5 acres it sits on was $40,000.
The station was started in the late 60’s by Godwin’s grandfather. Under the call letters WWKO, it broadcast Elvis Presley and the other “oldies” of the day.
Godwin, who works as an administrator at a nearby high school, lives just up the road from the station. He said Hurricane Matthew did about $10,000 worth of damage to his house. FEMA paid him $2000 toward repairs.
He wondered if the new station owner, who has expressed interest in the Fair Bluff community, would have any interest in buying his house.
Tobacco Warehouses >>>
Warehouses line Railroad Street, just south of Main. Some are still in use, others lie in various states of disrepair. When tobacco was booming, many of these warehouses served as markets, where buyers contracted by cigarette giants would bid on the crops of local farmers.
Old Powell Tobacco Warehouse (3 images) >>>
Signs still hanging in an old Powell warehouse on Railroad Street preserve the final days of the tobacco industry.
“Your vote is your voice in government. Speak out for your farm, your rights, and your community,” reads a poster from 2000, paid for by the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Co.
“ATTENTION TOBACCO GROWERS,” reads another, “FORD MOTOR COMPANY HAS NOT BANNED SMOKING.”
It adds, “Fair Bluff Motors supports farmers, the tobacco industry, smoking, chewing & dipping.”
Yet another shows the proper way to knot a tobacco sheet.
Railroad Street (3 images)>>>
Railroad street’s eponymous feature, showing signs of progress in the summer of 2019.
Stacks of new railroad ties emblazoned “RJC” sit alongside old and twisted ties at the center of town, and new rails are marked with a January date of installation.
Just before Hurricane Matthew, a railroad company by the name of RJ Corman purchased the dormant tracks that pass through town. The company, which runs short line freight rail service throughout the country, has been slowly repairing the tracks and has opened up a small depot in neighboring Chadbourn.
In their heyday, the rail line carried freight and passengers as a spur of the Atlantic Coast Line, but the rails in Fair Bluff can trace their history back to the Wilmington & Manchester Railroad, which operated prior to and during the Civil War, when it was the subject of raids by Union troops.
Randy Britt, 2019 (2 Images) >>>
“I don’t know how Fair Bluff’s going to exist in the next 6-12 months,” said Randy Britt, the owner of a hardware store on Main Street and former mayor of the town.
Britt is getting by as he did in the months after Hurricane Matthew, running a small engine repair shop out of the back room of what was once his store.
He has slightly more inventory since the last time I visited, nearly two years ago, and a trio of chainsaws sat on his work benches in various states of disassembly. But on a recent Monday morning, the front door was open to the street only for the breeze. Britt lets the occasional cat stalk the aisles of his dead stock inventory to keep the rodents under control.
“I think we have probably somewhere in the range of 600,” he said when asked about the town’s current population. “Might have 625.”
The dwindling tax base has made it difficult to fund the police department and maintain the city sewer system, he said.
“The town government has basically been wiped out of it's revenue to operate,” he said.
Property values have dropped precipitously, and those who went to live elsewhere while awaiting relief money have little incentive to come back.
Britt says there are plans to try to christen a new commercial district elsewhere in the city on higher ground, but that’s contingent on in-process grants and businesses willing to take a risk on the town.
“that's in the talking stages right now,” he said, “and what's going to come out of that I do not know.”
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A chainsaw on Randy Britt’s workbench in Fair Bluff, N.C. This saw made its way to Britt’s shop after falling into the Lumber River. It belongs to a crew hired to clear the river of storm debris and downed trees, in the hopes of mitigating future floods. The pickle jar to the left is filled with frothy oil scavenged from the saw’s waterlogged block.
To the victor go the spoils >>>
Trophies sit outside Fair Bluff’s old municipal building while it awaits demolition. After Hurricane Matthew, the town of Fair Bluff received a $1.9 million grant from the Golden Leaf Foundation to go toward building and rehabilitating the city government’s facilities.
The Golden Leaf Foundation was created in 1999 with the purpose of setting aside 50% of the money due the state of North Carolina from tobacco companies, and using it to rehabilitate parts of the state that were economically reliant on the tobacco industry.
In the 1990’s 46 states sued Big Tobacco for damages stemming from tobacco-related health costs. Of the $206 billion settlement, North Carolina was due roughly $4.6 billion over 25 years.
This image is part of my ongoing work in and around Fair Bluff, North Carolina, a town of roughly 600 people threatened with fading from the map. The town has been flooded twice in the past three years, exacerbating the economic toll wrought over the past two decades by the one-two punch of losing the tobacco and textile industries.
