Who Rules the Rural South?

Abstract

Abstract:Columbus County, North Carolina, is a great flat reach of farms and homes and timberland where August days get so heavy-hot that, as someone once put it to me, "the birds don't sing." By land area, it is one of the biggest counties in the state. It sits on the South Carolina border, stretching west and south of Wilmington. On its northeastern edge, it touches the Cape Fear River, and then the county line dives west until it finds the Lumber River and follows it southwest to the state line. Much of its land is quite literally backwater—wetlands upstream of rivers.