From  DARING TO LOOK: Photographs and Reports from the Field by Dorothea Lange, by Anne Whiston Spirn (University of Chicago Press, 2008).

GENERAL CAPTION NO. 19 (by Dorothea Lange and Harriet Herring)

DATE: July 5, 1939

LOCATION: Route 501, Person County

MAP CODE: Person 18

SUBJECT: Hill side farm, facing road, showing owner’s house and outbuildings and tobacco field. Share cropper’s farm on other side of small hill.

Notes: Owner’s house: general view of hillside farm opposite Tucks Service Station, shows home, outbuildings and tobacco field beyond. The fields show erosion. The owner usually makes according to the man at the filling station about 600 pounds to the acre which is a small yield for Person County. Better yields run from 900 to 1200 pounds.

Other side of hill: this side has been terraced – the sharecropper said before the government erosion work began, not tended now. In background is a sweet potato patch with a Negro man chopping. Could hear the sound of the hoe on the small rocks in the soil. Up the hill is the log and frame house the family live in. Steep rocky drive up hill from highway to owner’s house and passed it along a single track to Negro house in background. Negro sharecropper’s house: shows different aspects of house, chimney, lean-to with kitchen stovepipe, stuffed through side of wall and capped off with joint of tobacco flue to keep smoke from blowing back into house, flower garden in front protected by a slender fence of lathes, young Negro couple and baby. Note guano sacks washed and drying on a line in back. The man was shy of having his photograph made but finally held the baby in front of the house for one picture. They have just moved here this year – “They treat us better here than where we did live”; did not know how many acres he had, tobacco, corn, a potato patch “and such.” He said they did not measure up the land this year – everybody did last year when they were cut down in acreage, but this year everybody planted all they wanted to. The woman had been through seventh grade, the husband not much education. She would not let us take photographs of interior – “Ain’t cleaned up in ever so long – too big a mess.” 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. Note disc harrow standing rusted in the field. House in background of this photograph is the pack house with log “ordering house” adjoining it.

19971C, 19974C, 19993C, 19995C, 20200E, 20249E, 20258C, 20263E, 20264E