"The bottom line is, if my grandparents hadn't survived the hand that was dealt them, then I wouldn't be here. If they didn't have hope.... They had their children, and it was brave of them. They could have said, `No, no, no, no, no, I'm not bringing no children in this world!' . . . But they didn't. They said, we can do it. We'll be alright. We'll make it. And they fed them, and they bought them two pairs of shoes a year when they sold that tobacco, and they sent them to school...."
Agricultural History in Eastern N.C.
In the Soybean Fields & Factories of Edgecombe County, 1942
Soybeans have been one of Eastern North Carolina's most important crops for more than a century, but these photographs are the only historical images I have ever seen of how workers turned them into the oil and meal that was, and still is, so much a part of daily life in the U.S.
At a Cotton Gin in Dunn, 1938
In this third photo-essay in my "Working Lives" series, I am looking at the Tart brothers' cotton gin in Dunn and the cotton fields of Harnett County in 1938.
David Cecelski 