“We Have Nothing with Which to Clothe our Children”

It feels strange to look back into the past and feel heartbreak for people's suffering, and all they did without, when they are long gone and there is nothing left to be done about their want or need. But I cannot always help myself, and that is how I felt when I read these words from a tenant farmer in Martin County, N.C. in 1887.

In the Peanut Fields of Edenton, 1937-1942

This is the first photo-essay in my series "Working Lives: Photographs of Eastern North Carolina, 1937-1947." In this photo-essay I am looking at a group of 21 photographs that chronicle threshing time on a peanut farm near Edenton, N.C. in the years just before the Second World War.