Benton Henry and Dr. Wink Prince have just released the book, The Great Harvest: Remembering Tobacco in the Pee Dee.
Tobacco Barns of the Pee Dee, a photography exhibit that traveled through the Pee Dee in 2009, was created by Benton Henry, Dr. Wink Prince and Bruce Douglas. This same trio came together again in 2012 to produce The Great Harvest: Remember Tobacco in the Pee Dee, a book about the region’s tobacco culture published by Coker College Press.
About The Great Harvest:
For much of the twentieth century, flue-cured tobacco culture dominated the Pee Dee economy. On farms throughout the region, families labored to plant, cultivate, harvest, cure, and ready the crop for market. In the market towns of Mullins, Lake City, Darlington, Timmonsville, Conway, and Loris, warehousemen turned the crop into cash. Between 1988 and 1993, faculty and students—mostly from Coker College—conducted interviews among Pee Dee tobacco growers and warehousemen. Many subjects had been involved in tobacco culture throughout their lives and spoke knowledgeably of producing and marketing the crop. Their stories are here, woven into an engaging and highly readable narrative. The brilliant photographs of Benton Henry, shot on the country roads and city streets of the Pee Dee, provide a poignant visual commentary on the agrarian architecture of another time.
“Benton sees and shows us the beauty of this world in a most singular way.” – Sam Abell, Photographer, National Geographic
“Studies based on memory can be fraught with inaccuracies, but not so with this textural and photographic study of the Pee Dee tobacco culture by Eldred Prince and Benton Henry. They have provided a valuable—indeed indispensable—account of tobacco culture in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina. Based on oral histories and evocative images, this study arouses sensory details of sight and smell and sound. With a deft hand, Prince places the daily lives of the Pee Dee community within the larger regional discourse on tobacco’s role in the culture. And Henry’s eloquent and sometimes haunting images are essays in themselves. The result is an extraordinary contribution to historical understanding and photographic art.” – Orville Vernon Burton of Clemson University
For more information, contact Benton Henry at Benton@BentonHenry.com or Bruce Douglas at peedeearts@gmail.com. (adv.)
