A ‘small kept secret’: Once one of the wealthiest in the state, Warren County fights for economic survival

Story by Danielle Chemtob

Photos by Landon Cooper

In the Warrenton of Jennie Franklin’s youth, business was booming.

The town, 55 miles from Raleigh in the northeastern part of the state, sits in Warren County, a county of just fewer than 20,000 people that was once one of the wealthiest counties in North Carolina.

Franklin, born in 1941, grew up in Warrenton in the Jim Crow era. Black businesses thrived partially out of necessity, with segregation still legal.

Still, Franklin fondly describes the many black-owned businesses that lined Main Street in the 20th century — everything from shoe repair shops to car washes. To Franklin, they are stories of African American success.

Downtown today presents a starkly different picture. Multiple storefronts are boarded up, with the paint peeling.

The town of just over 1,000 people faces many of the struggles often portrayed about rural America — the loss of manufacturing, a decline in small farming and youth leaving for better opportunities.

“Places like Warrenton, small towns used to have an economic function,” said Carla Norwood, executive director of Working Landscapes, a nonprofit she and her husband co-founded to help small farmers reach wholesale markets. “They were places that people sold and processed agricultural goods, and then walked down the street and spent their money in a locally owned business.”

That’s changed as consumers have shifted from frequenting local businesses to spending their money with a handful of large companies such as Amazon.

“People spend their money with businesses that have no reason to invest in places like Warren County,” she said.

But beneath the surface is a rich history of activism and perseverance in the predominantly black community that birthed the environmental justice movement. And residents are harnessing that spirit to forge a path for the future.

A Generation Gap

Ebony Talley-Brame always “ate good” growing up on a farm in Warren County. Her family raised pigs and grew crops such as tobacco and cucumber.

“Back then, I didn’t know that I was poor necessarily,” she said. “Because I think we had a family where we showed a lot of love to each other.”

Talley-Brame went on to study business administration at Saint Paul’s College in Virginia, and she earned a master’s degree from Regent University. She moved to Los Angeles, and when her uncles died, her family sold the farm. It wasn’t until she was nearly 40 that she returned to Warrenton.

In 1920, black farms represented about 14 percent of all farms in the country. Now, African Americans are just 2 percent of the nation’s farmers.

Black land ownership has always been a point of pride for Warren County, said the Rev. Bill Kearney, who serves as assistant minister at Coley Springs Missionary Baptist Church.

It was once home to one of the largest populations of free blacks in antebellum North Carolina. In the 1860 U.S. Census, 68.7 percent of Warren County’s population was “colored,” compared to just over 50 percent who were black or African American in 2016 Census estimates.

Kearney grew up on a 4-mile-long street, bookended by two stop signs. Virtually everyone living between those stop signs was a farmer. But that’s changed.

“We who grew up black in rural Warrenton, we knew that … you leave town because there’s nothing for you there,” Kearney said. “What happened over a number of years with our young people leaving Warren County and then our grandfathers and fathers were owning a lot of property, they had nobody really to roll it off to.”

It’s not just farming that youth are abandoning. Across rural America, young people are leaving for better opportunities, and in many cases, they never return.

Twenty-five percent of Warren County’s population is over the age of 65, according to 2017 U.S. Census estimates. Nationally, that figure is 15.6 percent.

“It is rare that a child who has talent or who seems to have what it would take to bring something to Warrenton stays here,” Franklin said.

Norwood remembers the dark, quiet nights on the old tobacco farm she lived on as a child. It’s what drew her back to Warren County about a decade after graduating college to start Working Landscapes.

But there are few opportunities for those like Norwood who do want to return, or those who stay.

More than a quarter of Warren County’s citizens live in poverty. It’s a stark contrast from Warren County’s designation as the wealthiest county in the state in 1860. The slavery-based economy prospered from its productive tobacco and cotton plantations, and its popular hot springs. After the Civil War, though, its agricultural economy declined, and the resorts began to close.

The manufacturing industry helped revitalize the economy in the 20th century, but as factories across the country were shuttered, Warren County was hit hard. In 1990, there were nearly 1,500 manufacturing jobs in the county. In 2016, there were 531.

“With the manufacturing, especially for some of these small towns, that’s the only gig in town,” said Heather Hunt, a research associate at the North Carolina Poverty Research Fund. “When that left, all of these places were just really kind of trying to figure out what to do in response.”

Business Investment

By her late 30s, Talley-Brame had a successful career in Los Angeles. But she couldn’t shake a promise she had made to her teacher in high school: if she did well in her career, she would return home and give back to the community.

Talley-Brame, now 40, decided to leave her career, move back to Warren County and start a business. The name came to her in a dream — W.I.S.E: wisdom, inspiring and serving everyone.

In August 2018, WISE Southern Cooking 3-in-1 celebrated its one-year anniversary of serving up soul food and its famous fried chicken. The business also includes WISE Transportation, for which Talley-Brame is working on securing a contract to provide medical transportation in the community, and Shanell’s Boutique, which sells everything from essential oils to designer handbags.

Talley-Brame hopes her business can be part of a revitalization of the vibrant downtown she grew up with. Her husband, Alvin Brame, suggested they start a business a few counties over for a higher profit, but she insisted on staying in her hometown.

“It’s kind of hard to sell this town if we don’t have businesses or economic resources for people to want to even come here,” she said. “Unless you know the history behind us, and then you see that we’re a small kept secret that a lot of people wish they would know, because it’s a great place to live, and we’re very family-oriented, very friendly — everybody kind of knows everybody. If not, we speak to each other anyway.”

Communities like Warrenton rely heavily on grant money for business investment.

Still, local leaders are working to rebuild the business community in Warrenton one mom-and-pop shop at a time. A couple from Raleigh is opening a brewery in the town early next year. Some of the businesses have received grant money from the North Carolina Department of Commerce’s Small Town Main Street program.

Stacy Woodhouse, the economic development director for the county, hopes that the area can become a center for innovation in agricultural technology. He predicts the county will see spillover growth as the Triangle expands.

“I think a lot of people tend to paint a broad brush when it comes to rural counties and the problems they face,” he said. “A lot of the challenges are the same … But the benefits and how you market to companies and people coming to those counties is very different.”

Harnessing History

On a Friday afternoon in late September, Kearney gestured to a marker on the side of the road. A black baseball cap shielded his eyes from the bright sun as he described what the sign commemorates: the PCB Protests.

In 1982, Kearney moved to adjacent Henderson after spending time in Washington, D.C., as a police officer. Shortly after, his mother began to develop terrible stomach issues. The town would soon be on the cusp of the first environmental justice movement in the country.

The state had chosen a small, predominantly African American community in Warren County to host a hazardous waste landfill site, which would take in PCB-contaminated soil. Residents fought back, and more than 500 protestors were arrested. Eventually, the site was detoxified.

“In the Bible it says, Joseph told his brothers: ‘what man meant for harm, God meant for good,’” Kearney said. “So how do you see a positive in a negative situation? And I think low-income communities, people with disadvantages, that’s how we have to survive.”

It wasn’t the first time the African American community in Warrenton had been pioneers. John Hyman, who was born a slave and went on to become the first African American elected to represent North Carolina in the U.S. House of Representatives, once called Warren County home. As did Eva Clayton, who became the first black woman to represent North Carolina in Congress.

Kearney hopes that history will help his community see its own potential. His church was once just two miles from the landfill site. Now, the church leaders, along with a for-profit company, are developing 16 solar greenhouses on its 55 acres of property, where they will grow organic produce.

Eventually, he hopes that people from around the country will flock to Warren County to learn about its environmentally-friendly practices. With the development of that tourism, it won’t just be a rosy picture painted about the town’s history.

“Of course they can go and look at the slave plantation, the antebellum home, but also be able to tell the slave’s side of the story,” Kearney said.

If Franklin has anything to do with it, that story will not be forgotten.

While serving as principal at a local middle school, she heard white students say there weren’t any black businesses in Warrenton. So she enlisted the help of her mother, who had lived in Warren County since the 1930s, to put together a list of businesses with African American connections for the students.

When her mother died, Franklin decided to expand on the notes she had put together. Thus, the African American walking tour was born.

“The idea that nothing had ever happened in Warrenton was dispelled,” she said.

In its past and its present, community ties run strong in Warrenton. While there may not be a clear path forward yet, one thing is clear: the residents who remain are determined to find one.

“In some ways I think there is a shared sense of, we’re kind of in this together,” Norwood said. “There’s a bit of camaraderie of being from a place that is often overlooked or ignored by others.”