Like a sharecropper's abandoned cabin, Georgia's Taliaferro County has been quietly decaying for 30 years, until little is left but the shell. When the boll weevil destroyed the cotton crops of the '20s, the young people began to pull out and head for the cities. The population dropped from 8,841 in 1920 to 6,278 in 1940 to 3,370 today. It is falling still. Says Mrs. Grace Beazley, a county health worker: "Our families are just an old man and his wife sitting on the porch together."
But dying Taliaferro (pronounced Tolliver) County retains...
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