March 3, 2015 — Did you ever wonder what became of those towns after the tobacco industry collapsed?
Well, local artist Tony Alderman is wondering the same thing about our fishing communities.
Tony is spending a lot of his time on the coast when he is not here with his wife and adult son. He is finding that a lot of the young people are moving away, finding the back-breaking work of their prents and grandparents a dead-end field they want no part of. Recently, while talking to him at Respite, a popular tea shop near Brightleaf, he told me the average age in the town he is looking at is 50.
It wasn’t long ago that folks were thinking the same about Durham, that it was a dying town, before it went through the renovations that are bringing more people downtown every day. A rebirth that is seeing new restaurants, entrepreneurial businesses and residents moving in.
One can only hope that Varnamtown, N.C., the community that Tony is documenting, can find some similar way to reinvent itself. And not just become another Norman Rockwell-type painting people look at it to remember the way things were.
Read the full story at the Durham News
Read more about the project here