Thursday, June 18, 2009

Scott

On Saturday I met my friend John and we drove out to the small town of Scott, located just a few miles east of North Little Rock. Scott is an old farming town, with many old silos and barns. Also, it's home to the Cotham's restaurant, which is where we started out our trip. Alas, I didn't order the famed Hubcap Burger, just a puny regular sized one (and I wasn't able to finish that, anyways).

We headed south and passed through miles of farmland on each side of the road. Along the way we passed by this old church, tucked away along a side road.
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On the other side of the church was an old cemetery, which was nearly obscured in some parts by tall grass. It was a melancholy kind of place, it somehow seemed like the only recent visitors to these graves were grasshoppers. Some other parts of the small cemetery looked like it was more taken care of, at least.

This area was the home of several large plantations, and we passed by several groves of pecan trees that perhaps belonged to a former plantation. We stopped at this one spot, where a large barn had recently collapsed in on itself. All that is left now is the roof, which seemed to survive the fall ok.
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I walked up to it and had a peak inside. There was still hay sitting in the barn's loft, which was now ground level.

We moved on and stopped at another old plantation building, which might have once been an old sharecropper's house. It was empty and abandoned now...
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Or well it wasn't exactly abandoned. I was interested in the mailbox in front of the old house, and got a few pictures of it. I noticed that there was an old newspaper in the mailbox, and I began to reach in to see what the date was. I stopped before my hand got about halfway there, because I noticed that there was a big mud dauber's nest in the mail box, with a mean looking wasp hanging below it. It probably wouldn't have been wise to invade his territory too much.
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That old plantation home is located along a neat stretch of road. There are rows of trees planted along this bit of highway, which seems to stretch on for a few miles. We stopped to get a good shot of the tree-lined road, but mine didn't really turn out. There wasn't much traffic out, so I hurried out to get this shot of the road, taken with the camera sitting right on the pavement.
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4 comments:

  1. Oh I know Scott well, you need to come down to my place in De Witt sometime. Lots and lots of old interesting junk and swamps to photograph

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  2. I like the last shot with the camera on the pavement, but you are a brave soul. Risked your camera for it. I hope your friend played lookout.

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  3. Matt - Scott is a great little town, lots of old buildings. I'm going to take you up on that De Witt offer...

    WIndy - luckily there was hardly any traffic, so little risk of getting run over!

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  4. Very nice shots. 15 to 20 years ago, there were multiple sharecropper's shotgun houses on that stretch, in various faded shades. Wish I had captured them. Found your blog looking for pics of those houses after seeing an exhibit of Southern photographs at satellite of Ogden Museum of Southern Photography in Watercolors, FL. Great shots of Southern vernacular architecture and people.

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