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August 1940. "Natchez, Mississippi." Medium format negative by Marion Post Wolcott for the Resettlement Administration. View full size.
Nice job but Spanish moss is gray, not green.
With family came to my mind with the moss and Natchez. We saw the most Spanish moss on our leg from Baton Rouge to Hattiesburg. We spent a week at the Alamo Hotel on the coast at Gulfport. The hotel survived Hurricane Camille of 1969, the most powerful to hit the Mississippi coast.
My Mamma was raised in Crosby MS and this could be the very road to the old place! Not many of the roads I knew as a kid were sunken like this but all of them were lush, and dusty in summer. The gravel was orange-red round river pebbles, and the sound under the car tires distinctive.
I'd like to see the colored version larger -- Spanish moss is always gray to white, never green, so it looks as though you missed that detail. But I'd still like to see it large! I could print it an hand next to me snapshot I took of Granddad at the well when I was 16, in 1966.
Color airbrushed with PhotoShop
I'll tell you what, this photograph so perfectly captures the feeling of the South, it almost gives me the shakes from malaria. Fantastic!!
Wow, the Spanish moss is so beautiful in the full-size version!
Note the height of the side embankments; over time, the road has lost elevation due to use and erosion. It even originally may have started as an Indian trail.
Today, 70 years later, a photographer can find the same scene, except for the vintage of the automobile and maybe the umbrella. Here in North Florida they are called canopy roads -- typically public roads with plantations on each side; cotton is long gone, many now are hunting plantations, mostly quail.
I've also driven on roads like this in south Georgia. I daresay the South has many more.
They still exist: the sunken roads, the summer heat, the dust, but also the Southern charm, the delicious food, the easy cordiality.
Channeling Eudora Welty here.
Could this be the Natchez Trace?
There was a young woman from Natchez
Whose clothing was always in patches.
When confronted by those
On the state of her clothes,
She replied, "When I itches, I scratches!"
Outstanding photograph from Marion Post. One can almost feel the heat.
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