Jerome De Perlinghi recently revealed this haunting photograph taken just before Farmers Warehouse’s partial collapse last month. Though such images shock us now, they were once as commonplace as dandelions and unremarkable even to those who had to bypass them to slake their thirst under the ‘Colored’ sign.

I was immediately reminded of a passage in William B. Clark Jr.’s Some Reflections On and Trivia of Wilson’s Tobacco Auction Warehouses 1890-1980, self-published in 1991, and excerpted here in 2018.

[The ninth edition of Eyes on Main Street, the incredible international outdoor photography festival De Perlinghi founded in Wilson, opens 1 June and runs through 10 September 2023. Don’t miss it, or his newly opened American Center for Photographers.]