
          The Lost Colony of North Carolina
          By 
            Dyer, DonnaDonna
	       Dyer and Adams, FrankFrank Adams
          Vol. 4, No. 3, 1982, pp. 3-11
          
          
            "We don't have poverty in Hertford County. People live
like that because they want to. They don't want it any other
way"--L.M. "Mutt" Brinkley, Hertford County
Commissioner.
          
          In speaking of the rural poor of Northeastern North Carolina,
Sister Mary Genino, a Catholic nun who has worked in the region for
three years, acknowledges a bewildering configuration of
powerlessness: "They are bound," she says, "by a social structure that
has not changed for hundreds of years. It has affected their economic
freedom, their political freedom and their social freedom. They don't
vote--though no one comes around with a gun or turns them away from
the voting polls. They drop out of school--because education doesn't
get them anywhere. And although there are no written laws that say
'blacks and 'while,' the mores of past generations are still rigidly
adhered to."
          Seldom since William Byrd staked the Virginia--North Carolina
boundary in 1728 has there been so much discussion within and without
the region about conditions of life in the "Northeast." Some have
begun to call the area east and north of Interstate 95 the state's
"lost colony." Colonies exist when a region's people or natural
resources are under the sway of outside individuals and
institutions. A colony is subordinate to and dependent upon outside
sources of accumulated capital, upon the "superior training" of
outsiders or their agents, upon the outsiders' control and
manipulation of privileged information, or some combination of these
factors.
          Advantage over the colonized or peripheral region is preserved
through manipulation of wages and labor markets, through continued or
increased levels of outside ownership over resources, and through the
thousand and one ways in which wealth and concentrated power make
themselves felt. There are also the advantages which are played
through in discriminations of sex, race, religion or culture. And when
necessary, there can be a show of force. Poor people are usually
numerous in dependent regions (witness Sister Genino's comments), and
passions over racial attitudes, sexual traditions or religious beliefs
often divide them, further preventing effective challenges to the
causers and causes of poverty and quiescence. Appalachia is one such
colony in the United States.  

Is Northeastern North Carolina another one?
          In August 1981, Governor James B. Hunt, Jr., spoke at an "economic
summit" arranged by the Department of Commerce in Edenton, once the
state's capital. The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot announced
the event saying the Northeast's governmental and commercial leaders
were being invited "to continue a process of focusing bureaucratic,
political, and economic attention on the region."
          Later that month, either spurred by the governor's zeal or
unimpressed by what they heard, sixteen counties formed a coalition
calling itself Northeastern North Carolina Tomorrow to promote a
regional agenda for economic growth. In October, they met with a
delegation of Virginians to plea for help in pushing tourism,
industrialization, links with the thriving Tidewater, and markets for
new products. The area's feelings of being a stepchild were
underscored by talk of secession. State senator Melvin R. Daniels,
Jr., a Democratic Party stalwart and influential banker, told the
Virginians, "If things don't go right with redistricting in Raleigh,
we might petition Virginia to take us back in--everything from the
Roanoke River through the Chowan River Basin." Whether ploy or
facetious warning, Daniel's remarks drew swift rebuttal from equally
powerful state senator J.J. "Monk" Harrington, a Lewiston
manufacturer, who bluntly defended the state's efforts to spur
development. He said, "I think Northeastern North Carolina has been
looked out for quite well by North Carolina officials. I have never
known them-Virginians--to give us anything. We give and they take."
          Governor Hunt's Balanced Growth Policy stirred some faint hopes for
economic growth in the Northeast, a land of productive farms, endless
timber tracts, pocosins, slow moving rivers and small towns. But the
highly visible policy debate during the governor's first
administration spawned more rhetoric than results. The coalition's
leaders, pushed by Ahoskie newspaper publisher, Joe Parker, were
agreed in their determination to see some change in the region's bleak
economic status. They arranged public meetings and held symposia at
community colleges and offices of Chambers of Commerce. However,
despite the region-wide, public nature of all the talk, very few of
the debate's participants offered more than a glimpse into the
Northeast's economy, or provided an analytical framework for
discussing the region's severe economic ills.
          For instance, there are shifting definitions of which counties are
to be included, or more accurately, are willing to be tarred as
"underdeveloped." The Governor's Task Force on Northeastern North
Carolina, the group responsible for the Edenton Summit, included
Beaufort, Bertie, Camden, Chowan, Currituck, Dare, Gates, Halifax,
Hertford, Hyde, Martin, Northampton, Pasquotank, Perquimans, Tyrrell
and Washington. Their list coincided with the sixteen-county
coalition. Other observers, particularly a few municipal, regional
planners, and University of North Carolina professor of planning Ed
Bergman, argue the entire First Congressional District shares the
common demoninator of an agrarian-based economy with the lowest per
capita income in the state. In accepting Bergman's position, we
include Carteret, Craven, Greene, Lenoir, Pamlico and Pitt counties in
our analysis.
          Too, the debate has been blurred by a division as to the reasons
for persistent underdevelopment. Some point to myriad human
deficiencies; others blame the lack of roads, schools or bridges. The
first camp attributes the region's plight to ills they say are
inherently a part of the Northeast's people and their culture. In
circular fashion, they claim that the often shocking statistics of
poverty, poor health, inadequate diet, ignorance, rotting housing, or
lack of participation in the electoral process characteristic of the
First Congressional District, explains the origins and causes of
underdevelopment. Another camp, perhaps the majority, holds that the
lack of adequate roads, incentives for investors, shortages of skilled
labor, and inadequate tools for capital formation prevent regional
modernization.
          Both camps ignore several essential questions: Who owns or controls
the land in this sprawling region? Who owns the region's jobs? Where
do profits go? How are governmental services distributed, or taxes
levied? These key questions are at the base of any regional
analysis. And while the Governor and the coalition have let them go
begging, some of the citizenry has not.
          Dr. Eugene G. Purcell, a minister and professor of philosophy at
Atlantic Christian College, spoke at a regional development seminar
organized by Elizabeth City's College of the Albemarle on November 17,
1981. He drew knowing, approving nods from listeners when he declared
that growth is difficult because people "realize the critical
decisions that affect them most are made by people they cannot see and
do not know." Purcell continued: "The economic future of small towns
is determined in a corporate boardroom in a distant city. 

Impersonal
bureaucrats make decisions about state or federal funding and control
of the schools, the quality and availability of medical care, who gets
a slice of the welfare pie, what interest rates you pay for borrowed
money, and even the quality of the air you breathe or the water you
drink."
          Intellectuals are certainly not the only persons asking who
prospers from the region's people and resources. In 1979, before the
present debate became public, a popular bumpersticker was sold at many
Northeast restaurants, grocery and hardware stores. The message?
"Welcome to North Eastern North Carolina: Owned and Operated by
VEPCO." The bumpersticker reflected the successful drive by twenty-one
Northeast municipalities to terminate contracts with Virginia Electric
and Power Company (VEPCO), headquartered in Richmond, and then buy
power from Carolina Power and Light Company, based in Raleigh, saving,
they predicted, $1.1 billion over a twenty-one year period.
          
            Who Owns the Land?
          
          According to the Sixth Edition of the Profile of North
Carolina Counties, published in 1981,thereare5,783,500 arable
acres in the District. Farmers till 24.9 percent of the land, or
1,400,700 acres. Timber is grown on 61.8 percent, or 3,572,200
acres. The federal government owns 233,909 acres, or 2.5 percent,
using that land principally for military bases or parks. The remainder
is taken up by roads, towns, trailer parks, shopping centers,
junkyards, schools or prison camps.
          All told, according to the 1978 U.S. Census of Agriculture, there
are 10,658 farms in the District. They produced twenty percent of the
state's agriculture receipts, or $657,204,000, averaging about $62,000
per farm. The majority are small, inherited, family-held operations
whose number is declining.
          North Carolina State University's Dr. Leon E. Danielson found in a
1981 study that about a third of all the state's farmland was owned by
retired persons, or by white- and blue-collar workers who farmed
part-time and worked other jobs. The average size of a North Carolina
farm was forty-two acres. The patterns he found hold in the Northeast,
especially because tobacco is grown in abundance, and is labor
intensive, and can be done part-time. But changes in farming
practices, operating costs, interest rates and labor costs are wiping
out the small family farm. Black farmers in the District have been
particularly hard hit. Their number declined from 2,570 full-time
farmers tilling 111,888 acres in 1954 to 529 full-time farmers working
26,876 acres in 1979, a drop of seventy-nine percent, causing the
N.C. Division of Policy Development in June 1981 to predict that by
the end of the century "there will be no black-owned farms," in the
state.
          As small farms vanish, larger farms and "superfarms"--requiring
huge capital resources and extensive management skills, have taken
their place, adapting new technologies and taking in previously unused
or marginally productive land. This trend started in 1973 when Malcolm
P. McLean, the one-time Winston-Salem trucking magnate, paid $60
million for 581 square miles c land or about one third of the entire
Albemarle-Pamlico peninsula, and appropriately called what he'd bought
(the state's largest farm), First Colony Farms. Since then, dozens of
other investors, all but two from outside the region, have bought and
developed land, cleared and drained the property, then leased or
resold the farms to absentee owners or corporations. Mostly corn,
soybeans and hogs are raised on these farms. A partial list of the
Northeast's superfarms includes the 44,000acre Open Grounds farm in
Carteret County, owned by an Italian grain merchant; the 35,000acre
Mattamuskeet Farms in Hyde County, owned by John Hancock Mutual
Insurance Co. of Boston, which has another $70 million in invested
farm mortages elsewhere in North Carolina; a 7,500-acre farm along the
Roanoke River in Halifax County, owned by ten New York City investors;
and two Washington County farms--one totalling 9,400 acres and the
other 4,700 acres--owned by foreign investors hidden so completely by
corporate veils that even the resident managers don't know for whom
they till. Only two of these megafarms are held by North Carolinians:
Rich Farms, a 13,000-acre operation east of Belhaven, and the
15,000acre farm operated by the relatives of A.D. Swindell around
Pantego.
          Decisions about the daily operations on these are made locally, but
management policies are set elsewhere. Profits and tax advantages
accumulate elsewhere, too. Further, local control over land use policy
is eroded, if not lost, as a result of absentee farm operations. Even
the state's Environmental Management Commission found their reins a
bit short. They voted to assess the impact of the superfarms on the
ecology because "no one knows now what effect the 'gigantic
denudations' of large farms . . . will have in the long run on
weather, water, and wildlife . . ." First Colony managers pooh-poohed
the study as having little value other than "keeping a few state
bureaucrats off the street."
          
            Who Controls the Water?
          
          Water, so vital to farming and seemingly so abundant in the
Northeast, is also becoming scarce as a result of industrial activity
controlled by absentee owners, or interests outside North
Carolina. The superfarms profoundly alter water distribution
patterns. Thousands of pounds of farm chemicals run off into swamps
and rivers, and have had a devasting impact on fish and shrimp in the

sounds. Meanwhile, underground cones of depression traced to huge
industrial withdrawals daily in Virginia have begun to diminish the
underground water supply in Hertford, Northampton and Gates
counties. Union Camp Corporation, operating in Franklin but
headquartered in New York City, pumps about forty million gallons out
of the ground daily, dropping the ground water level at least eighteen
feet annually. To the south near Aurora, Texasgulf, Inc.,
headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, but owned by the Government of
France, pumps over nine million gallons of water daily to keep its
subsurface phosphate mines dry. These withdrawals, combined with the
ground water pumped by municipalities or by other industries, has
caused the Northeast's ground water level to drop nearly forty feet in
ten years, according to Robert Cheek of the N.C. Department of Natural
Resources. Private wells from Wanchese to Rich Square have dried up as
a result of the depleted artesian aquifier. Already, fishermen net
crabs in the Chowan River as far upstream as Winton.
          
            Who Controls the Forests?
          
          The region's timberlands are held primarily by hundreds of private
landholders in small tracts. This is the pattern across the
state. There are some 245,000 non-industrial forest landowners in
North Carolina, more than in any other state in America. They control
about eighty percent of the commercial forest production--which yields
over three billion dollars annually, if the furniture industry is
included. In North Carolina, only twelve percent of the forests are
held by all corporations, but in the First Congressional District,
five giant forest product firms own twenty-one percent of the forests,
or 746,322 acres. None of them are headquartered in the Northeast
although each has a regional office there, and one, Weyerhaeuser,
operates a mill in Plymouth employing nearly 2,300 persons to replant
trees, run its nursery, haul logs, and run the complex, sprawling mill
itself.
          Weyerhaeuser illustrates how firms outside the region directly
influence the life inside. The Tacoma, Washington, corporation owns or
manages 660,000 North Carolina acres, mostly in the First
Congressional District. Even with all these holdings,
Weyerhaeuser-owned timber accounts for only twenty-five percent of its
production needs. Nearly three-fourths of the timber it processes must
come from smaller landholders, many of whom are unable to afford
investing an average of $120 per acre to replant and then wait twenty
to forty years for a return on their investment. To insure that its
needs are met, Weyerhaeuser constantly buys up more timberland. Also,
the company sponsors reforestation programs which enable the family
timberowner to hold onto land, but puts hundreds of Northeast acres
under its indirect control, or under the indirect control of the
handful of other companies. For they are the only buyers available.
          The giant firm influences the region's social economy even more
directly. At the end of October 1981, Weyerhaeuser settled a
four-year-old suit brought by black employees at its Plymouth
mill. They had alleged that the company assigned blacks in
disproportionate numbers to its wood products division rather than the
higher paying 

fiber division. No blacks worked in the nursery, they
said, and only a handful in salaried positions. Some seventy-eight
percent of the work force in Plymouth (1,800 persons) was black, and
the counties from which the firm drew the majority of its workers have
large black population. Weyerhaeuser agreed to divide $700,000 in back
pay among approximately 725 workers and pledged no further
discrimination in job transfers, hiring, or promotions. Discriminatory
wage patterns--to say nothing of hiring policies--provide a major
reason why the region's poverty is widespread and enduring and why the
term "colony" is accurate.
          Race has not been openly a part of the current debate about the
region's economic future. Black participation has been marked by its
absence. Only after the sixteen-county coalition's preliminary plans
were well laid were any blacks invited to join what had been an all
white, mostly male group.
          An ad hoc committee of the N.C. Department of Commerce reported on
March 19, 1979, on "the minority concentration issue." Its authors,
many of whom lived in the Northeast, sought to "dispel the myth that
areas populated by high concentrations of minority individuals are to
be avoided as possible locations in industrial facilities." Some
potential industrial clients, they noted, spurned the region because
of its lack of water, sewer services, poor roads, or their low regard
for its schools, shopping centers, cultural activities and
recreation. Others frankly balked at the Northeast because of
race. "Some . . . cite higher minority concentrations in the
population and labor force as an additional factor adding to the lack
of client interest . . . Some have stated a firm will not look at an
area which has over thirty or forty percent minority
concentration. The explanation is given that, in general, due to the
lack of economic and educational opportunity, the Southern rural Black
worker is perceived as having a poorer work ethic and is more easily
organized by union efforts." According to the 1980 Census, blacks are
the majority of the population in four of the Northeast's twenty-two
counties and a third or more in eleven others.
          
            Who Controls the Jobs?
          
          Long periods of unemployment or long daily commutes for workers are
another regional characteristic. Sixteen Northeast counties reported
unemployment rates above the state's average in 1980. Tyrrell County
had the highest unemployment rate in the state--11.5
percent. Aggregate figures do not account for seasonal employment in
the tourist industry (a major factor in Dare, Pamlico and Carteret
counties) nor farming, making it likely that real unemployment during
some months may be much higher than official averages reveal. For
hundreds of persons, the option is commuting. Between 2,200 and three
thousand North Carolinians drive daily into Virginia to work at
Tidewater shipyards, or the meat packing and food processing plants in
Suffolk and Smithfield. As the prices of fuel, autos and vans increase
more rapidly than general inflation and the real incomes earned at
these distant jobs, the region's economy is further weakened by
reducing the actual amount of money available to be spent or saved in
Northeast.
          The work which is available in the Northeast is characteristic of
jobs to be found in other colonies--apparel sewing and manufacturing,
timbering, mining, or food processing--which pay the lowest wages and
characterize first-stage, primitive industrialization.
          Even a casual look at available employment in the Northeast
explains why workers choose to commute such long distances. Jobs are
scarce. In twelve of the twenty-two counties, less than thirty percent
of the nonagricultural workforce is employed in manufacturing. The
state's average is 34.6 percent. In the nine counties where more than
thirty percent of the work force is employed in manufacturing, jobs in
food, apparel and lumber dominate. By considering Beaufort, Craven,
Lenoir and Pitt as "metropolitan centers" among the other
overwhelmingly rural counties, work in those three categories accounts
for fifty-six percent of the District's jobs. Across the state, the
average is twenty percent. These low-paying, low skill industrial
sector job categories quickly feel the nation's cyclical economic
lurches. When building permits drop nationally, the Northeast's trees
do not. When clothing sales decline, sewing machine operators are laid
off.
          In only two of the Northeast's twenty-two counties do average
weekly wages exceed or approach the statewide average of
$222.56. Seven counties reported weekly wages of less than two-thirds
the state's 1979 average. During that year, North Carolina, which
became the nation's eighth most industrialized state, ranked fiftieth
in average weekly industrial wages. Hyde County workers labored for
the lowest wage in the state, if not the U.S.,--$85.66 a week.
          There is a parallel scarcity of unions. In nine Northeast counties
there isn't a union local at all; in the others only three locals are
listed in telephone directories. Recent efforts by the United Food and
Commercial Workers, a progressive union with an emphasis on organizing
among the poorest paid sectors of the labor market, failed to overcome
widespread fear among poultry processors in two huge, profitable
factories. Even those unpleasant jobs were precious to people who know
other work isn't available. One veteran UFCW organizer, a native of
Williamston who is based in Asheville, says, "Organizing back home is
as tough as any place in the South I know of."
          Low wages, the large number of unemployed, plus the lack of unions
dull any prospect for immediate change in 

wage patterns. When new
firms do locate in the Northeast, pay levels remain low despite
increased competition for labor. For example, a British-owned elastic
manufacturing firm in 1981 took over a Jamesville building which had
housed a zipper factory also owned by absentee investors. As an
official from the elastic firm cut a ribbon to reopen the
once-abandonded plant, he told Martin County boosters, "Pay scales at
the company will be commensurate at least with those of the region of
the state."
          By subtracting the public sector portion of the non-agricultural
jobs, an even gloomier picture of the region's real wage level
emerges. Persons in government employ tend to be paid at higher hourly
wage rates than persons in the private sector. Government employees
comprise about twenty-five percent of all jobs in the Northeast and
thirty-five percent of the non-manufacturing jobs in the
region. Across North Carolina, the public sector averages only sixteen
percent of the total work force, and twenty-five percent in
non-manufacturing. In some Northeastern counties, Gates, for instance,
public schools are the largest single employer. And while county
government exercises control over a few jobs, most government workers
are managed, hired, and fired by policies or regulations set in
Raleigh, Atlanta, or Washington.
          In December 1981, Governor Hunt told a Military Appreciation Day
ceremony that the armed forces were more important to the state's
economy than tobacco. "The military pays out about $1.7 billion
dollars annually in North Carolina," he said, "while tobacco generated
about $1.3 billion dollars in wages and salaries in 1981--one of the
best yet for our number one crop." In 1980, the military pumped $230
million into the Northeast, primarily to run the Cherry Point Marine
Air Station, the New River Marine Air Corps Station, Camp LeJeune,
Johnson Air Force Base, the Fifth District Coast Guard Station in
Elizabeth City, and the demolition training center operated by the
Central Intelligence Agency outside tiny Hertford. Over 41,000 persons
are employed at those installations. Higher than average levels of
government employment, plus the large concentration of military bases,
further characterize a colony.
          
            Who Controls the Capital?
          
          Determining the final resting place for profits gained from the
region's workers and resources helps to explain why the Northeast has
a severely limited capacity to form a local capital base. According to
the 1981-1982 N.C. Directory of Manufacturing Firms, there are 103
manufacturers employing one hundred or more persons in the First
Congressional District; only thirty-four of these are headquartered
within the region. The rest make their decisions and count their
profits elsewhere, usually far from North Carolina. Of these absentee
firms, thirty-five, or one-half, are either textile, apparel, or
lumber producers. And while the 103 firms employ nearly 23,000
persons, sixty-nine of them, or the majority, control the jobs of
18,000 persons, according to N.C. Department of Commerce figures. Every one of those sixty-nine firms is headquartered
outside the Northeast. One is a foreign government.
          Still another measure of how the region's resources are drained
away by absentee capitalists is seen in expenditures for new plants or
machinery. These capital investments translate into tax revenue for
local government, indicate a firm's solvency, stability, and,
importantly, potential for additional jobs. They hint of continued
plans for operation. Only four of the twenty-two counties are within
ten percent of the state's average per establishment capital
investment levels. They are the most urban counties--Beaufort, Craven,
Lenoir and Pitt. In the rest of the Northeast, capital investments
ranged from seventy-five to five percent below North Carolina's
average. Industrial development has paid off less than handsomely for
local tax coffers. When Peat Methanol Associates announced plans to
build a $250-million plant on forty acres south of Lake Phelps,
Washington County officials crowed, "It would be a terrific iprovement
of our tax base," but were unable to tell "how much of the finished
plant would be subject to county taxes."
          The Northeast's low-wage, low-skill manufacturers produce goods
with low added-value above the costs of raw materials plus
labor. According to The 1977 Census of Manufacturing,
only firms in Pitt and Lenoir approached or exceeded the state's
average value-added statistics. Thus, industrialization has neither
translated into prosperity for individual workers nor substantial
additional tax revenue for local governments.
          Tax laws add to the region's impoverishment. The property tax is a
chief source of funds for North Carolina's schools, human services,
and some local roads. The Northeast's county and municipal governments
rely on ad valorem taxes for revenue. These taxes
are disproportionately paid by small farmers, or homeowners, and
storekeepers, rather than owners of the superfarms or the forestry
industry relative to their profits per acre. Farms and forests are
taxed according to "use values" instead of "market values," the
measures used to assess homes, trailers, autos or personal
property. Land used for farm forestry usually carries a lower assessed
value than residential, commercial or industrial land use.
          For years, North Carolina tax law has exempted timber companies
from paying taxes on cut-over land for ten years after re-seeding or
replanting. In 1973, the General Assembly went a step further by
exempting all 

standing timber from the tax base. The impact of their
decision can be seen in tiny Gates County where 165,000 acres, or 75.5
percent of all its arable 219,300 acres, is used for forestry. Three
timber companies owned 57,752 acres in Gates the year the exemption
bill passed. The previous year, they had paid $7,823.73 on standing
timber alone, and a total of $21,124 to the tax-poor county which had
no industry at the time, and can boast only of one small sewing
factory now. In a single legislative stroke, Gates lost nearly a third
of the taxes paid by the timber companies. Yet the human problems
faced by county government persisted. According to the 1980 Census,
over twenty-four percent of the population was poor, twenty-two
percent of the houses were substandard, and the unemployment rate
fluctuated between five and eighteen percent annually.
          How valuable was the timber harvested in Gates County that year? On
one seventy-four acre tract the timber sold for over $302,000. Seven
yers later--as the tax burden grew heavier as a result of the forestry
exemptions--Gates County farmers sought relief. They claimed four
hundred farmers, farm laborers and the county's few businesses paid
for seventy-five percent of the county revenue needs. Nor was Gates by
itself. Throughout the region, the ad valorem tax
rate is higher than the state average. Greene County has the highest
rate in North Carolina, at $1.39 per hundred dollars of valuation,
followed closely by Pamlico and Tyrrell with rates of $1.25 per
hundred.
          As tax rates increase, the incentives for industrial development
decrease. This forces individual property tax rates to continue to
climb, making it ever increasingly difficult for small property owners
to hang onto their land. Adding to this self-perpetuating cycle is the
regressive state sales tax. One cent of every four collected by the
state in sales taxes is returned to the counties from which the
revenue derived. Only a handful of the Northeast's counties possess
significant trading centers. Elizabeth City, Edenton, Williamston,
Greenville, New Bern and Kinston qualify, as do Little Washington and
Roanoke Rapids. However, market magnets such as Fayetteville, Raleigh
and Durham--even Richmond and Tidewater, Virginia--regularly attract
the Northeast's shoppers. Rural counties with limited retail sales
fail to benefit from the sales tax revenues to the degree "market"
counties enjoy, thus increasing the pressure to tax rural county
property at higher rates.
          
            How are Government Services Delivered in the
Northeast?
          
          Consider the following: According to the Eastern Carolina Health
Systems Agency in Greenville, the region's health planning
organization which has the largest geographic area to serve of any
agency of its kind in North Carolina, sixteen counties are "medically
under-served and have health manpower shortages." Regarding emergency
medical care only, the agency found that fourteen of the region's
hospitals had no twenty-four-hour physician coverage. Eight of them
did not have registered nurses on duty twenty-four hours daily in
emergency rooms. Only half the region's ambulances--132 of 264--met
Department of Transportation standards, and the region was short 513
ambulance attendants. Partly as a result, the agency noted, the
region's stroke mortality rates are twelve percent above state
averages. Motor vehicle deaths are ten percent above state
averages. Heart attack victims run a ten percent greater risk of dying
before getting medical attention in the Northeast than elsewhere in
North Carolina. Getting to hospitals is further complicated by the
fact that nearly a third of the region's roads are unpaved. In eleven
counties, the average number of miles of unpaved roads outstrips the
statewide average of 33.8 percent. In sprawling Beaufort County, for
instance, over 44.3 percent of the roads are unpaved.
          In a 1979 study of the Department of Human Resources listing of
every county's human service agencies, which included sheriffs'
departments, jails and prison camps, as well as hospitals, Red Cross
agencies, or Departments of Social Services, a relationship between a
county's poverty and scarcity of resources appeared. In Camden County,
where twenty-one percent of the 5,829 citizens were poor, there were
thirty-one state or federal agencies, the fewest in North Carolina, to
provide the available range of services open to other North
Carolinians. Gates County, which had thirty-two listings, the next
fewest in the state, had, as has been noted, nearly a quarter of its
8,876 citizens impoverished. In Hyde County, with thirty-four
agencies, thirty-seven percent of the 5,875 citizens were poor. There
was no public housing authority listed in these three counties, yet in
Camden, nineteen percent of the housing was substandard, in Gates,
twenty-two percent was below par, and in Hyde County, twenty-three
percent was substandard. By contrast, in Wake County, seat of state
government and one point in the affluent Research Triangle, and where
less than ten percent of the citizens are poor, there are 876
agencies, the state's highest number. In second place was Guilford
County with 483, then Forsyth with 412 and Mecklenburg with 353.
          Schools are often at the core of citizens' expectations from local
governments, and they frequently reflect the degree to which
governments can or will finance human services. Across the region,
dozens of schools have been left in the lurch and are falling to
pieces. A Raleigh newspaper found that Bertie County's only high
school held fifty-four classes daily in three World War II quonset
huts. Classrooms flooded regularly during rains. Two other Bertie
County schools had been condemned as unsafe but continued to be
used.
          For the region's older citizens, the picture is hardly brighter. In
North Carolina, an average of sixty-eight dollars per person was spent
on Medicaid in 1980. Fourteen of the Northeast's counties spent less
than the state average, and Northampton spent only thirty-eight
dollars annually. This dismal listing could continue, but the point
seems clear: Human services are scarce and supported at levels lower
than available elsewhere in North Carolina.
          
            Some Conclusions and Prospects.
          
          There is not a single Northeast county in which the per capita
income equals or exceeds the state's average, which was $7,382 in
1979. In Hyde County, the figure was one half the state's average; in
Greene, it reached ninety-five percent. In the decade between 1970 and
1980, the Northeast's citizens made no real gains in per capita 

income
if their wages were measured against those of fellow North
Carolinians. In real terms, adjusted for inflation, the gap remained
about thirty percent lower. Thus, it is not surprising that nineteen
of the twenty-one counties reported higher-than-average levels of
poverty, and in four counties, the number of poor was double the state
average.
          The internal colony metaphor provides insights into some aspects of
reality, distorts others, but forces attention on a set of
questions. Some of the Northeast's citizens want to know who controls
development, and how. A growing number want to regain control of their
jobs and land.
          Long before the state's policymakers told black farmers they were
an endangered species, those farmers were struggling to survive
despite predictions, policies and practices bent on eliminating their
way of life. Decades of planning by the state for a unique seafood
industrial park in Wanchese--at costs estimated at over $100 million
in state and federal funds--raised fears among Dare County
fishermen. "I've always said that the project will destroy us," one
fisherman told a Raleigh newspaper. "We'll have no control over the
large corporation which can absorb losses our small operation can't
stand."
          Two lines of strategy have characterized official response to the
plight of the Northeast. One tack, ever since William Byrd set down
the eighteenth century dividing line, has been to send in missionaries
to correct deficiencies thought to be inherently a part of the local
population's own waywardness. Byrd noted in his famous journal, "
. . . sometimes the Society for Propagating the Gospel has had the
Charity to send over Missionaries . . . " to Edenton, whose residents,
he wrote were "too lewd for the Priest . . . ", lacking ambition
"enough to aspire to a Brick chimney," wanting in religious devotion,
and without "the least taint of Hypocrisy, or superstition, acting
very frankly and above-board in all their excesses." Helping people
get used to or accept their deprivations continues to this day as the
chief means which many well-intentioned persons use in Northeastern
North Carolina.
          Others, uneasy about blaming the victims but equally concerned
about regional shortcomings, have substituted the term "progress" for
the patronizing "backward." To cure ills, these capitalists argue, a
modernizing corps must be posted to the region to bolster schools,
lure new industry, build roads, negotiate tax incentives. The
Northeastern North Carolina Tomorrow coalition would bring into the
region scores of professionally-trained persons: experts in hog and
black dirt farming, medicine, community development specialists,
economists, and lawyers experienced in corporate finance.
          These elite approaches ignore the talents, energies and questions
of the Northeast's citizens who don't own the banks, newspapers, or
manage the superfarms. Without local, democratic control over the
region's resources and the capital needed to develop them, the
colonial circle will go unbroken. Nonetheless, there are things which
can be done.
          In offering the following suggestions, we recognize the resistance
posed by the visible and active dimensions of power and also those
which, as Sister Genino suggested at the beginning of this essay,
result from generations o. powerlessness. Northeastern North Carolina
awaits a more thorough going analysis than that which we have
provided. In the absence of such a regional analysis, as the debate
goes on, we suggest some possible next steps.
          First, small scale, labor intensive farming should be fostered,
particularly for minority farmers or the young who are virtually
prohibited from entering farming unless land is inherited. A family
farm development authority similar to one established recently in
South Carolina should be created by the Legislature for the
Northeast. The authority would make long-term, low interest loans to
persons who earn sixty percent or more of their annual income from
farming, or who have adjusted incomes of less than $25,000. Absentee
landownership should be halted as one step in a long-range land reform
program.
          Second, markets should be guaranteed for crop alternatives to
tobacco, peanuts and corn, particularly the wide range of vegetable
crops which can be grown profitably in the Northeast but which are as
often as not imported. One U.S. Department of Agriculture study
reported that North Carolinians import three fourths of all the fresh
vegetables they consume.
          Third, the timber industry, or N.C. State University, should take
existing forest management programs into Elizabeth City State
University and East Carolina University or the region's community or
technical colleges. The aim would be to upgrade the husbandry skills
of small-tract timberowners, and to search for alternative marketing
sources for wood products.

          Fourth, the managers and employees of small businesses should be
provided opportunities to upgrade skills in all phases of their
businesses at state subsidized training centers at no cost to the
individuals or businesses. No firm with more than one hundred
employees would be eligible; nor would any absentee-owned firm.
          During the past two decades, small businesses have generated
sixty-six percent of all the region's new jobs. The state should
abandon its touted industrial recruitment program and concentrate
instead on development of enterprises directly related to the region's
economic needs, the skills of its people, and those marketable uses of
the region's resources. The state should establish a revolving loan
fund for democratically managed businesses. This would provide working
capital or start-up funds for small businesses owned and managed by
workers themselves.
          Fifth, state and local governments should re-examine the impact of
tax policy, law and formulae on timber, farming, fishing, and small
businesses; absentee ownership of both land or industry should be
discouraged through higher taxation. The guiding aim of any review
would be to insure rural counties a fair share of tax revenues, and to
insure they are not unfairly drained of resources vital to maintain
schools and human services, while seeking to spur indigenous economic
activity.
          Sixth, the state should encourage the growth of small scale,
locally control led energy development through continued solar tax
credits, demonstrations to small farmers of alternative energy
options, home insulation rebates, or energy efficiency audits at large
and small industry sites.
          Seventh, the state should provide the necessary technical
assistance for local county officials seeking to adopt industrial
development policies which take into account appropriate technology,
small-scale and locally controlled enterprises, or with qualifications
which include firm size, ownership, waste discharge, energy
efficiency, and, particularly, production links with local
resources.
          In the final analysis, however, we residents of Northeastern North
Carolina must ourselves organize the means to autonomy. We should
apply pressure on absentee owners, state politicians, county
administrators, and policymakers at every level. We must close the gap
between the "lost colony" and the state to which we pledge allegiance
and pay taxes.
          
            Donna Dyer and Frank Adams are natives of eastern North
Carolina. Ms. Dyer is a principal with Triangle Planners Network,
Inc., a nonprofit corporation offering planning and technical
assistance to community groups. Mr. Adams is the author of Unearthing
Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander and is a community educator who
now lives in Gatesville. Maps and illustrative materials for this
article were prepared by Marge Manderson of the SRC
staff.
          
        