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| Welcome to a dashed dream |
Soul City is both interesting and a little sad. While traveling through Warren County, NC I took the opportunity to stop in to find
Soul City (GC15HBT). This gave me the chance to look around the actual town of the same name. I learned that this community was the brainchild of Civil Rights Activist and Pastor Floyd B. McKissick
. His vision was to create a community in which people from all races could live in harmony. He wanted to intersperse industry with residential areas. Where were the funds to come from? Some donations supported the project but largely government grants supported this endeavor. McKissick broke with most of his activist colleagues in the late 1960's to become a Republican. Some accused him of becoming a Republican in order to gain financial support for his Soul City vision. The community started out with a bang but then, after failing to attract jobs to the area, fell into disrepair. There were also charges of money mismanagement; a charge that was later discovered to be unfounded. The dream was to have a community of 50,000 by the year 2000. Instead the community was in great decline by the end of the 1970's. There are only a few hundred inhabitants of Soul City today. Today the biggest enterprise in Soul City are the county and state correctional facilities. They are surrounded by large areas separated off with barbed wire to keep the prisoners from escaping. McKissick died in 1991. By then the dream was already fading. If you get the chance to look for this cache do so. It's just a short detour off of Interstate 85 at the Manson Exit. Just turn right at the end of the exit ramp. When you reach Highway 1 turn left and proceed until you see the Soul City sign. Turn right and make your way to the cache and the city that was a dream lost.
1 comment:
Thanks much for a very enlightening post. I never would have suspected that I would locate such a piece while waiting for the lights to come back on in the Superdome during the Super Bowl.
I grew up as a kid in North Carolina during the 1950s and 1960s, and moved away, lived in Los Angeles for 30 years, and only recently returned to North Carolina. I vaguely recall mention of this project.
Such a movement requires a commonality of interests and mindsets. That, unfortunately, never existed in the South. Part of it is simply lack of critical mass in terms of population density.
Nice blog work. I came across your blog while “blog surfing” using the Next Blog button on the Nav Bar located at the top of my blogger.com site. I frequently just travel around looking for other blogs which exist on the Internet, and the various, creative ways in which people express themselves. Thanks for sharing, and best wishes for the New Year.
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