Zachary Faircloth (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
This paper argues that climactic weather events have historically been incorporated into communal narratives of regional isolation in Horry County, South Carolina. Local histories of the region often mark Hurricane Hazel (1954) as the temporal cut between “Old Horry,” a world of subsistence fishing and farming communities, and “New Horry,” a modernizing area with a growing population and increased tourist attention. This paper thinks through the imagined and real spatio-temporal dyads that emerge here: the rustic idyll of “Old Horry” and the mid-century sheen of “New Horry”; the developed coast and the rural inland; the river and the ocean. This paper then considers the continued salience of floods as markers of rupture in the period after Hurricanes Matthew and Florence.
Part of 04-12 Folklore and the Environment in the Coastal American South, Friday, November 03, 8:30 am–10:00 am