Famed travel writer takes first trip in Deep South, off the interstates, and finds ruins they created

Travel writer Paul Theroux has traveled the world but until recently had never toured America's Deep South. In a story for Smithsonian magazine, "The Soul of the South," Theroux recounts his experiences in small towns in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas, away from the interstate highways.

"This other Deep South, with the same pride and with deep roots—rural, struggling, idyllic in places and mostly ignored—was like a foreign country to me," Theroux writes. "I decided to travel the back roads for the pleasure of discovery—doing in my own country what I had spent most of my life doing in Africa and India and China—ignoring the museums and stadiums, the antebellum mansions and automobile plants, and, with the 50th anniversary of the civil-rights struggle in mind, concentrating on the human architecture, in particular the overlooked: the submerged fifth." (Photo by Steve McCurry: Allendale, S.C.)

"The South began for me in Allendale, in the rural Lowcountry of South Carolina, set among twiggy fields of tufted white, the blown-open cotton bolls brightening the spindly bushes," Theroux writes. "In a lifetime of travel, I had seen very few places to compare with Allendale in its oddity; and approaching the town was just as bizarre. The road, much of it, was a divided highway, wider than many sections of the great north-south Interstate, Route 95, which is more like a tunnel than a road for the way it sluices cars south at great speed."

"Approaching the outskirts of Allendale I had a sight of doomsday, one of those visions that make the effort of travel worthwhile. It was a vision of ruin, of decay and utter emptiness; and it was obvious in the simplest, most recognizable structures—motels, gas stations, restaurants, stores—all of them abandoned to rot, some of them so thoroughly decayed that all that was left was the great concrete slab of the foundation, stained with oil or paint, littered with the splinters of the collapsed building, a rusted sign leaning. Some were brick-faced; others made of cinder blocks, but none was well made, and so the impression I had was of astonishing decrepitude, as though a war had ravaged the place and killed all the people."

"When the Interstate route was plotted, it bypassed Allendale 40 miles to the east, and like many other towns on Route 301, Allendale fell into ruin," Theroux writes. "But just as the great new city rising in the wilderness is an image of American prosperity, a ghost town like Allendale is also a feature of our landscape. Perhaps the most American urban transformation is that very sight; all ghost towns were once boomtowns." (Read more)