Looking from his well-groomed yard on Goff Avenue to other less well-kept properties, Dr. Marion Jamison remembers a different New Brookland than the one he sees now.

“I can remember when you could count the rental property in this neighborhood and not use all your fingers,” Jamison said. “There was probably only about six rental properties in the whole community.”

The New Brookland community spans the space from the U.S. 21 Bypass to King’s Road and from Magnolia St. to Belleville Road. When Jamison grew up there, the neighborhood consisted of two- to five-acre plots where residents lived and grew their own food — vegetables and a few animals. Jamison recalls a pastoral time when he spent tranquil days with the other children of his community, pursuing the pleasures of childhood and learning lasting lessons from his observation of the adults around him.

“Most of the people in New Brookland had little farms when I was a child,” Jamison said. “When a person butchered, he shared the meat with everybody. When vegetables were harvested they, like everything else, were shared with neighbors. The children belonged to everybody in the community. All of the adults were like parents to us.”

When Jamison grew to adulthood and finished college, he decided to come back to New Brookland and raise his family. In the span of 32 years, he has watched the neighborhood that nourished and nurtured him through childhood go through many changes, many of them heartbreaking.

“As the children grew up, they went other places, usually to northern cities, for employment opportunities,” Jamison said. “In some families, one child might have remained at home with the parents to keep the land going. In other situations, all the children left and when the parents died, the land became heirs property. With the children having their lives in other cities, perhaps they didn’t care for the land and let the taxes go unpaid. When that happened, someone would get the land just by paying the back taxes on it. Unfortunately, that happened more often than not.”

As that scenario played out over and over in New Brookland, Jamison noticed that the community started to change. He said the people acquiring the property did not intend to live in the community and constructed substandard houses, which they rented.

“And when people don’t own the property, they don’t keep it up,” Jamison said. “They don’t have the pride of ownership. And that makes a difference.”

The New Brookland community is suffering because much of the property being held by absentee owners, neighbors say. They say there are many dilapidated houses in the community that are a blight on the neighborhood.

And law enforcement officials say the homes can supply cover for drug activity and other illegal pursuits.

Jamison’s wife, Annie Jamison, has been an active part of the move to get the dilapidated houses condemned and razed.

“But it has been about eight years since they have torn down one of those old houses,” Mrs. Jamison said. “It’s a shame that the county allows them to stay up, knowing what they do to this community.”

But the plight of the New Brookland community has not gone unnoticed, county officials say. Orangeburg County Administrator Bill Clark said New Brookland is an area of concern for him.

“I’ll be making some recommendations to increase manpower and equipment so that we can be more aggressive in that area,” he said.

“Now we depend on the County Works Department to take down those houses and we can only send them out when we have crews available,” Clark said. “That can get difficult when the road maintenance crews are doing demolition and cleanups, especially now. They are engaged in road construction almost year-round. We’re looking to supplement the crews so they can focus on other areas of need.”

Clark said another issue that slows the process is having to work with the owners of the property. He said the owners have to be notified of the condition of the property and appeals have to be made to them to make improvements and repairs. He, too, said that absentee owners present the greatest hindrance to having the houses torn down.

“But if we get no response to our notification, we can add the cleanup costs to their tax bills,” Clark said. “And I’ve also had some dealings with Sheriff Larry Williams to assist us in identifying the properties that are attracting criminal behavior so we can prioritize those in the cleanup process. Because those that are creating a nuisance are the ones we want to target first.”

Sheriff Larry Williams said the dilapidated houses present a problem to everyone involved. He said they are more than a breeding ground for criminal activity.

“Places like those old run-down houses are dangerous to the people in that community and they are dangerous for my officers,” Williams said. “For the people in the community, there’s no telling what might be going on in those places and for my officers, they’re hiding places for the criminal element in the community. Someone could take refuge in one of those houses and an officer could lose his or her life.”

Last October, two Orangeburg County deputies were shot as they went to check out activity at what appeared to be an abandoned home. Both survived.

Williams said “We have a plan with the county administration to help them destroy those houses, but the legal process can move slowly. And we have to go through the process. I know that’s not fast enough for the people who want to see them gone. But it takes time.”

New Brookland is in the district represented by County Councilwoman Janie Cooper. She said that area and the problem of the dilapidated houses have been prominent on her agenda for some time.

“I have gone to the county administrator about those houses several times,” Cooper said. “He told me that he had written letters to the owners and they made promises but they don’t seem to make good on their promises. And we have to work with the owners because if they are repairable, we can’t condemn them. We can’t seem to get the cooperation of the owners. But we’ve got to do something.”

Mrs. Jamison, who continues to work for the improvement of the New Brookland community, said she understands that the wheels of bureaucracy move slowly.

“But the wheels of bureaucracy grind the hope of the people who have to contend with the problems those old houses bring to a community,” Jamison said.

“The people who own those houses don’t live in this community and wouldn’t have something like that in their own communities. I’m willing to work with anyone who will do something about those places,” she said. “We’ve got to demand that they be just and fair about it. If it’s something you wouldn’t want in your own community, don’t put it in somebody else’s.”

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