By Ben Rappaport
This story is published in partnership with The Assembly.
It was a sight that ruined Lauren Cole’s childhood memories: cracked concrete filled with murky green water, overgrown weeds, and hundreds of waterbugs.
“This is hard to look at,” said Cole, now 71. It was the first time she’d returned to Whiteville’s Wedgewood Road swimming pool in nearly two decades. “We used to swim here and dance in the gazebo there and just have a grand old time really. But this just breaks my heart.”
It wasn’t just the state of the pool itself. It was her understanding now that the place she loved in her youth was a symbol of racial division for others in her community—and one only for white residents like her.
She’s spent the last four years trying to change that, leading an effort to revive not just the Whiteville pool, but other abandoned pools across Columbus County as community spaces.
“We tried so hard,” she said. “I consider that my biggest failure in life: not being able to bring a pool back here.” The nearest public pools are at least an hour’s drive away in Wilmington or St. Pauls.
It’s not just a problem in this region. Community and public pools across the country are on the decline. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates there are about 309,000 public pools in the country, a number that hasn’t changed much since the U.S. built them en masse during the Great Depression. That figure includes pools that belong to condos, hotels and schools, so the number of pools accessible to the public is even lower.
Meanwhile there are 10.4 million private pools belonging to residences or individuals; those remain out of reach to many lower income residents. Most of the public pools in North Carolina are in urban areas like Cumberland, Durham, Mecklenburg, New Hanover and Wake counties. Nearly all of the 157,000 total pools in the state belong to private residents.
To Cole, the problem is not just the lack of recreational opportunities. No access means young people don’t learn to swim. Drownings are also on the rise and are the leading cause of death for children ages 1 to 4, according to the CDC. Over half of U.S. adults have never taken a swimming lesson, and drownings increased 28 percent among Black people between 2019 and 2022.
Across North Carolina, 29 children died in accidental drownings in 2022, according to the state Department of Health and Human Services. Six children drowned in Columbus County between 2016 and 2020, the latest year state data is available.
“It’s about more than swimming,” Cole said. “It’s about creating a community hub—something we haven’t had in Columbus County for a long time.”
A relic of segregation
The former pool on Wedgewood Road sits at the end of an upscale neighborhood across from the county hospital. The street at one time was known as “Doctor’s Row,” with most homes valued at $400,000 to $700,000 according to Zillow. Nearly every home in the predominantly white neighborhood now has a private pool in the backyard.
The place where families once swam is now owned by longtime Columbus County Commissioner Giles “Buddy” Byrd, who according to property records bought it at public auction in 2014 for $93,300. The property was sold at auction after membership declined and the neighborhood stopped paying insurance on the space. The lot has sat vacant and unused ever since.
The 3.2-acre property is again listed for sale at $150,000. Byrd told the Border Belt Independent and The Assembly he’s ambivalent about what happens next with the property. “I don’t care if I sell it or not,” he said. “I bought it as an investment and have just let it lay.”
While officials with the Whiteville Planning Department said several other properties Byrd owns have become overgrown eyesores, the Wedgewood Road property has not received any official complaints and is not on the city’s code enforcement list.
In the 1950s and ‘60s, at least six pools were built across Columbus County in Chadbourn, Fair Bluff, Lake Waccamaw, Riegelwood, and Whiteville. Many were community-owned, meaning residents paid membership dues. All of them, however, were racially segregated and denied access to Black residents long after integration in other parts of the country.
As public pools confronted integration, white people with the funds to do so—like those on Wedgewood Road—opted to build private pools in their own backyards. Wedgewood Road sits on Whiteville’s northern end, which is 68 percent white and has a median household income of $68,000. Meanwhile, southern Whiteville is 37 percent white with a median income of just $28,000, according to 2022 Census data.
Historian David Cecelski said swimming pools and other bodies of water were frequently a flashpoint for white supremacist ideology.
“A lot of white people were more willing to talk about Black and white kids going to school together than they were swimming pools,” he said. “At least at school, Black kids had their clothes on.”
For rural places like Columbus County, the refusal to integrate sooner is part of why nobody has access to the pool today.
“In some ways, the swimming pool situation sums up the white supremacy movement and its impacts,” he said. “Because what refusing public access really means is that the kids at the country club will still have their pool.”
A steep cost
Robert “Red” Evans, a Black resident in Fair Bluff, helped build his community’s pool on Elm Street as a teenager. Now 83, he remembers laying the concrete at its base. Once it was built, he wasn’t allowed inside.
“I’ll never forget it: being a little Black boy in the summer staring across the street,” said Evans. “Wishing we had a place to cool off like all the white children did.”
The Fair Bluff pool was stock-owned, meaning neighbors paid a membership fee to be partial owners of the facility. Those stocks, however, were never sold to Black residents.
Stocks to swim there originally cost about $100 per year, according to Mary Alice Thompson, vice president for the Greater Fair Bluff Historical Society. Prices increased as white families left town, and the pool struggled to stay financially afloat. By the 2010s, Thompson said annual memberships were upward of $500—a steep price in a town where the average household income is $40,600 and the poverty rate is 19.68 percent, 1.5 times higher than the state average.
The town of about 430 people is 61 percent Black and 31 percent white. While not explicit, Fair Bluff residents say the pool remained racially segregated until 2018.
Today, Evans frequents the Fair Bluff Senior Center, which sits next to the now-abandoned and quickly deteriorating pool on Elm Street. People in the senior center still tend to divide lunch tables along racial lines.
Thompson says the exclusion at the time was intentional.
“All the Black people swam in the Lumber River, so the white people felt they didn’t have anywhere to swim,” she said. “The pool was ‘stock-owned,’ but they never sold stock to Black folks.”
In Evans’ youth, Elm Street was a predominantly white, upper middle-class neighborhood. But flooding of the Lumber River from Hurricanes Matthew in 2016 and Florence in 2018 have ravaged the town and caused population decline. Now the neighborhood is predominantly Black and lower income, with home values averaging $100,000 or less according to Zillow.
That racial exclusion has lasted generations in Fair Bluff, and along the way it’s become normalized for both Black and white residents. Evans said he’s seen white families in town get opportunities for recreation that his children never got. “There ain’t nothing for a Black kid to do around here,” he said.
His 29-year-old daughter, Jacqueline Evans, also grew up never being allowed to swim at the pool in her neighborhood. By the time she grew up, the racial exclusion was more implied than formal policy, but the effect was the same. She recalls walking past the pool house every day with her friends on the way to elementary school—a visceral reminder that even in the 2000s Black people weren’t included in parts of day-to-day life in Fair Bluff.
“We had to build our own community, but in a small town that’s just the way it was,” Jacqueline Evans said. “We were so used to the segregation that there really isn’t much you can do about it.”
“By the end there they were really just trying to get anybody to join—Black or white—because they couldn’t pay the bills,” said Grayson Jarvis, 33, a member of the town council. “And it wasn’t intentional segregation, but Black families typically didn’t have that kind of money.”
‘It still feels crushing’
In 2018, the Southeastern YMCA leased the pool in Fair Bluff to keep it open. It also leased the pool at the Whiteville Country Club (now called Vineland Golf Course) on James B. White Highway. Cole, a retired childhood educator, spearheaded that effort.
“For so long we’ve seen Columbus County keep poor kids away from opportunity,” Cole said. “Swimming is a lifelong skill, and it’s a non-competitive activity. We need more activities like that for all children here.”
Cole’s work with the Southeastern YMCA, which is headquartered in Wilmington, began when she and executive director Dick Jones helped distribute a survey to Columbus County residents about recreation. They found “safe and secure community spaces” and places to exercise were among the top needs.
In a different 2013 survey by the local hospital, 94 percent of residents said they wanted a community wellness center. And 35 percent desired a pool within that center.
It took two years of committee meetings and politicking with local officials, but Cole and Jones cut the ribbons in Fair Bluff and northern Whiteville and finally reopened the pools with hopes for a new aquatic future for Columbus County in the summer of 2018. For just $5 a day (or $250 per year), all families in Columbus County would finally have a place to swim.
“When those pools were open, it was glorious,” Cole said. “We were teaching people of all colors and income levels to swim and creating a really special community space. It was just great.”
At its peak, the pools employed about 25 people, including 15 lifeguards, and taught free lessons for people of all ages through Swim For Life, a program focused on helping minorities learn to swim.
Cole recalls the joy of a 78-year-old Black woman learning to swim for the first time and finally being able to enjoy the beach with her grandkids. Cole also remembers the big smile of relief on a 16-year-old baseball player who could finally join his teammates in the pool without fear of drowning.
But the initial enthusiasm didn’t last. Even with the low costs, many families stopped paying. Then came the coronavirus pandemic, which shut down operations in 2020. Then there were the repairs needed on the aging pools—sealing cracked concrete, new skimmers, a new water pump—that quickly grew too costly.
During the two years the pools were open, Southeastern YMCA was paying for the maintenance and staffing. As problems continued to show up, however, it was no longer feasible for them to support the project financially.
“Without a continual source of support and funding, systems get old; it doesn’t last forever,” Jones said. “At the end of a two-year period we were faced with a question: Do we continue to support operating losses? It just became increasingly difficult to keep things going.”
The YMCA pulled out before the summer of 2021, and the pools never reopened.
“It still feels crushing,” Cole said. “It was like this big hill to climb to get these things open. After they opened, the hill kept getting steeper and steeper.”
After two drowning incidents at Lake Waccamaw in 2022, Cole rallied the YMCA committee to meet again in hopes of returning energy to the cause. The committee’s efforts stalled after Southeastern Community College in Whiteville showed interest in building a recreational facility—which still hasn’t come to pass.
What’s left behind
Nowadays, the Fair Bluff pool is decrepit. Broken skimmers have prevented it from draining, so trash floats atop the algae-filled water, while kudzu wraps around the remnants of a diving board and water slide.
“It’s such a shame to not have something like that now for the younger generation,” Fair Bluff Mayor Billy Hammond said. “We just aren’t seeing the younger generation get involved in community issues. I think not having that recreation is part of why.”
In 2021, the property was sold to Gastonia-based C&C Carter LLC for $76,700, according to county land deeds. The LLC’s business filings show it primarily operates a children’s daycare. Phone calls to the company were redirected to a property management division, which declined to comment.
The town sent the company a letter telling it to clean up the property. They never received a response, Hammond said. The pool is now on the town’s code enforcement list, which means it could be demolished in the next 90 to 180 days if it is not cleaned up.
Following a hearing on August 9, a code enforcement officer for the town told the Border Belt Independent and The Assembly that Curtis Carter, who owns the LLC, intended to fill the pool with concrete and build a baseball field on the property. Carter did not respond to multiple phone call requests for comment to verify this claim.
The vacating of community-owned and public pools is common across the country, especially in poor communities of color like Fair Bluff. The draining of the pool is symbolic of the larger loss of resources in these communities.
In her book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, author and racial justice policy advocate Heather McGhee writes that as white Americans began paying for private pools, they let their community pools fall into disrepair. “A once-public resource became a luxury amenity, and entire communities lost out on the benefits.”
“Today, we don’t even notice the absence of the grand resort pools in our communities; where grass grows over former sites,” she writes. “There are no plaques to tell the story of how racism drained the pools. But the spirit that drained these public goods lives on. The impulse to exclude now manifests in a subtler fashion, more often reflected in a pool of resources than a literal one.”
Confidence in the water
Mariel Biebl, a Latino resident of Whiteville, misses having access to the YMCA pool. She brought her three children every day it was open. She grew up going to public pools all the time after school as a child in Bolivia and was surprised there was none when she moved to Whiteville in 2007.
Biebl struggles with joint pain from rheumatoid arthritis. Swimming gives her a way to get exercise and relieve her tension. She loves the freedom she feels underwater. As a graduate student at UNC Pembroke, she used the aquatic facility there daily.
“Being in the water is therapy to me,” she said. “I put my goggles on, tune the world out and open my eyes to a new world.”
Teaching her children to swim was also a priority. But without access to a public pool, she had to pay for a membership to the Whiteville Country Club. That country club pool off of James B. White Highway would later be the property the YMCA leased for its swimming lessons.
Biebl works with migrant families at Whiteville City Schools and understood many families she worked with couldn’t afford the cost of a country club membership.
She joined the YMCA committee with Cole in 2018 and made a concerted effort to get Latino and migrant families involved. On several occasions, she took migrant students to the north Whiteville pool for lessons.
“I remember there were many students who didn’t speak any English, but they’d find their confidence in the water,” she said. “Helping them with swimming was like an opening-up process for some of them.”
After the pool closed, Biebl bought an above-ground one for her backyard. She still swims in it regularly, but instead of Olympic-sized laps she swims 20-foot circles over and over.
Third places
Columbus County is one of the unhealthiest counties in the state, according to University of Wisconsin County Health Rankings. Residents have a lower life expectancy than the state average as well as significantly higher rates of obesity and physical inactivity.
Shaq Davis, community outreach coordinator for the Columbus County Partnership for Children, said family engagement opportunities are limited, which is one reason few young people stay after high school.
“We are lacking in outdoor recreation and gathering spaces like splash pads, theaters, bowling alleys,” he said. “Those sorts of things can really help people feel connected to the community.”
Spaces like the ones Davis mentions are known as “third places”—a public space outside of home and work where people can connect with their community. According to the sociologist Ray Oldenburg, who coined the term, third places are important because they help build relationships, level out social classes, and promote informal conversation.
As a Columbus County native, Davis, 33, said recreational opportunities in the county are often centered around sports. In 1986, ABC News dubbed Whiteville “Baseball Town USA,” after a string of high school players went to the major leagues. Baseball has remained prominent, third places have dwindled, and so has recreation at large.
“Being able to find a space to get moving, and not feel the pressure that something like baseball here often brings, it’s critical to a healthy childhood,” Davis said.
Safe and free places for kids to gather are essential to a healthy childhood, according to McGhee. And while a pool can be a financial strain in the short term, she argues that the new businesses, economic opportunities, and other indirect benefits created around it can supersede those direct costs. A pool, she said, can become the type of amenity that draws people to a place.
“Children are going to go to water regardless,” McGhee told the Border Belt Independent and The Assembly. “The question then becomes, what is the value of children’s lives to the county?”
Pools can often be signifiers of quality of life, she said, and integrated pools can be community connectors.
Davis, like almost every boy in the county, grew up playing baseball. He was inspired by the community aspect of recreation on the ballfield to do the work he does today. Children need ways to keep themselves busy and connect to their community, he said. Without that, issues like drug use, violence, and absenteeism at schools will persist.
“We have to make our community more suitable for our kids,” Davis said. “When we make it more suitable for them, we make it more suitable for us in the long run.”
Davis first learned to swim after his 15-year-old cousin—an all-star baseball player—tragically drowned at Myrtle Beach. His family forced everyone to learn to swim in their uncle’s backyard. Davis said one of his cousins pushed him in against his will and taught him “swimming survival 101.”
Cole said stories like Davis’ are why she finds it so heartbreaking to see what has become of the pools today.
“Before I take my last breath, I desperately want to see a pool in Columbus County,” Cole said. “I just wish more people wanted it that badly, too.”
