Yale

"No traffic lights, no trash collection, no high-speed Internet. Endless stretches of soybean and peanut fields line the horizon, only occasionally interrupted by modest Georgian-style homes."

A pretty apt description of this little place I stumbled across last year while returning from photographing a vacant funeral home.

Yale is an unincorporated area that doesn’t meet the qualifications to be named as a town. It got its name in 1882 when a graduate from Yale University was hired to lay railroad tracks for the Atlantic and Danville railroad, decided to name the local train depot after his alma mater. In a 2007 interview the Sussex County Clerk, Gary Williams, said, “Some places become towns and some places become cities, but Yale, Va. has no hope for either one.” It’s a small, tight knit community, where most families have roots that go back four generations, and where one famer said that when he needed to harvest his crops and his machine broke, a neighbor loaned him a $225,000 harvester to bring his crops in, and two trucks to help haul them to market. The 2020 census showed a population of 526 people. Which slightly outnumbers the number of deer, possums, rabbits, squirrels, and raccoons. And hunting dogs.