CAMDEN, N.C. - There is no McDonald's here. No fast food anywhere in Camden County: No Wendy's, no Burger King, no Hardee's. No supermarket either: No Farm Fresh, no Food Lion, no Kroger. No department store. No 7-Eleven. No mall. No large factory. Virtually no jobs.
In all of Camden County - the long, thin, swampy peninsula just south of Chesapeake, Va. - there is almost no business at all. But there are lots of new houses. And many more are popping up. Virginians are moving in.
Camden County may be North Carolina's perfect bedroom community. Almost nobody who lives there works there.
Many of Camden's 7,000 residents cross the state line to work in Hampton Roads, driving up to an hour each way.
New census figures released this month confirm it: Among North Carolina's 100 counties, Camden ranks dead last in percentage of residents who work in the county where they live - just 24 percent.
It's no surprise that income is high and poverty is low in Camden. "If you don't have a job, why would you move here?" County Manager Carl Classen said.
And Virginians are moving to Camden - so fast and so often that Camden adopted a new plan this summer to force most new house construction into three existing villages on one-acre or two-acre lots.
But even that's not enough for some longtime Camdenites, who see their rural idyll fading away.
"If this keeps up," says Arthur Clow, who runs a local antiques store, "we'll be just another subdivision of Norfolk and Portsmouth."
But not yet.
It starts at the swamp.
There's no way around it, literally. To get to Camden County, you must drive through the Great Dismal Swamp.
Start on Dominion Boulevard in Chesapeake. Drive until the road ends. Keep going.
The Dismal Swamp Canal runs along the right, straight as a ruler's edge. This is Route 17. Trees are so thick that a sign warns drivers to switch on headlights for safety, even in daytime.
"Warning: 25 people have died on this road since 1988," the sign cautions. The asphalt is flat, straight and one lane each way. There is no shoulder. Passing is an adrenaline rush, like Apollo's Chariot at Busch Gardens. Trucks with headlights blazing barrel past at 55 mph in a steady stream from North Carolina.
There is nothing to see here. No houses, no stores, no signs. A few farms. An abandoned garage. The canal.
Suddenly, the road splits. This is North Carolina. Now there are two lanes each way. "Welcome to Camden County," the sign says. "Opportunity awaits you." And still there is nothing but swamp.
Minutes later, the first sign of civilization emerges: The Dismal Swamp Canal Welcome Center. Acres of asphalt, vending machines, bathrooms, picnic tables and docks for boats on the canal.
An oddity: Instead of flowers, the gardens beside the canal are filled with tobacco and peanut plants, labeled for visitors who have never seen one.
Soon, the swamp ends. Elizabeth City traffic forks to the right. Don't go there. The two-lane road - now it's Route 343 - will take you the rest of the way through Camden County, roughly 40 miles, to South Mills and Camden and Shiloh, all the way to the wetlands of Old Trap.
You've arrived
Gradually, houses reappear, one at a time, then in bunches. Clusters of vinyl-sided homes sprout out of nowhere, developments with names like Wharf's Landing and Bell Farm Estates.
Plastic roadside mailboxes compete for the area's two daily newspapers. Billboards pop up for George's Home Cooking and Poorman's Fruits and Vegetables. "Clean restrooms. Only 7 miles!" one announces.
You've arrived.
There is one stop light in Camden County.
No other is needed. Traffic is light, except when school lets out at Camden County High School or in summer when tourists pass through to the Outer Banks. Two lanes is enough - one each way - and there are no plans to widen Route 343. That's intentional.
"One way you can keep a county rural is not to provide major highways," says Classen, the county manager.
Camden is growing, maybe too fast. In the past year, the county gained about 212 people, according to census estimates. That doesn't sound like much, but it's 3 percent of the county's 2000 population. Few counties grow that fast in one year.
By next year, Melinda and Anthony Jaroch of Virginia Beach will be among the newcomers.
This summer, the Navy family bought a one-acre lot in Wharf's Landing, the new development just over the state line. They've outgrown their modest Ocean Lakes home and wanted something bigger.
The family of six looked in Chesapeake and Suffolk, but everything was either too expensive or too small.
Camden County looked good and quiet and safe. "It's beautiful country," Melinda Jaroch says. "The schools are good. And it'll be kind of nice to sit on my front porch without the jet noise. I couldn't find anything to touch it around here."
Bill Young moved to Camden after 20 years as a New York City firefighter and six years in Great Bridge, Chesapeake.
"I couldn't stay in New York and Long Island on my pension, that's for sure," says Young, 61. "We'd vacationed in Virginia Beach a number of times. We liked the area, so we moved down.
"But then Great Bridge got too congested. It was starting to remind me of Long Island again. So we built a house here in Camden. It's very laid back, quiet and peaceful. I built a bigger house for probably the same price as my old house cost in Great Bridge. Plus the taxes are a lot less."
In Virginia, Young paid $1,700 a year in real estate taxes. In North Carolina, he pays $1,000 a year on a bigger house.
"I found moving over the state line was a lot less expensive," he says.
So Young is staying. But some old-timers may leave.
History has caught up with the old Camden County Courthouse.
The place is a wreck - temporarily. The wiring is unsafe and stairs are rotting. Orange fences keep residents away. Inside, workers rip up the walls and floors.
A keeper
But folks here like their history. The 155-year-old courthouse is a keeper. County residents will spend half a million dollars patching it up instead of replacing it. It is the oldest continuously used courthouse in North Carolina.
Time passes slowly in Camden County.
For years, Camden didn't grow much. The population froze around 6,000. Even now, Camden is still the third-smallest of North Carolina's 100 counties by population.
Folks like that un-changing. But it can't last.
Clow, the antiques dealer, has lived here 30 years. He worries about Camden's future.
"Hardly anything changed around here until the last four or five years," Clow says. "We didn't even have a population change for 25 years. Then all this growth started coming in and it kind of got out of control.
"There's a lot of people moving down here to avoid all that traffic in Hampton Roads. If we put sewers in, it will be uncontrollable. And if they four-lane Route 17, stand by. The people who are still here will be taxed to death for the infrastructure we will need." If development gets worse, Clow says, he'll move somewhere west, maybe Lake Gaston.
Meanwhile, Virginians keep coming. They have swelled neighboring Currituck County. They have crowded into neighboring Gates County and Pasquotank County.
And Camden? It could use the jobs. It could use the economic development if that arrives with the new houses.
"We've become a rural bedroom community," says Classen, the county manager. "There are monster subdivisions coming to hit us. Development is just a matter of time."
The cars keep rolling down Route 17. Headlights on.