Risk Lived, Stigma Experienced '

Marshall, Georgia is situated in Pecan County in southern Georgia. ¹ It hosts an historically Black college, a population of 5,000, and a very limited stock of inexpensive housing. Railroad tracks and a major thoroughfare separate the Alouette Chemical Works plant and an adjacent African-American neighborhood from the town’s more prosperous residential and commercial center. The Alouette Company began operating in 1910 as a lime-sulphur plant, later becoming a supplier of arsenic-based pesticides for agricultural, lawn and garden markets (M. Hillsman & M. Krafter, personal communication, July 29, 1996). Locals refer to the plant as “the dust house,” a designation that invokes the particulate matter that once permeated neighborhood air and life. A ditch carrying untreated waste from the plant traveled through the adjacent neighborhood until it was covered in the late 1970s. Adult residents of the neighborhood recall playing in the ditch as children while their parents were said to have waded across the ditch to avoid the longer walk to the plank bridges at the ends of each block.