On loan from photographer Lex Youngman, professor at Wingate University, the exhibit features poignant black and white photos of everyday life along Highway 601. For most of its length, U.S. Route 601 is a rural two-lane highway running through towns large and small across the piedmont of North Carolina downward to the low country of South Carolina. Along that road live people whose lives are largely untouched by the fast pace of the Carolinas’ larger cities. Those people form a cross-section not only of the South, but also of rural America.

According to Youngman, "They are regionally distinctive, but share with their counterparts elsewhere the traits which make them truly "country" - they are genuine, friendly, unpretentious; confident in themselves and their culture; proud, but not prideful. They are common people with uncommon dignity. Even so, their world is in transition. Transplants from the North and immigrants from further south and other parts of the world are coming to the area to live and work - and the faces of the New South are changing." Through this project, Youngman explores and records the cultural and social diversity of those people along Route 601.