A place apart: left behind, North Carolina's northeast corner gets a lift from an economic driver across the state line.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: Unemployment - Statistical data

The flat country road disappears into the night. Even in daylight, it's hard to tell distance in the coastal plain, leveled by eons of rising and receding water until sky and horizon appear seamless. Vivian Chamblee's round face and horn-rimmed glasses reflect the dashboard glow as she stares into the dark. Debris litters the pavement. Are those flickers of red and blue in the distance? A lump grows in her throat.

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She's as much Bertie County as if she took root when born here 67 years ago, a sharecropper's daughter reared in a four-room house without electricity. She drove a mule and squashed thumb-sized horn worms that ate her daddy's tobacco crops. "I got married and left home when I was 16. My first public job was housecleaning. I didn't know how to clean a bathroom because I'd never had one." She earned a high-school equivalency, went to night school for a nursing-assistant's certificate and eventually became a dental assistant. In 1986, she and her husband built a frame rest home on the outskirts of Colerain, a town of about 200 just west of the Chowan River. It was smart business. Bertie and surrounding counties have some of the most elderly populations in the state. In 1990, they added a second one next door, for a total of 11 residents. Her husband died in 1993. Even after she remarried, Moore's Family Care Home was her nest egg.

The writhing, sickish-green cloud sprang up about sundown on an April Saturday. Tearing across Snakebite Township, nothing stood between it and her rest home but farm fields and the feeble steeples of a few country churches. By the time word reached her in Ahoskie, 15 miles up the road on the Hertford County line, night was falling. When she arrives, the front-step railing still stands, illuminated by red and blue lights flashing on ambulances and sheriff's cars. Beyond lie ruins. Broken, twisted bathroom pipes entangle an old man's body. A dead woman's leg protrudes from under a fallen wall. An ambulance whisks away another person, who will die the next day. That night, though, will live on. "It'll never leave my head," Chamblee says.

Hard times and bad luck are no strangers here. In a year's span, northeastern North Carolina suffered three federally declared disasters: the tornadoes in 2011 that killed 24, including three people at Chamblee's rest home, and flooding from Tropical Storm Nicole and Hurricane Irene. Between the floods, drought stunted crops. Nature shapes life here. So does location. North Carolina's Northeast, as the region is marketed by economic developers, is officially 16 counties tucked into that corner of the state, between the ocean and Virginia state line. Currituck, the farthest away, is 190 miles from Raleigh, but miles don't measure how remote the region is from the state's urban centers. "People pretty much forget about us up here," Charlie Knauss says. He's a plant-manager in Elizabeth City. With fewer than 19,000 people, it's the region's biggest town.

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This is a place apart from the rest of the state. Clustered mostly along Albemarle Sound and its tributaries, it's more akin to tidewater Virginia, whence its early settlers came and with which it still has strong commercial and cultural ties. With broad rivers and bays, expanses of field and forest so flat they're hypnotic and dark, verdant blackwater swamps, the region is rich in natural beauty. It's also a land of contrasts. In Hertford, the county just north of Bertie, a steel mill of Rust Belt proportions looms out of nowhere. This is the Cofield plant of Charlotte-based Nucor Corp., the nation's largest steel producer, where 450 employees earn up to $90,000 a year. On Dare County's Outer Banks--a 45-minute drive from Tyrrell County, where one family in three lives in poverty--Shore Realty Inc. in Nags Head maintains a list of more than 30 houses priced over $ 1.5 million. As rich outsiders bid up shrinking stocks of Atlantic seashore, inland counties such as Hertford, Halifax, Martin, Bertie and Washington are shrinking in a different way.

High unemployment is common, at times reaching...