In the late 1890s, self-taught photographer, Hugh Mangum (1877-1922), began riding the rails as an itinerant portraitist, traveling primarily in North Carolina and Virginia. Mangum worked during the rise of the Jim Crow Era, a period in which laws were passed throughout the South to enforce segregation. Despite this, his portraits reveal a clientele that was both racially and economically diverse and show lives marked by notable affluence and hardship, all imbued with a strong sense of individuality and self-creation.