Southern Stories
The Best Southern Thing We Saw This Week: Friday Night Lights
A small-town high school football game, where the whole town shows up under the lights and remembers, for a few hours, that it is one thing.
Southern Stories
Essays, history, and the people who make the South home.
Latest in Southern Stories
Southern Stories
The Front Porch, Part Two: On the Art of Sitting a Spell
We wrote once about why the South built porches. This is about what people did on them: the lost art of sitting, watching, and letting the evening pass.
Southern Stories
The Courthouse Square, and the Town That Grew Around It
In a thousand Southern towns, everything points to the same place: the courthouse on the square. Here is why it was built that way, and why it still holds.
More in Southern Stories
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The Last of the Whole-Hog Pitmasters Cooking a whole pig over wood coals from dark to dawn is one of the oldest crafts in the South, and one of the fastest disappearing. -
The Last of the Water-Powered Mills A creek, a wheel, and two stones once ground a community's cornmeal. A few of those mills still turn, and the meal they make tastes like nothing from a bag. -
The Sweetgrass Basket Makers of the Lowcountry A craft carried across an ocean and kept alive for three hundred years, coiled one blade of grass at a time. -
The Last of the Shrimp Boats The boats still go out before light, but there are fewer of them every year, and the men who run them know exactly what is being lost. -
The Best Southern Thing We Saw This Week: The Hardware Store That Never Closed An old downtown hardware store with creaking floors and a man who can find a single hinge in a drawer without looking. A quietly hopeful place. -
The Best Southern Thing We Saw This Week: A Small-Town Theater Lights Up Again A small-town marquee comes on again after years of dark, and a town decides the place where it once gathered is worth gathering in again. -
The Quilts of Gee's Bend In an isolated bend of the Alabama River, generations of women turned worn work clothes into art that now hangs in the world's great museums. -
In Defense of the Front Porch Before air conditioning, the porch was where the South did its living, from Charleston's piazzas to Natchez's galleries. On reclaiming what we left behind.