Southern Stories
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.
Southern Stories
Essays, history, and the people who make the South home.
Latest in Southern Stories
Southern Stories
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.
Southern Stories
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.
More in Southern Stories
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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.