Southern Comfort

I realized after my last couple of posts, someone could get the impression that I had a miserable time in The South. Nothing could be further from the truth. I had a great time and found many things to like and love about the places I went. So, for the sake of accuracy, I have compiled a list of things I enjoyed about The South.

1. Friendliness
Having grown up in an area of Pennsylvania where the locals can most charitably be described as reticent, I appreciated the general atmosphere of friendliness in The South. People were helpful and sweet and willing to just have a nice chat with a stranger.

Even the mules are friendly in the South.

2. Their accents
As I stated in my previous post, I have always wanted to say "y'all" naturally. I seriously envy those who can.

3. Barbeque
I love barbeque. I also have no idea what the difference between good barbeque and bad barbeque is. Trying to find restaurants, people would tell me the barbeque someplace was decent, but when I ate there, it would taste amazing. Because of this, I ate more barbeque in a five day period than I usually do in six months. 

4. Fireworks stores
Fireworks are illegal in Pennsylvania, but vendors in Pennsylvania can sell fireworks to people in New Jersey, even though fireworks are also illegal in New Jersey (ah, the beauty of a country of laws). I say this to make it clear I have seen fireworks warehouses before. I have bought fireworks in a fireworks warehouse before.

If you love fireworks (and if you don't, you really don't know what you're missing), go south. I saw more billboards and stores related to fireworks in five days in the south than the rest of my life put together. Not only was there a heavy concentration, each place was big, usually about the size of a small airplane hangar. My excitement never dwindled with each sighting, so now about 10% of our pictures from the trip are of fireworks warehouses.

Sadly, none of those pictures were actually good.

5. The insane concentration of historical markers
Anyone who has read this blog has probably figured out that I'm a massive history nerd. When I see a historical marker, I get excited. I soon learned being a history lover in the South was like being wine lover in Napa. In Charles City, Virginia I saw four markers within ten feet of each other. The sight was so overwhelming, I almost swooned, or at least let out an undignified squeal of excitement.

I was almost run over in the process of getting this picture.
It was worth it.

6. The opportunity to finally experience song geography

As a music lover and college radio DJ, I love me a theme playlist. My southern tour gave me my best opportunity yet to indulge in my propensity for geographically themed songs. Carolina in My Mind, Sweet Home Alabama, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down (both versions!), and basically every Pretty Girl song were all played at some point. However, my proudest accomplishment was the realization that there is a geographical error in the song Wagon Wheel by Old Crow Medicine Show: Johnson City is actually to the east of the Cumberland Gap. 

The Night I Drove Down to Old Dixie (Part Two)

You can read Part One here.


After a pleasant sojourn through Tennessee, we were on our way to Georgia. Our route was supposed to take us across the Tennessee-Georgia border, coming within two miles of the Alabama border without actually crossing into Alabama. This was unacceptable to my father and me, but for totally different reasons. He wanted to check another state off the states he has visited; I wanted to confirm Alabama in fact existed.


Several years ago, I got it into my head that Alabama had ceased to exist sometime in the mid-1990s. I had just finished reading To Kill a Mockingbird for the second time and realized I didn't know anyone from Alabama and I hadn't heard of anyone or anything coming out of Alabama in the past 15 years (this was before I knew anything about college football). Somehow, my lack of exposure to the people and culture of Alabama convinced me that it had, in fact, been swept out to sea sometime around 1995, and the people of Mississippi couldn't bring themselves to tell the rest of the country.

Definitive proof of the existence of Alabama

As we approached the border, my level of excitement mounted to ridiculous levels. In a moment of frenzied glee, I started playing "Sweet Home Alabama" as we finally entered Alabama, and didn't turn it off until we left five minutes later. 


In Georgia, we stopped by a few historic sites near the town of Dalton. My great-great grandfather who fought in the Civil War was wounded there, and it was really cool to see the house where he recovered as well as the site of the battle where he was shot. 

House that used to double as the Union hospital
Dalton, GA

On our way back home, we stopped by the Jamestown National Historic Site. We had arrived just in time for the 105 degree heat (120 degree heat index!). This was made even worse by the fact that Jamestown was built on a swamp, so the added humidity made it almost unbearable.

The staff at Historic Jamestown warn us about the heat

Luckily, the site was interesting enough to make up for the weather. The area where the fort once stood is surrounded by a replica of the original fence. Archaeologists are still working on the site to uncover new artifacts to analyze, which are housed in a museum located just beyond the fort itself. There were more monuments than I ever would have imagined, including statues of John Smith and Pocahontas, looking a little different from their Disney counterparts.

Jamestown was the perfect end to an amazing trip because it brought everything right back to the beginning. With the benefit of history, Jamestown is a historic place full of meaning and purpose, but at the time, the colonists could not have known how important their struggle to survive would be. 

Presidential House Retrospective: A Pennsylvania Yankee in King Andrew's Court

If James Monroe is Bill Pullman in Sleepless in Seattle, then Andrew Jackson is Clint Eastwood, specifically Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. He’s mean, he’s tough, he doesn’t suffer fools, he’s really unstable, and yet you kind of like him. Intellectually, I realize that Andrew Jackson had a lot of unsavory qualities and made many damaging decisions, but I can’t help but admire many aspects of his personality.

By the age of fourteen he was already orphaned and in the militia during the Revolutionary War. He was captured by the British and ordered to clean a British commander’s boots, and his refusal won him a saber slash to the forehead. Thus began Andrew Jackson’s intense hatred of the British, which would spur him on to major victories against the British during the War of 1812. His campaigns during the war also demonstrated his undeniable leadership ability. During the Battle of New Orleans, Jackson led a ragtag group of militia men and pirates to victory against superior British forces. Getting this group of misfits not to kill each other would have been impressive; leading them to victory is almost miraculous.

Andrew Jackson continued to live a miraculous life-- miraculous in that it was a miracle he survived it. In a time when a toothache could kill you, Jackson survived a slew of incidents that would have easily ended in death for almost anyone else. Many of these near death experiences stemmed from problems in his love-life. When Jackson fell in love with and married a young divorcee named Rachel Robards, it later turned out she wasn’t quite as divorced as she had thought. At the time, only a man could petition for divorce, so Rachel had to rely on her estranged, jealous husband to grant her a divorce. Everything eventually got sorted out, but the damage was done. When a man named Charles Dickinson published some unsavory comments about Mrs. Jackson in a newspaper and finished his statement with a challenge to a duel, Jackson accepted, despite knowing Dickinson was a deadly shot. Jackson let Dickinson shoot first, and took a bullet to the chest that could never be removed because it was too close to his heart. He then raised his pistol, aimed, and fired, shooting Dickinson dead. All told, Jackson engaged in as many as 44 duels over his lifetime. In his old age, he quipped that he “rattled like a bag of marbles.”

I can’t help but admire that sort of toughness, so I was excited to visit The Hermitage, his home for over 40 years. We arrived in Nashville on a sweltering midsummer day. Even with the almost unbearable heat the visitor center was crawling with people. Walking into his stately plantation, I expected to enter an inner sanctum of machismo. Surely the house would positively reek of the tough life of our illustrious seventh president.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. The walls were covered in narrative wallpaper based on classical myths which the tour guides assured us was authentic multiple times. While I can appreciate this as a feat of historic preservation, the Hermitage was home to the second most horrifying wallpaper I have ever seen (first place goes to a home in historic Deerfield, MA that depicted the death of Captain Cook at the hands of Hawaiian cannibals. Seriously.) A vast majority of the items in the house were original, which the tour guides are very proud of, as well they should be.

The house was large, spacious, and quite feminine. This was no doubt the influence of his daughter-in-law, whose tastes ran towards the expensive. Jackson and his wife adopted three children: Andrew Jackson, Jr., the the son of her sister (his twin stayed with his birth parents), a Native American boy named Theodore about whom little is known, and an orphaned Creek boy with the best name ever, Lyncoya Jackson. He also served as the guardian to eight other children. I never thought of Jackson as a family man, but standing in the Hermitage, you can imagine the laughter of children sailing in from the backyard.

The most affecting part of the tour was Rachel Jackson’s grave, which is located in the garden next to the house. She died a short time before Jackson’s inauguration, and he believed she was killed by the stress of a messy campaign which prominently featured her checkered past. On her tombstone is a epitaph written by Jackson: "Her face was fair, her person pleasing, her temper amiable, and her heart kind. She delighted in relieving the wants of her fellow-creatures,and cultivated that divine pleasure by the most liberal and unpretending methods. To the poor she was a benefactress; to the rich she was an example; to the wretched a comforter; to the prosperous an ornament. Her pity went hand in hand with her benevolence; and she thanked her Creator for being able to do good. A being so gentle and so virtuous, slander might wound but could not dishonor. Even death, when he tore her from the arms of her husband, could but transplant her to the bosom of her God.”

I tend to think of Andrew Jackson as a wild man who lived a rough and tumble life, but The Hermitage showed his gentler side. Jackson may have been capable of extreme violence, but he was also capable of deep love. He may have been known as a dominating presidential personality, but when it came to decorating his home, he deferred to the judgment of the women in his life. Still, I wonder sometimes whether he was tempted to shoot the wallpaper right off the walls.