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.