Innholdsfortegnelse for April/May 2020 i Garden & Gun

HISTORY LOVES COMPANY CHARLESTON, SC Glenn Keyes PRESERVING HISTORIC ARCHITECTURE FOR THREE DECADES (AND COUNTING) In 1986, architect Glenn Keyes opened his preservation-focused practice, Glenn Keyes Architects, in Charleston, South Carolina. Since then, Keyes and his team have been behind the preservation of some of the city’s most iconic buildings, from the Charleston City Market to the Nathaniel-Russell House. Today even the skyline bears evidence of his work. What sets Charleston apart from other historic cities? Charleston feels as much like a European city as it gets in America, in large part due to the historic district—it’s the oldest established district in the country. Members of the community have been actively engaged in preservation since the 1920s, and that engagement is only growing with time. Efforts were originally focused on…

CONTRIBUTORS Jon Meacham WRITER After growing up along Missionary Ridge in Chattanooga and passing his college days on the Cumberland Plateau at the University of the South, Jon Meacham spent two decades as a writer and editor in Washington, D.C., and New York City. But like many Southerners, he felt the pull of home. Now based in Nashville, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author has written seven books spanning presidential profiles, the religious faith of the founding fathers, and the ways music has played a role in American history. For “Southern Stand” (p. 36), he returns to a topic close to his heart: the future of the South. “I write about the South for the same reason I respire,” he says. “It’s innate and essential.” Alice Gao PHOTOGRAPHER “I write about the…

INTERVIEW Country Strong WITH HER NEW TV SERIES, THE CHEF VIVIAN HOWARD CONTINUES TO ADVOCATE FOR THE OVERLOOKED SOUTH By Phillip Rhodes PHOTOGRAPHS BY GEOFF WOOD Since famously leaving a career in New York City to return to Kinston, North Carolina, near where her parents had raised tobacco and hogs, to open the restaurant Chef & the Farmer in 2006, Vivian Howard has dedicated herself to preserving the culinary traditions of the place she’d once most wanted to escape: the rural South. In doing so, Howard elevated local ingredients from her pocket of Eastern North Carolina, and the dishes long crafted from them—themes she also celebrated in her award-winning PBS television series, A Chef ’s Life, and best-selling cookbook, Deep Run Roots. Those portraits of country life resonated—droves of fans…

BOOKS Left Behind CNN ANALYST BAKARI SELLERS SHINES A SPOTLIGHT ON THE LONG-IGNORED LIVES OF RURAL AFRICAN AMERICANS By Jonathan Miles The South is an aggregate of many Souths: the Upland South, the Deep South, the Urban South, the Rural South, the vestiges of the Old South, the New South, the Newer New South, and so on. Then there’s what Bakari Sellers calls the “Forgotten South.” Its borders aren’t strictly geographical, though it’s roughly contained inside the so-called Black Belt running through the lowland states and curving up the Eastern Seaboard. Its defining characteristics, instead, are economic and racial. In My Vanishing Country, a memoir-slash-manifesto, Sellers locates its epitome in his hometown of Denmark, South Carolina, a majority African American town of nearly 3,000 devastated by “isolation, lack of economic…

TOOLS “Ta-Da” Dishes THE RIGHT PANS GIVE NEW LIFE TO TREASURED FAMILY RECIPES FOR JELL-O SALADS By Phillip Rhodes Food and prop styling by Charlotte Autry PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHNNY AUTRY Many Southern families have a go-to recipe for congealed salad, probably written on a yellowed index card in a grandmother’s impeccable handwriting. These salads, or their kin, tomato aspic, have been brought to special-occasion tables for at least three generations, maybe more considering that the main ingredient—Jell-O—first came to market just before the dawn of the twentieth century. They’re the Southerner’s version of green bean casserole (created by the Campbell Soup Company in New Jersey, by the way), appearing whenever families gather for a big meal, be it Easter, Thanksgiving, or any other holiday. They’re touchstones in a shared culinary…

WHAT’S IN SEASON Walk This Way A MASTER GARDENER’S FAVORITE, THE WALKING ONION—ZINGY, HARDY, AND SELF-PLANTING—IS RIPE FOR REVIVAL By Jenny Everett ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN BURGOYNE he best way to reach Blackberry Farm’s master gardener, John Coykendall, is to call his wife’s cell phone. “Her business card says, ‘Keeper of the Seed Keeper,’ and that’s accurate,” he says. Seed Keeper is a title Coykendall has aspired to since childhood. He pulled his first potato from the Tennessee dirt at age eleven. A few years later, in 1959, he discovered a tattered copy of a 1913 William Henry Maule seed catalogue, and his garden-guru calling took hold. “I loved gardening and art, and so all of those beautiful illustrations of these varieties, from tomatoes to pumpkins to onions, held a huge…

SOUTHERN STYLE Saving Southern Classics THE TASTEMAKERS WHO ARE CARRYING FORWARD FIVE STYLE ICONS By Wayne Curtis and Haskell Harris Styling by Linden Elstran PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALICE GAO THE COWBOY BOOT MAKERS: Sharon and Duane Little, of Little’s Boot Company LOCALE: San Antonio, Texas Lucien Little started his shoe shop in San Antonio in 1915, and before long he and his son Ben were making boots for ranchers and cowhands. Then a sort of artistic warfare broke out among the premier boot makers in San Antonio as to who could craft the most extravagant designs. Next, the boot collectors showed up, ordering pairs lavished with colorful cacti, thistles, and roses. Four generations later, the Littles are still at it—Lucien’s great-grandchildren Sharon and Duane now run the workshop. There’s a seven-month…

HOMEPLACE Home Is a Wild Heart A RARE CUMBERLAND ISLAND DWELLING SHOWCASES THE WONDERS OF ITS SETTING By CJ Lotz PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALI HARPER After the ferry ride from Fernandina Beach, Florida, and landfall on Cumberland Island, Georgia, and down the dirt road past the stately Greyfield Inn and beneath the live oaks and alongside the feral pony chomping on grass, the house rises from sand. The home the jewelry designer Gogo Ferguson built three decades ago with her husband, David Sayre, rambles, wood and stucco beneath a red tin roof. The couple has filled it to overflowing with memories and the bones of the South’s past—literal animal bones, plus washed-ashore curiosities and antique remnants from the Carnegie family from which Ferguson descends. At the heart of it all is…

№ 03: The Seed Restorer SARAH ROSS The twelve-hundred-acre Wormsloe estate in Savannah, with its maritime oak and longleaf pine forests, has been held by nine generations of the same family since it was first established in the 1730s, as a plantation and an outpost to fend off Spanish invaders. But thanks to the work of Sarah Ross, the president of the Wormsloe Foundation and executive director of the University of Georgia Center for Research and Education at Wormsloe, today the estate supports an astonishing range of interdisciplinary research programs in ecology, environmental engineering, geography, hydrogeology, forestry, landscape design, historic preservation, habitat restoration, archaeology, organic gardening, and heirloom seed saving. Ross had already served as the director of education for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the national education…

№ 08—09—10: The Literary Lights HUB CITY WRITERS PROJECT New York book publishers don’t always do right by the South. Manhattan offices might love a version of the region, sure, because airy beach romances and Appalachian stereotypes sell. But if you’re looking for a publishing house that not only allows but celebrates all the nuance and complexity and curiosity that the South contains, make room on the nightstand for Hub City books. The Spartanburg, South Carolina, independent publishing house, bookshop, and nonprofit trace back to a 1995 conversation among three writers who wanted to preserve the literary tradition of the Carolinas. Twenty-five years later, the focus has expanded to the entire South, and three women helm the whole thing (depicted, from top): executive director Anne Waters; Betsy Teter, a cofounder…

16 17 18/30 — THE TORCHBEARERS AMIR TOURÉ BJ DENNIS SALLIE ANN ROBINSON THREE GUARDIANS OF GULLAH GEECHEE CULTURE ON THE STRUGGLE TO HELP THEIR LOWCOUNTRY TRADITIONS NOT ONLY SURVIVE, BUT THRIVE — Written by LATRIA GRAHAM The Gullah Geechee culture, long vulnerable to time and tide, has found many champions, including Benjamin “BJ” Dennis IV, Sallie Ann Robinson, and Amir Jamal Touré. Each of these experts descended from formerly enslaved Africans who lived on islands along the Southeastern coast. Isolated from the mainland, these communities kept many African traditions and language markers, and the dialects that emerged became known as Gullah, or Geechee, depending on the locale. But the term Gullah Geechee encompasses more than a way of talking—to the descendants, being Gullah Geechee is a way of…

20/30 — THE MUSIC MAKER DARIUS RUCKER — Written by JENNIFER JUSTUS — Photograph by PETER FRANK EDWARDS Peter Frank Edwards/Redux The National Museum of African American Music will open this year in Nashville amid the glow of neon-lit honky-tonks. But given the African roots of country music, such as the introduction of the banjo, the placement makes sense. Music City, after all, gets its moniker not from country alone, but from the history of diverse music made in town, from the Fisk Jubilee Singers to R&B along Jefferson Street to, of course, rock and roll. “There’s music everywhere in Nashville,” says Darius Rucker, who has signed on to be one of the museum’s national chairs. “When you get off the plane, you hear music.” Rucker himself…

23/30 — THE CORAL COMMANDO RUDY REYES — Written by NICK DAVIDSON During three combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, Rudy Reyes—a special forces recon U.S. Marine sergeant and elite combat diver—had executed countless amphibious insertions, jumped from helicopters into open ocean, and swum miles to shore in a heavy pack to infiltrate opposition-held zones. But for all the time he’d spent wet, he had never seen a fish underwater until a friend, Jim Ritterhoff, took him on a weeklong pleasure dive on Grand Cayman in 2015. Civilianized and aimless, Reyes—who had also portrayed himself in Generation Kill, HBO’s fictionalized miniseries about the 2003 invasion of Iraq—had been reeling at the time from post-traumatic stress, depression, and drug and alcohol addiction. But when he was there in the water, held…

25/30 — THE WHALE WATCHER CLAY GEORGE — Written by DAVID Di BENEDETTO — Photographs by PETER FRANK EDWARDS With only about 425 North Atlantic right whales left on the planet, the species faces a dire future. A combination of unprecedented mortality rates and poor calving seasons in recent years led many to predict right whales would be wiped out in a handful of decades. But Clay George and his team are not the types to fold. A wildlife biologist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, George leads a coordinated effort between a spotter plane in the sky (on loan from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, with a crew of spotters from the Clearwater Marine Aquarium in Florida) and boats on the water to survey and sample the highly…

DUE SOUTH WILSON, ARKANSAS SPORTS A NEW SCENE By Nic Brown There was a time when the tiny Delta town of Wilson, Arkansas, was booming so hard that it was ginning more cotton than almost anywhere else in the South, all of its storefronts were being built to resemble an English Tudor village, and the hundreds of employees working its fertile soil were paid in currency printed by Lee Wilson & Co., which created the town itself in 1886. Then the Depression hit, the cotton industry crumbled, and by the turn of the new millennium, the town had become a shell of its earlier self. “The winds, if they blew from the east,” says John Faulkner, Wilson’s former town manager, “would blow the glass out of the windows in the…

DUE SOUTH CLEVELAND, MISSISSIPPI SINGS AGAIN By Caroline Sanders It used to be the classic small-town story: “Growing up here, we spent our whole lives figuring out how to get out,” Cole Ellis says of Cleveland, Mississippi, a Delta hamlet twenty miles east of the Mississippi River. Now Ellis has become something of a prodigal son. The proprietor of Delta Meat Market and a James Beard Award semifinalist, Ellis has been on the forefront of Cleveland’s revival since moving back to his hometown in 2013 and opening the restaurant, known for its Berkshire pork chops, hanger steaks, and kielbasa and grits. Last year he relocated it across the street to the lobby of the new Cotton House hotel, where he also runs the chic rooftop spot Bar Fontaine. “People my…

EDITOR’S LETTER Southern Original LESSONS FROM A PIONEERING WILD SPIRIT—AND AN ISSUE DEDICATED TO THOSE PUSHING THE SOUTH FORWARD DAVID DIBENEDETTO Senior Vice President & Editor in Chief Spend time in South Carolina’s Santee Delta with Phil Wilkinson, and you begin to wonder if his blood runs brown like the Santee River itself. A renowned wildlife biologist, Wilkinson, eighty-six, is a product of place, shaped not only by the elemental forces that combine to create the largest river delta on the Eastern Seaboard, located just north of Charleston, but also by that region’s people. PHOTOGRAPH BY MARGARET HOUSTON Jacqueline Stofsick (book) Wilkinson’s first outdoor mentor was an elderly African American man he called Daddy Ben, who gave him his first coonhound and entrusted the young boy with a lifetime of…

LETTERS “I google ‘ Garden & Gun’ and a town name. Best tour guide around” CHARLESTON’S CHOPS I have been a subscriber ever since I purloined a copy from my doctor’s office many years ago. I was delighted to see your issue on Charleston (February/March 2020) because I have been wanting to jump in the convertible with my wife and come down for a nice long weekend. Your issue will be my guide. Lou Hiers Alpharetta, Georgia Your last issue makes me proud to live in Charleston. I love the heirloom silver at Croghan’s Jewel Box; my personal favorite, the Lowcountry hash browns at Marina Variety Store Restaurant; and even the stiff drinks at Salty Mike’s. Robin Smith Charleston, South Carolina COVER CANINE Dear Human: Thank you…

MUSIC Bringing the Blues A HILL COUNTRY SCION AND A DELTA GUITAR PRODIGY KEEP TRADITIONAL MISSISSIPPI MUSIC HUMMING By Matt Hendrickson PHOTOGRAPHS BY WILLIAM HEREFORD Proud Larry’s is Oxford, Mississippi’s communal living room, where Ole Miss students mingle with professors, writers, and other assorted locals. A restaurant by day and music club by night, it has a warm vibe with a weathered wooden floor that’s probably seen a tanker or two of spilled beer. Not to mention shows from such big names as Elvis Costello, Warren Zevon, the Black Keys, and the North Mississippi Allstars, who were basically the house band for a good chunk of this century’s first decade. And on a dreary Friday afternoon in January, two legends in the making, Cedric Burnside and Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, are…

SPORTING SCENE Against the Wind DEDICATED CHESAPEAKE WATERMEN KEEP THE LAST OF THE SKIPJACK BOATS AFLOAT By Michael Graff PHOTOGRAPHS BY WRAY SINCLAIR Over the course of a Chesapeake Bay waterman’s life, big memories tend to swallow smaller ones. So when seventy-two-year-old Harold “Stoney” Whitelock looks back on his childhood now, it’s all misty images of water and boats, and little else. “That’s all my family talked about at Sunday dinner,” he says. “Boat this and boat that.” Whitelock is one of the bay’s last skipjack captains. Long, shallow wooden boats with tall, wide sails, skip-jacks survive as the only commercial sailing vessels left in North America. The nine or so (by Whitelock’s estimate) still used to dredge for oysters all concentrate here on Maryland’s toothy Eastern Shore, kept afloat…

Fleeting Beauty A lyrical cookbook honors a Louisiana landscape at risk Before cleaning the soft-shell crabs, stirring the oyster bisque, or gathering ingredients for any of the other delightfully Deep South recipes in Mosquito Supper Club: Cajun Recipes from a Disappearing Bayou (Artisan), find a cozy chair and rejoice in the photographer Denny Culbert’s evocative images and the chef Melissa M. Martin’s poetic storytelling. “Louisiana’s coast, a thick, ever-changing blanket of marsh, is disappearing, and our wetlands and bayous are disappearing along with it,” writes Martin, the daughter of a fisherman and granddaughter of oyster farmers. “I want to make sure we put the Cajun food I grew up with and the people responsible for it on record.” Shrimp, oysters, crawfish, or redfish usually grace her Mosquito Supper Club restaurant…

DRINKS One for the Hills MOONSHINE HAS MOVED OUT OF THE JUG AND INTO THE JAR, BUT IT STILL PACKS A PUNCH By Wayne Curtis Food and prop styling by Charlotte Autry PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHNNY AUTRY Drinking vessels tell a story every bit as much as the drink they contain. An expert in antique drinkware once told me that he was offered up a ladleful from what his host described as a colonial-era punch bowl that had been lovingly handed down through generations of a proud Southern family. He accepted the drink with grace. He did not inform the family that what they own is not, in fact, an antique punch bowl, but an antique chamber pot. You will be pleased to know that another historic drinking vessel runs less…

BY JOHN T. EDGE Top of the Morning SIXTY LOCATIONS STRONG AND COUNTING, BISCUITVILLE MAY SOON BE BRINGING A TRADITIONAL TASTE OF THE SOUTH TO A DRIVE-THROUGH NEAR YOU Illustration by Michael Spitz PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOEY SEAWELL Behind a glass wall printed with the slogan HOME OF THE BISCUIT WINDOW, Cynthia Yow mixes flour and buttermilk and shortening in a wide bowl. She wears a white chef jacket and a white hat stitched with the tagline FRESH SOUTHERN. To her right, painted wheat stalks play across a field of corrugated tin. Next to the register, mounted on wallpaper that looks like weathered barnwood, a constellation of icons mark the local and regional sources of the ingredients that come out of this kitchen: Flour from Henderson, North Carolina. Country ham from…

MCKEE PROPERTIES Blue Ridge Magic IN CASHIERS, NORTH CAROLINA, THE IDYLLIC MOUNTAIN LIFESTYLE BECOMES A REALITY As the golden hue of early evening sets in, Cashiers, North Carolina’s Village Green is filled with music. Scattered across the field, attendees spread out blankets, unpacking small bites and bottles of fine wine from their picnic baskets. A cool breeze whispers overhead, mingling with the chatter of neighbors and friends. On the outskirts, folks order cuisine and brews from local vendors while a bluegrass band warms up onstage. The occasion? Cashiers’ outdoor concert series, Groovin’ on the Green, which takes place in the heart of town every Friday night of the summer. The sky above the valley is putting on its own show, turning from pink and gold to silky blue and revealing…

SHOPS The Case for Southern Antiques BROWN FURNITURE NEVER GOES OUT OF VOGUE AT BOONE’S By Logan Ward PHOTOGRAPHS BY PATRICIA LYONS There’s no telling how many road-trippers have exited I-95 near Wilson, North Carolina, and started in on a plate of chopped pork at Parker’s Barbecue without realizing their proximity to another Southern treasure: Boone’s Antiques. A mere half mile from the famous ’cue joint, fronting a lonely stretch of U.S. Route 301, the sixty-five-year-old business occupies a compound of nondescript showrooms and warehouses. The buildings were just as humble during Boone’s heyday, but the hordes of buyers they drew are the stuff of legend. Yes, celebrities dropped by—Michelle Pfeiffer to buy an Oriental rug, Martha Stewart shopping for beds for her Maine house, North Carolina’s own Andy Griffith.…

№ 04: The Lighthouse Keeper ERIC S. MARTIN Just a handful of miles off the southernmost tip of the continental United States, the six Florida Keys reef lighthouses have guarded the world’s third-largest living coral reef since the nineteenth century. Once beacons for sailors, the lights have fallen into disrepair in recent years. Their spindly cast-iron legs extend into the aquamarine water, inviting corrosion and battling the winds and waves of hurricanes. Now, with increased use of GPS and other technology, the Coast Guard has deemed all but one of the lights no longer useful. As each structure goes up for auction, Eric S. Martin and his Florida Keys Reef Lights Foundation have applied for a transfer of ownership, or put in a bid for it. “Saving lighthouses doesn’t have…

06/30 — THE POET of PLACE WENDELL BERRY A CONVERSATION, IN LETTERS, WITH ONE OF THE SOUTH’S MOST VITAL VOICES — Written by SILAS HOUSE — Photograph by GUY MENDES Wendell Berry has been called a prophet and a visionary, but he has about as much use for such lofty praise as he does for screens. He doesn’t own a cell phone or a computer. An essayist, fiction writer, poet, and small-farms advocate, Berry does possess a National Humanities Medal, which President Obama presented him in 2011, as well as a slew of other honors and the adulation of people around the world who admire him not only for his tremendous body of work but also for his activism and uncompromised truth telling. Since his debut in 1960, he has…

№ 11: The Tomato King CRAIG LEHOULLIER In 1990, Craig LeHoullier received a package at his home in Raleigh from Sevierville, Tennessee, containing seeds from an unnamed tomato plant with a fuzzy history. The sender, John D. Green, claimed the tomatoes would be thick, juicy, and a lush bold purple. Green had obtained the seeds from a friend, whose ancestors had gotten them from a local Cherokee tribe more than a hundred years earlier, and passed them to LeHoullier, whom he had learned about through seed swap listings in gardening magazines. “I was skeptical,” LeHoullier says, “but I felt the gravity of the importance of trying this.” Indeed, the tomato grew to a beautiful dusky color and was so delicious that LeHoullier named it the Cherokee Purple and sent seeds…

№ 21: The Maritime Defender KAREN AMSPACHER Storms have marked Karen Amspacher’s family for more than a century. In 1899, hurricanes hounded her great-grandfather William Henry Guthrie off North Carolina’s Shackleford Banks. He floated his tiny home from the old Diamond City fishing village near Cape Lookout across Back Sound to nearby Harkers Island. There, today, his great-granddaughter acts as one of the most stalwart defenders of maritime culture in the state’s Down East region, a marshy peninsula of eastern Carter-et County. Amspacher, who will soon turn sixty-five, has served as executive director of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center on Harkers since 1992. She travels widely as an advocate for working waterfronts and the often tumultuous nexus between natives and newcomers along the North Carolina coast. And…

26/30 — THE LONE RANGER LARRY CALLIES — Written by MATT HENDRICKSON — Photographs by NICK SIMONITE Larry Callies wanted to be a cowboy for as long as he can remember. When he was three years old, his father put him on a horse for the first time, and once he learned to ride, the two began working for Sloan Williams, one of Texas’s largest rodeo stock producers. Along with their ranch duties, the pair traveled all over the state to take part in rodeos. The work was grueling. Callies ran cattle at the white rodeos on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and at the rodeos for blacks on Sundays. “We weren’t allowed to work with the best cattle on Sundays,” he says. “It was the ones no one wanted.” As…

MADISON, GEORGIA PROTECTS ITS HISTORIC CHARMS By Mike Grudowski This is, like, the signaturebuilding in Madison, the signaturehome,” says Christine McCauley Watts, executive director of the Madison-Morgan Conservancy. In Madison, Georgia, a jewel of a town about sixty miles east of Atlanta, that’s no small boast. The house she’s showing off, though, a once-proud 1883 Victorian, is hardly a showpiece at the moment: Flaps of peeling paint dangle from its lofty ceilings. Ancient wallpaper is darkened by soot from a fire that ravaged the five-thousand-square-foot home back in 2001, the last time anyone lived there. Birds nest in its chimneys. But a look beneath the dust and neglect reveals astonishing bones, primed for an epic rebirth. It’s thought that the home’s builders took aesthetic cues from “House Beautiful”–themed lectures Oscar…

15 MINUTES AWAY Tucked in an old mule barn in Merigold, Mississippi, just north of Cleveland, McCarty’s Pottery has garnered worldwide acclaim since the 1950s. As legend has it, William Faulkner allowed its late founders, Lee and Pup McCarty, to use a clay deposit on his Rowan Oak property in Oxford. Now the McCartys’ godsons carry on the tradition of making pitchers, platters, and vases with native clays. Stop in Tuesdays through Saturdays to browse before exploring the azalea-draped gardens out back.…

Building a Southern Music Canon MerleFest artists share the songs that make the South sing By Dacey Orr Sivewright “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” By Flatt & Scruggs “The banjo tune that set the standard for an entire generation of pickers.” —Sam Bush, Grammy-winning mandolinist “Black Mountain Rag” By Doc Watson “It’s a Doc Watson staple. Nobody can touch him when it comes to this kind of pickin’.” —Billy Strings, bluegrass guitarist “Mississippi Goddam” By Nina Simone “Born and raised in North Carolina, Simone encapsulates the struggle of the black Southerner. Her vocals and lyrics are frank and matter-of-fact, intertwining seamlessly with the show-tune piano underneath.” —Amythyst Kiah, singer-songwriter “Georgia on My Mind” By Ray Charles “An account of longing for the South, a place where the author dreams of returning. The…

A Wildly Good Book Wading deeper into the Santee Delta If Phil Wilkinson and the Santee are topics you’d like to explore further, I highly recommend Seven Days on the Santee Delta (Evening Post Books, $60). Coauthored by John Lane, the recently released book, framed as seven separate adventures through the Delta, follows Wilkinson as he visits places that shaped him and his career. A talented photographer, Wilkinson also contributes a wealth of images he’s taken along the way. It’s the next best thing to roaming around the Delta with the biologist himself.…

Social Chatter GARDENANDGUN.COM AND BEYOND WE ASKED... Who Newt? A recent gardenandgun.com report on a newly discovered species, the Hickory Nut Gorge green salamander, in Western North Carolina, has people talking about amphibians—and the hope they bring for the future of Southern wildlife. Humans think we’ve seen it all when really, we haven’t even scratched the surface. David Nye Check out those amazing colors! @pickersue_ We see salamanders frequently at our North Carolina home. We’ll have to be on the lookout for this cute fella. @gryphonestate silver Do not care to meet it face-to-face. Lynn Hawkins When I was a little girl, I would go down to the branch and dig up salamanders all the time. Brought back so many memories of our old homeplace. @_alexisjackson Love when a new…

ANATOMY OF A CLASSIC Other Fish in the Sea A HOUSTON COUPLE SHARES A VERSATILE RECIPE THAT WORKS FOR THE CATCH—OR BYCATCH—OF ANY DAY By Kim Severson Southern cooks barely tap into all the great eating that is swimming out there in our seas and streams. Atlantic bearded brotula, ribbonfish, and oyster drills rarely if ever make it to the supper table. “There isn’t a whole lot of seafood from Southern waters you can find at the retail level, which is really too bad,” says PJ Stoops, who along with his wife, Benchalak Srimart Stoops, last year published Texas Seafood: A Cookbook and Comprehensive Guide. “A lot of times it just comes down to catching it yourself or hoping you have a friend who likes to fish.” Most anyone who…

Biscuit Survivor The classic pleasures of Dude’s Jimmy and Dinki Davis, the husband-and-wife owners of Dude’s Hot Biscuits in Brookhaven, Mississippi, open the doors at four in the morning every day but Sunday. If you hunt in south-central Mississippi, you fuel up at Dude’s on buck-eighty-nine homemade biscuits stuffed with sausage, or flaky one-dollar butter biscuits that taste of buttermilk and flour and not much else. Flanked by a pine tree and a pair of picnic tables, Dude’s was once part of a five-location local chain, of which this cinder-block takeaway on Highway 51 is the last standing. Pros order cups of gravy for dunking. —J.T.E.…

02/30 — THE QUAIL DOCTOR RONALD KENDALL — Written by MIKE GRUDOWSKI I’m hopeful and encouraged and excited by what I’ve seen,” says Ronald Kendall, a professor of environmental toxicology and head of the Wildlife Toxicology Laboratory at Texas Tech University. This may sound like a stretch for someone as preoccupied with bobwhite quail as he is. The last fifty years have not been kind to that iconic Southern game bird, which concerned observers call “the canary of the prairie”; in that span, Kendall says, the species has endured “the collapse of most of its original native range.” Even in the Rolling Plains of Texas, more than twenty million acres in the state’s western grasslands that remain a relative stronghold of bobwhite habitat, “the booms are less a boom,…

05/30 — THE AGRARIAN EVANGELIST CINDY AYERS ELLIOTT Ten years ago, Cindy Ayers Elliott was no farmer. “I’d never grown anything in my life except for flowers, and even those were plastic,” she says with a laugh. Now the Mississippi native and former New York investment banker runs Foot Print Farms on sixty-eight acres in Jackson, Mississippi. There, she uses USDA techniques, programs, and policies in her quest to help combat the state’s soaring rates of obesity and diabetes by getting healthy food on local tables and educating other would-be farmers in the process. She started with raised beds of cherry tomatoes on a tennis court—now dubbed the Serena Williams Tennis Garden—and has transformed her land into a full-fledged farm that rears goats, herbs, fruits, and vegetables as typical as…

№ 07: The Accent Advocate WALT WOLFRAM If you wonder why residents of Ocracoke Island began referring to vacationers as “dingbatters” around 1972, Walt Wolfram can help (the answer: thank All in the Family). He can explain why someone who grew up in North Carolina’s western mountains might say, “Anymore we drink a lot of coffee”; he can identify a member of the Lumbee tribe just by hearing him speak; he knows why a person in Greensboro is more likely to pronounce “well” as “whale” than someone in Charlotte. A longtime professor of sociolinguistics at North Carolina State University, Wolfram often calls the state “dialect heaven,” and he’s been researching, celebrating, and helping preserve distinctive speech patterns there and elsewhere for decades. “Dialects, if they’re alive, are always changing and…

15/30 — THE FIREBRAND FRANKLIN D. VAGNONE — Written by WAYNE CURTIS When Franklin D. Vagnone coauthored Anarchist’s Guide to Historic House Museums in 2015, he essentially tossed a small bomb into the staid, hands-off world of historic homes. Instead of keeping visitors behind a rope as they peered into a curated tableau, he wanted to invite them in and let them explore and touch and ask uncomfortable questions. Replacing “look” with “experience” was his way of creating relevance at historic properties, many of which have suffered from declining funding and attendance. “I was frustrated by the inability of these sites to innovate and move outside what is really a 1930s-to-1950s interpretive model,” says Vagnone, who grew up in Charlotte and previously headed historic site groups in Philadelphia and New…

№ 22: The Teacher DOUG NASELROAD In Hindman, Kentucky, one of the poorest areas in the eastern part of the state, and a community ravaged by opiate addiction, hope comes with strings attached—for guitars, mandolins, and dulcimers. That’s thanks to Doug Naselroad and Culture of Recovery. In 2012, Naselroad became the Appalachian Artisan Center’s Master Artist in Residence in woodworking, and shortly thereafter, he created the Appalachian School of Luthiery there. Soon, he received a phone call. The man on the phone, Earl Moore, told him that he needed a luthier. “I’m like, who in the world needs a luthier?” Naselroad recalls with a laugh. Moore, a recovering addict and an ex-felon, was looking for something to occupy his time. He ended up apprenticing with Naselroad for six years and…

24/30 — THE PRESERVATIONIST LAUREN NORTHUP THE HISTORIC CHARLESTON FOUNDATION’S DIRECTOR OF MUSEUMS BRINGS TO LIGHT THE LIVES OF THE ENSLAVED — Written by JOHN KESSLER Lauren Northup was sitting in her of- fice, on the second floor of an outbuilding of Charleston, South Carolina’s historic Nathaniel Russell House Museum, when a ray of sunshine beamed through a two-hundred-year-old window at her side and settled on the office door. The door was ajar at just the right angle to reveal a hidden secret: Beneath its layers of glossy white acrylic paint, the surface looked just uneven enough to suggest hand-planed planks. Could this door be original? North-up wondered. And if so, what else here was? The two-story, twelve-hundred-square-foot structure had played many roles over its history—a gift shop, a tenement…

10 MINUTES AWAY “Calm down!” That, says innkeeper Crystal Johnson, is the operating principle behind the Farmhouse Inn at Hundred Acre Farm, just east of downtown Madison. A native of Hong Kong, Johnson and her husband, Ellis, oversee a haven of woods, pastures, and ponds surrounding a solar-powered bed-and-breakfast and a menagerie of goats, peacocks, and chickens guarded by two massive Great Pyrenees. The property fronts the Apalachee River and Lake Oconee, and overnight guests and day-trippers alike can unwind along the nation’s first certified “forest therapy” trail.…