99 Fun Facts About Southern

Which boundary, surveyed in the 1760s between Pennsylvania and Maryland, became shorthand for the divide between North and South?

The Mason-Dixon line was run from 1763 to 1767 by English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon to end a long border quarrel between the two colonies; decades later it came to divide free states from slave states.

Which city was the largest in the American South by population in the 2020 census?

Houston counted about 2.3 million residents in 2020, ahead of San Antonio and Dallas; Atlanta, for all its fame, had fewer than half a million people inside its city limits.

Which Southern nickname did H. L. Mencken claim to have coined?

The Bible Belt has been traced to a 1920s newspaper column by Mencken, the Baltimore journalist who went to Tennessee in 1925 to cover the Scopes 'Monkey Trial' and mock the anti-evolution side.

Which is the only state that lies entirely within Appalachia?

West Virginia has all 55 of its counties inside the Appalachian Regional Commission's map, which runs from southern New York to northern Mississippi; the state was born in 1863 after pro-Union western Virginians rejected secession.

The Okefenokee Swamp straddles the border of Georgia and which state?

Florida holds the swamp's southern edge; the Okefenokee's dark water feeds two rivers that rise in it, the Suwannee, which runs to the Gulf, and the St. Marys, which forms part of the state line with Georgia.

Which song, first performed by a minstrel troupe in New York in 1859, became the Confederacy's unofficial anthem?

Dixie is usually credited to Ohio-born Dan Emmett of Bryant's Minstrels, and Abraham Lincoln loved it: the day after Lee's surrender he had a band play it for a White House crowd, saying the Union had fairly captured it.

Coca-Cola was first sold in May 1886, at five cents a glass, in which kind of Atlanta business?

A pharmacy: drugstore soda fountains were in fashion because fizzy water was thought good for the health, and Jacobs' Pharmacy sold the new syrup mixed with it as one more tonic.

By Coca-Cola's own account, why did Frank Robinson want two Cs in the drink's name?

They'd look good in ads: the company says John Pemberton's bookkeeper thought 'the two Cs would look well in advertising', then penned the script logo himself; Robinson's own account was that the name was euphonious.

Which Kentucky cave system, protected as a national park, is the longest known in the world?

Mammoth Cave has more than 400 miles of mapped passages, and explorers say there is no end in sight; in 1972 cavers linked it to the even longer Flint Ridge caves next door, making one giant system.

Which federal agency informally reads the 'Waffle House Index' to judge how hard a storm has hit?

FEMA picked the idea up from its chief Craig Fugate, who coined the index: the chain so rarely closes that a shut Waffle House tells responders the damage is really bad.

Which food did South Carolina name its official state snack in 2006?

Boiled peanuts became South Carolina's official snack food in a law careful to add that no school need serve peanuts to students with food allergies.

Housekeeping in Old Virginia, an 1870s cookbook, holds the oldest known recipe for which iconic Southern drink?

Sweet tea in Marion Cabell Tyree's recipe was brewed from green tea and sugared in the glass, a quarter-century before the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair that is often wrongly credited with inventing iced tea.

Which soft drink is traditionally paired with a Moon Pie as the 'working man's lunch'?

RC Cola and a Moon Pie each cost a nickel in the Depression and came in bigger servings than their rivals, the likeliest reason the ten-cent pair became the 'working man's lunch'; Big Bill Lister sang about it in the 1950s.

Pimento cheese, the 'pâté of the South', is famously served as a sandwich at which sporting event?

The Masters Tournament has sold the sandwich for decades, yet the spread was born up North: an early recipe in a 1908 issue of Good Housekeeping called for cream cheese and minced pimentos.

North Alabama's distinctive 'white' barbecue sauce is built on which base?

Mayonnaise is the base of the white sauce Big Bob Gibson created in Decatur in 1925, sharpened with cider vinegar and black pepper; it began as a dressing for smoked chicken and has since spread to pork.

The mustard-based 'Carolina Gold' barbecue sauce is usually traced to which 18th-century arrivals?

German settlers were drawn to the Midlands around Columbia by colonial land grants, and that is still where the yellow mustard sauce rules; in the Pee Dee to the northeast, pitmasters keep to vinegar and hot pepper.

By law, bourbon must be made from a grain mixture that is at least 51% which grain?

Corn must make up at least 51% of the mash, and the whiskey must age in charred new oak barrels; since each barrel can be used only once, retired ones move on to other jobs, such as aging Tabasco's pepper mash.

Where does federal law allow bourbon to be made?

Anywhere in the US will do, so long as the recipe and barrel rules are met; Kentucky's distillers nonetheless count about 95% of the world's supply as their own.

Which nut grows on the official state tree of Texas?

Pecan trees were feeding people long before Texas honored them in 1919: Native Americans gathered the wild nuts as a staple and made a milky drink from them.

Tabasco sauce is made on Avery Island in Louisiana, which is actually what kind of geological feature?

A salt dome: Native Americans boiled the island's briny springs for salt long before Edmund McIlhenny first made his pepper sauce there in 1868.

Dr Pepper was created in the 1880s by Charles Alderton in which Texas city?

Waco was briefly the drink's name too: fountain patrons would ask for a 'Waco' before owner Wade Morrison named it, and Alderton left the drink for Morrison to build into a business.

Which chain's first franchise opened in Utah in 1952, far from its founder's roadside café in the South?

KFC's first franchisee was Salt Lake restaurateur Pete Harman, whose sign painter suggested the name Kentucky Fried Chicken; Harman also gave the chain its bucket, after filling a surplus batch with chicken.

As the story goes, why did Vernon Rudolph open the first Krispy Kreme in Winston-Salem?

His favorite cigarettes were made there: Rudolph is said to have bet on the town after learning Camel was based in Winston-Salem; once there, he cut a hole in his bakery wall to sell hot doughnuts straight to passers-by.

Which roadside chain began in 1969 as a plan to sell more Shell gasoline?

Cracker Barrel's first store, outside Lebanon, Tennessee, had gas pumps out front, as did every early location; when the fuel shortages of the 1970s hit, the chain began building without them and kept the country cooking.

Piggly Wiggly, which opened in Memphis in 1916, won fame as a grocery store that did what?

Let customers serve themselves: in most groceries of the day a clerk fetched every item on a shopper's list. Clarence Saunders made a fortune from the idea, then lost it all trying to corner Piggly Wiggly's stock.

The Southern pronoun 'y'all' fills which gap in standard English?

Plural 'you' is the form standard English lacks, since 'you' serves for one person or many; the South fills the gap with y'all, short for 'you all', as other regions do with 'you guys' or 'you-uns'.

Stock car racing, and eventually NASCAR, grew out of which illegal Prohibition-era trade?

Running bootleg whiskey took ordinary-looking Ford coupes with souped-up engines that could outrun government agents; the drivers took to racing one another, and Bill France organized them into NASCAR.

The Grand Ole Opry began in 1925 as a radio program under what name?

WSM Barn Dance got its lasting name in 1927, when announcer George D. Hay followed a program of classical music by saying listeners had heard Grand Opera and would now hear 'the Grand Ole Opry'.

Which city on the Tennessee-Virginia line has Congress recognized as the 'Birthplace of Country Music'?

Bristol, Tennessee, housed Ralph Peer's makeshift studio in 1927, where the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers made their first records; the sessions are often called the 'big bang' of country music.

Jazz originated in the African-American communities of which Southern city?

New Orleans mixed brass-band marches and ragtime into the new music, which grew up in everyday city life: bands played for funerals, picnics, ball games and neighborhood dances.

Which Tennessee theme park took its present name in 1986, when a country star became a co-owner?

Dollywood had already been Rebel Railroad, Goldrush Junction and Silver Dollar City when Dolly Parton joined its owners, the Herschends; she said she wanted to bring jobs to the mountain country where she grew up.

Elvis Presley was born in which Mississippi town before his family moved to Memphis?

Tupelo heard him first: at ten, Elvis stood on a chair to reach the microphone at a local fair and sang 'Old Shep', a ballad about a dying dog. The struggling family left for Memphis in 1948.

Which Alabama city is home to the headquarters of the Southeastern Conference (SEC)?

Birmingham houses the league office; the SEC was born in 1932, when 13 schools broke away from the sprawling Southern Conference, and ten of those founders are still members.

What is the traditional drink of the Kentucky Derby?

A mint julep comes in a keepsake glass thanks to light-fingered racegoers: in 1938 so many guests took home the track's water glasses that Churchill Downs has produced an official souvenir glass ever since.

Which Gulf Coast city, then the capital of French Louisiana, claims America's oldest Carnival celebration, begun in 1703?

Mobile, Alabama, went on shaping Carnival: by the 1850s several members of its Cowbellion de Rakin Society had moved west along the coast, where a new parading club, the Mistick Krewe of Comus, took them as its model.

Which cash crop, first grown by John Rolfe around 1612, turned struggling Jamestown into a money-maker?

Tobacco saved the colony: John Rolfe, who went on to marry Pocahontas, swapped the bitter local leaf for a sweeter Caribbean strain and gave Virginia its first export worth shipping.

Which city was the first Confederate capital, before the government moved to Richmond?

Montgomery, Alabama, held the title for less than four months in 1861; once Virginia joined the Confederacy, the government moved to Richmond, a larger and more developed city.

Wilmer McLean left Manassas to escape the war, only for Lee to surrender in his parlor in which village?

Appomattox Court House was meant to be McLean's refuge after the First Battle of Bull Run swept over his farm; once the surrender was signed, Union officers carried off his parlor furniture as souvenirs.

Which Army division did Eisenhower send to escort the Little Rock Nine in 1957?

101st Airborne paratroopers walked the nine students into Central High; Eisenhower also federalized the Arkansas National Guard, the very force Governor Orval Faubus had used to keep them out.

'Bloody Sunday' in March 1965 took its name from an attack on voting-rights marchers crossing which Southern bridge?

Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, is named for a Confederate general and Klan leader; the attack on some 600 marchers there shocked the country, and the Voting Rights Act was signed less than five months later.

Four of the first five U.S. presidents were Virginians; which one came from Massachusetts?

John Adams of Massachusetts was the odd man out, and the only one of the five voted out after a single term; Virginia's eight native sons in the White House earned it the nickname 'Mother of Presidents'.

Jimmy Carter was born in 1924 in which small Georgia town, where he later ran the family farm?

Plains pulled him back twice: Carter gave up a Navy submarine career to run the family peanut farm after his father died, and he came home to live there again once he left the White House.

Which Mississippi writer invented Yoknapatawpha County as the setting for most of his novels?

William Faulkner called it 'my apocryphal county' and modeled it on Lafayette County around Oxford, his home from boyhood; in the novels the town itself goes by the name Jefferson.

Which future writer was Harper Lee's childhood friend in Monroeville, Alabama?

Truman Capote is widely seen as the model for Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird; in 1959 Lee went with him to Kansas to help research In Cold Blood.

Flannery O'Connor famously raised a flock of which birds at her Georgia farm, Andalusia?

Peafowl roamed Andalusia, the family farm near Milledgeville where lupus forced her home in 1951; she tended the growing flock between stories and wrote about the birds in an essay, 'The King of the Birds'.

Which 1991 film turned nearly deserted Juliette, Georgia, into a tourist stop with its Whistle Stop Cafe?

Fried Green Tomatoes dressed a former hardware store there as its cafe; after the film came out, townspeople reopened the building as a working Whistle Stop Cafe for the visitors who kept arriving.

Which Southern staple does St. George, South Carolina, celebrate with a yearly world festival?

Grits earned St. George its World Grits Festival in 1986: salesmen kept remarking how much the small town ordered, and by a local grocer's reckoning it ate more grits per person than anywhere else in the world.

What makes Vidalia onions from Georgia so unusually sweet?

Low sulfur in the local soil keeps the onions mild, because sulfur is what makes an onion pungent; a 1986 state law reserves the Vidalia name for onions grown in twenty Georgia counties.

Which Southern track, at 2.66 miles, is the longest oval NASCAR races on?

Talladega Superspeedway proved almost too fast: after Bill Elliott qualified at 212.809 mph and a crash tore into the catch fence in 1987, NASCAR choked engine power there, which bunches the field into huge packs.

The Louisiana-born restaurant chain Popeyes, founded in 1972, was named after a detective in which film?

The French Connection supplied the name: founder Al Copeland said he took it from Gene Hackman's detective Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle, not from the spinach-eating sailor.

Lynyrd Skynyrd took its name from Leonard Skinner, who held which job at the band members' Jacksonville high school?

Gym teacher Leonard Skinner strictly enforced the school's rule against long hair on boys, so the name was a mocking tribute. He later let the band use a photo of his realty sign inside an album.

Which Nashville specialty is said to have begun as a girlfriend's breakfast revenge on womanizer Thornton Prince?

Hot chicken backfired as a punishment: Prince liked the pepper-laden fried bird so much that he and his brothers opened a cafe to sell it. His family's Prince's Hot Chicken Shack carries on the recipe.

Which retail giant grew from a single discount store opened in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962?

Walmart was founded by brothers Sam and Bud Walton, and its headquarters never strayed far: the company is run from neighboring Bentonville.

Spanish moss, the gray plant draping Southern live oaks, belongs to the same plant family as which fruit?

Pineapple is its cousin: Spanish moss is a bromeliad, neither a true moss nor native to Spain. It is an epiphyte, growing on tree limbs without rooting in soil.

Louisiana's 64 county-level divisions go by which name, a holdover from French and Spanish colonial rule?

Parishes followed the old Catholic church boundaries: when the territory was first carved into counties in 1805, the lines largely matched the colonial church districts, and the older name won out.

Which Asian plant, once grown to shade Southern porches, earned the nickname the vine that ate the South?

Kudzu takes its name from kuzu, the Japanese word for the plant. Left unchecked it swallows whole trees and buildings, which is how the nickname stuck.

Which writer's Key West home, now a museum, is roamed by dozens of six-toed cats that bear his name?

Ernest Hemingway, the story goes, was given a six-toed cat named Snow White by a ship's captain. Cats with extra toes are widely nicknamed after him, and about half of the museum's residents have them.

Which theme park chain, whose first park opened near Dallas in 1961, is named for the nations that have ruled Texas?

Six Flags counts Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the Confederacy and the United States. The original park in Arlington was the project of real estate developer Angus Wynne.

Which citrus soda did Knoxville bottlers Barney and Ally Hartman create in the 1940s as a mixer for whiskey?

Mountain Dew was born because the brothers could not find their favorite lemon-lime mixer for bourbon. Early labels showed a barefoot mountaineer with a rifle and a moonshine jug.

Juneteenth marks the day in 1865 when a Union general announced the end of slavery in which Texas port city?

Galveston heard Major General Gordon Granger's order on June 19, which is why the holiday's name blends June and nineteenth. Freed people and their descendants later made pilgrimages back to the island city.

Which island stronghold in Charleston Harbor did Confederate guns bombard in April 1861, opening the Civil War?

Fort Sumter saw the war's first military deaths only after the shooting stopped: a spark during the surrender's cannon salute blew up a pile of cartridges and mortally wounded two privates.

Which seamstress's 1955 arrest for keeping her bus seat set off a 381-day boycott in Alabama's capital?

Rosa Parks was not the first to refuse: 15-year-old Claudette Colvin had been arrested for the same act nine months earlier. The boycott ended once bus segregation was ruled unconstitutional.

Which Outer Banks town is famously tied to the Wright brothers' first powered airplane flights of December 1903?

Kitty Hawk was where the Wrights had been testing gliders since 1900. The four flights of December 17 actually left from a spot about four miles south, now part of the town of Kill Devil Hills.

At which chain's Greensboro lunch counter did four Black college students begin a famous sit-in in February 1960?

Woolworth's gave in that July, when four of the store's own Black employees became the first to be served at the counter. The Greensboro store later became a civil rights museum.

Which Texas Revolution site in San Antonio fell to Santa Anna's army in March 1836 after a 13-day siege?

The Alamo began as a Spanish mission, and nearly all of its Texian defenders were killed when it fell. The defeat became a rallying cry for the revolution, which was won within weeks.

Which name is given to the forced 1830s removal of the Cherokee and other Southeastern nations to Indian Territory?

Trail of Tears names a removal hastened by gold: an 1828 strike near Dahlonega, Georgia, set off a rush onto Cherokee land. Thousands died of disease before reaching the West or soon after.

John Scopes went on trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925 for teaching which scientific idea in a public school?

Evolution was barred from Tennessee classrooms by the Butler Act, and the town staged the case to attract publicity. Scopes was fined $100, but the verdict was overturned on a technicality.

General Sherman offered which captured Georgia city to the president as a Christmas gift in 1864?

Savannah came with 150 heavy guns and about 25,000 bales of cotton, as Sherman's telegram to the White House pointed out. The mayor had already surrendered the city in exchange for a promise to protect its people.

Which city, founded by Spain in 1565, is the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the contiguous U.S.?

St. Augustine was founded on September 8, 1565, by the Spanish admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, decades before the English landed at Jamestown or Plymouth.

Which Mississippi bluesman, legend says, sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in exchange for his guitar skills?

Robert Johnson left just 29 songs, cut at two sessions in San Antonio and Dallas in 1936 and 1937. The crossroads story is the legend most often attached to him.

Which Georgia-born singer's 1960 recording of Georgia on My Mind became the official state song in 1979?

Ray Charles did not write it: Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell composed the song in 1930, three decades before he recorded it for the album The Genius Hits the Road.

Which Nashville concert hall, opened in 1892 as the Union Gospel Tabernacle, housed the Grand Ole Opry until 1974?

Ryman Auditorium is named for Thomas Ryman, a Nashville businessman who owned saloons and a fleet of riverboats and led the drive to build the revival hall.

Which Kentucky mandolin player led the Blue Grass Boys, the band that gave a whole style of music its name?

Bill Monroe named the group for the bluegrass of his home state, and the fast string-band sound they played took the name too. He is often called the Father of Bluegrass.

Which Georgia college town produced both R.E.M. and the B-52's, as well as the jam band Widespread Panic?

Athens draws much of its music scene from the students of the University of Georgia. The B-52's broke out first, drawing international attention in the 1970s with best-selling records.

Which small Alabama city is home to FAME Studios, where Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding recorded?

Muscle Shoals lent its name to a second studio, founded by FAME's own session players, the Swampers. That one drew the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon.

B.B. King gave which woman's name to his guitars after a 1949 dance-hall fire in Twist, Arkansas?

Lucille was the woman two men were fighting over when they knocked over a kerosene heater and set the hall ablaze. King ran back in for his $30 Gibson, then used the name as a reminder never to do it again.

Which Southern thoroughfare did an act of Congress officially declare the Home of the Blues in 1977?

Beale Street's clubs hosted W. C. Handy, who moved his band to Memphis in 1909 and wrote The Memphis Blues there as a campaign song for a mayoral candidate.

Mount Airy, North Carolina, is believed to have inspired the fictional town of Mayberry in which 1960s sitcom?

The Andy Griffith Show starred a Mount Airy native, and his hometown leans into the link: it holds an annual Mayberry Days festival and has a Floyd's Barber Shop to visit.

In Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, what is the name of the O'Hara family's Georgia cotton plantation?

Tara was named by Gerald O'Hara for the Hill of Tara, seat of Ireland's ancient high kings. He founded it on land won from an absentee owner in an all-night poker game.

Which fast-food chain grew out of the Dwarf Grill, a diner Truett Cathy opened near Atlanta in 1946?

Chick-fil-A keeps every restaurant closed on Sundays, a rule rooted in its founder's religious convictions. The original diner in Hapeville, Georgia, survives as the Dwarf House.

Which legume do Southerners traditionally eat in Hoppin' John on New Year's Day to bring good luck?

Black-eyed peas are simmered with rice and pork for the dish, and eating it alongside collard greens is thought to bring a prosperous year.

Which Tuskegee Institute scientist urged Southern farmers to plant peanuts and sweet potatoes on cotton-worn land?

George Washington Carver worked out ways to restore fields depleted by repeated cotton planting. He wanted poor farmers to grow crops that would also feed their own families.

Which Atlanta-based airline grew out of a 1920s crop-dusting outfit that sprayed Southern cotton fields?

Delta Air Lines began as Huff Daland Dusters, the world's first aerial crop-dusting operation, founded in Macon, Georgia, in 1925. Its later name honors the Mississippi Delta region.

Which Virginia home designed by Thomas Jefferson has appeared on the back of the U.S. nickel since 1938?

Monticello shares a UNESCO World Heritage listing with the nearby University of Virginia, which Jefferson also designed. Only in 2004 and 2005 did the nickel's reverse show something else.

Which Gilded Age family built the 250-room Asheville chateau that is the largest privately owned house in America?

Vanderbilt heir George Vanderbilt had Biltmore, his chateau-style mansion, built between 1889 and 1895, after visiting the Asheville area with his mother during the 1880s.

Which songbird is the official state bird of Texas, Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi?

Mockingbird repertoires go well beyond birdsong: the northern mockingbird can also mimic artificial and electronic noises. Linnaeus first classed the species as a kind of thrush in 1758.

Alabama football coach Paul "Bear" Bryant was known for a trademark hat in which black-and-white checked pattern?

Houndstooth became Bryant's signature look on the Alabama sideline. He was just as recognizable leaning against the goal post during pre-game warm-ups.

At which Memphis motel, later the National Civil Rights Museum, was Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated in 1968?

The Lorraine was bought in 1945 by Walter Bailey, who renamed it for his wife Loree and ran it as upscale lodging for Black travelers. Musicians recording at Stax Records often stayed there.

Which carnivorous plant is native only to the coastal bogs and wetlands of the Carolinas?

Venus flytrap is grown for sale around the world, yet it is wild only in that small corner of the Carolinas. Its first written description came in 1759 from colonial governor Arthur Dobbs.

Jack Daniel's whiskey is distilled in which small Tennessee town, located in a county that is officially dry?

Lynchburg sits in Moore County, which stayed dry even as the distillery became a major tourist attraction. The brand's ads kept quoting the town's 1960s population of 361.

Louisiana's Cajuns descend from French colonists whom the British expelled in the 1750s from which region of Canada?

Acadia gave the Cajuns their name, which is an anglicized form of Acadian. The British expulsion ran from 1755 to 1764, and thousands of the exiles reached Louisiana in the late 1700s.

Which Tennessee city was built from scratch in 1942 as a secret production site for the Manhattan Project?

Oak Ridge was planned for 75,000 residents on farmland the government bought up in the Clinch River valley. Its nicknames include the Atomic City and the City Behind a Fence.

Which word did John White find carved into a palisade when he returned to the abandoned Roanoke colony in 1590?

Croatoan was the name of a nearby island, so White took the carving to mean the colonists had moved there. It was the home of Manteo, who had sailed to England with an earlier expedition.

Enterprise, Alabama, built a 1919 monument to which insect, whose ruin of the cotton crop pushed farmers into peanuts?

Boll weevil damage is hailed on the statue as a herald of prosperity. It stands as the world's first monument built to honor an agricultural pest.

Which African American people of the coastal Sea Islands developed a creole language rich in Africanisms?

Gullah communities kept so much of their Central and West African heritage because plantation life on the coast left them relatively isolated. In parts of Georgia they are known as Geechee.

Dallas restaurateur Mariano Martinez's 1971 machine, later acquired by the Smithsonian, dispensed which cocktail?

Frozen margarita history turned on that machine, which Martinez billed as the world's first of its kind. It sits in the collection of the National Museum of American History.

Which Louisiana governor and senator, nicknamed the Kingfish, was assassinated inside the state capitol in 1935?

Huey Long took the nickname from a character on the radio show Amos 'n' Andy. He was poised for a 1936 presidential bid when Carl Weiss shot him.

Which Texas oil field near Beaumont erupted in a 1901 gusher that set off the state's petroleum boom?

Spindletop blew for nine days at an estimated 100,000 barrels a day. Gulf Oil and Texaco were both formed to develop the field.

Which Arkansas resort city sits beside land Congress set aside in 1832, before the idea of a national park existed?

Hot Springs Reservation was the first land the federal government ever set aside to preserve for recreation. With that protection the city grew into a successful spa town.