The American South carries a history that shouldn’t be forgotten. It happened. We can’t erase it. What we can do is preserve the beauty it left behind and learn from its heavier lessons — so as not to repeat them.
We flew into a frozen Denver in February 2022, the four of us meeting at the airport for our connection to Charleston, South Carolina: Aaron and I from Sacramento with Cole, a high school junior still figuring out his next move; Caden, a community college freshman also figuring out his, returning from his trip to Maui. Two boys at a crossroads, eight days through three states, and one tornado. The South had things to show us.
Charleston
Charleston knows what it is. The city wears its history without apology and without performance — it’s simply there, in the pastel stucco and brick facades south of Broad Street, in the grand portico entrances and white column-wrapped porches that catch the sea breeze off the harbor, in the iron gates of the French Quarter’s walled gardens. The Battery and the antebellum mansions along East Bay Street have been looking out over Charleston Harbor since before the country existed in its current form.
We took an Old South Carriage Co. ride — more touristy than we would normally choose, but Charleston is a city that earns the overview. Our native Charlestonian driver was entertaining and genuinely funny, steering carefully between informative and corny, telling the city’s history with the ease of someone who has lived inside it. The four of us sat across one carriage bench behind a tawny horse with a blond mane, clopping through the French Quarter and south into the streets below Broad — estate after estate with shuttered windows, deep piazza porches, the layered color of a city that has been painting over itself for three centuries. We returned on foot, walked the Battery’s harbor promenade, then north to Waterfront Park for sunset over the Cooper River.
The food in Charleston was a preview of what the whole trip would deliver: rich, specific, slow-cooked, and generous in the way of food developed over centuries in a warm climate. Shrimp and grits, she-crab soup, biscuits with everything. It was outstanding. It was also, by day three of the trip, the kind of food that required recalibration. The South’s culinary tradition is extraordinary in individual encounters and cumulative in its effects.
Columbia: University of South Carolina
Two hours northwest to Columbia, where Caden had connected online — through Twitch and FIFA — with Nick, a professor who turned out to teach Sports Management at USC’s Darla Moore School of Business. Nick arranged a private tour of the program. The Darla Moore School is the country’s highest-ranked Sports Management program; its students had just returned from staffing the Beijing Winter Olympics and were heading to the UK for British football placements. The gap between this program and what the West Coast typically offers in this area was immediate and instructive.
We walked the Horseshoe afterward — USC’s original 1801 oval green flanked by Federal-style Rutledge and DeSaussure Colleges, the brick perimeter wall built during the Civil War that saved it from burning. An enthusiastic first-year student showed us around, pointing out his favorite buildings and his favorite açaí spots with equal conviction. The campus has the quality of a place that has been thinking carefully about itself for a long time. Columbia itself carries both registers of a state capital and a college town simultaneously — the domed State House visible from the same streets as the bars on Gervais.
From the Campus into the Woods
What the beautiful UGA campus could not have prepared us for was what lay beyond it.
The road between Columbia and Athens takes you through a version of the South that the university brochures don’t include. Highway 78 narrows to two lanes and slows through small towns where the roadside structures and the mood of the landscape felt almost suspended — as if time had stopped sometime around the Confederacy and hadn’t been fully restarted. Dense, quiet forest on both sides. Deliverance was mentioned.
We passed the Callaway Plantation from the car window, a living history museum preserving the physical structure of an antebellum plantation, and felt the weight of the region’s history settle differently than it had in Charleston’s cultivated streets. Augusta along the way offered a brief riverside stop downtown, where we confirmed that Augusta’s civic identity rests more convincingly on its golf course than on its urban center.
Athens was a relief. The University of Georgia campus — progressive, alive, architecturally confident — felt like a haven that had grown up since 1785 among the trees rather than a continuation of what surrounded it. The contrast between campus and corridor was the most vivid thing about the drive.
Athens: University of Georgia
A few weeks before our visit, Georgia had beaten Alabama in the College Football Playoff National Championship. Students had rushed to ring a campus bell. We stood at that bell — a modest white trussed tower behind the chapel — and watched a student ring it with the satisfaction of someone upholding a tradition that goes back to an 1894 victory over Auburn.
We entered through the historic iron gate on College Avenue, past the Holmes-Hunter Academic Building’s massive Doric colonnade — named for the first Black students admitted in 1961, Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes, whose court-ordered admission arrived to protests before both went on to distinguished careers. The building that honors them is architecturally the most prominent on the original campus.
The broader campus maintains its red brick and white trim across 760 acres by deliberate architectural policy, the coherence sustained across two centuries of construction. Sanford Stadium, sunk into a natural bowl and ringed by privet hedges, seats nearly 93,000. We had dinner at South Kitchen + Bar — butternut squash with candied bacon, pecans, and goat cheese, followed by shrimp and grits. The South’s culinary argument, made clearly.
Atlanta and the Road West
The next morning was cloudy but cooperative. At the Atlanta Breakfast Club on Luckie Street — a soul food institution — I ordered the Georgia Peach chicken and waffles: not overly sweet, the peach working against the richness with more restraint than the name promised.
From there through Centennial Olympic Park and into Pemberton Place, the modern development along the park’s edge where the World of Coca-Cola and the Georgia Aquarium anchor one end, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights the other — a different register of Atlanta than what surrounds it. A stop at the gold-domed Georgia State Capitol before heading west.
Alabama I-20 delivers. An oversized load of giant tires. Talladega Speedway announced from the median. The Home of the 2022 World Games. And then, a triple-tow: a wrecked but functional minivan towing a wrecked car towing a wrecked pickup truck, all three in motion, headed somewhere with apparent purpose. We kept our judgment to ourselves. The energy in Alabama surprised us — we had expected something like what we’d felt in the Georgia woods. What we found was different: warmer, more alive, less stuck.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama and the Tornado
Heavy rain began just as we pulled into the hotel. The red band on the radar was moving in. Caden opened his laptop in the room, logged on for his online class, and prepared to give a scheduled speech. Then the sirens started.
Hotel guests moved toward the storm shelter — a small storage room. Caden excused himself to his professor: there appeared to be a tornado warning in progress. He would return when it passed. The twister touched down thirty miles to the north as the system moved through, the hotel ceiling springing leaks before it cleared. Caden returned, reloaded his notes, and gave the speech. This was a first.
Friday in Tuscaloosa was cold but clear, the storm having scrubbed the sky. We started with breakfast at Another Broken Egg Cafe, elevated above the Black Warrior River, before heading to campus. We walked the 1,200-acre campus that day — the surviving antebellum buildings around the original Quad, the Victorian Gothic red brick of the post-Civil War restoration, the early 20th-century Neoclassical expansion that defines the campus’s visual identity. Denny Chimes, the 115-foot Art Deco bell tower, marks the central axis. Bryant-Denny Stadium’s nearly 102,000 seats announce the institution’s priorities without ambiguity. The Bryant Museum documents the football program with the comprehensiveness of a cultural institution. We spent an hour there.
The campus carries its history more dramatically than USC or UGA — the burned antebellum buildings, the deliberate reconstruction, the Victorian Gothic restoration, the Art Deco intervention, all visible simultaneously. The Gorgas House, the only original building to survive the 1865 burning, stands at the edge of the Quad. The President’s Mansion was reportedly saved when Louisa Garland stood between it and the Union soldiers. It is still occupied by the university president today. She is not commemorated by a building. She should be.
That evening: Dreamland BBQ in Northport, across the river. Hickory-fired ribs and pulled pork, served on styrofoam with white bread, tender fried okra, baked beans, and a banana pudding perfectly balanced — not the most environmentally friendly operation, but one that has been getting its specific thing exactly right since 1958. Among the most memorable meals of the trip. Afterward, past the fraternities setting up for their Friday night TGIF gatherings, into lively downtown Tuscaloosa, the South fully inhabited and apparently unbothered by the previous evening’s weather.
Birmingham
We had driven through Birmingham’s historic district on the way to Tuscaloosa, noting it for the return. Back now, we drove up to Vulcan Park on Red Mountain: the 56-foot cast iron statue of Vulcan, Roman god of the forge, the largest cast iron statue in the world, built from Alabama ore for the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. From the observation tower, Birmingham spreads below — the downtown towers, the valley, the industrial topography of a city that built itself on steel and coal.
From Vulcan we could see our next stop: the Sloss Furnaces, two pig iron blast furnaces that operated from 1882 to 1971, now a National Historic Landmark and arts venue. The scale of the structures — the stoves, the blowing engines, the casting shed, the ore bridges — makes the period of Birmingham’s industrial dominance physically present.
There is something almost poignant about the city seen from these two vantage points: the civic aspiration of Vulcan above, the industrial muscle of Sloss below. Birmingham is a city with real potential, its historic fabric worth preserving, its community worth investing in. The work of figuring out what comes next is visible everywhere you look.
We returned the rental car and flew home. The South had left an impression.
The South is a land of contrasts. The beauty and the weight. The extraordinary hospitality and the complicated past. The progressive energy of its university towns and the stretches of road between them that feel like another era entirely. The food that stops you in your tracks and the history that demands you sit with it. We left having seen all of it — not resolved, not summarized, just present. Which is probably the most honest thing you can say about the American South.
The American South connects to the US Deep South Atlas. For the architectural argument running through these campuses, read the companion Design post →