Garden & Gun

One of my favorite places in the South is an uninhabited barrier island off the coast of South Carolina where I’ve left tracks in the sand since I was a kid. In grade school I lost my first bull redfish in the surf there (and broke down in tears on m

Thanks to Erin and Ben Napier, Laurel, Mississippi, is enjoying a boom of sorts. There, the couple founded Laurel Mercantile Co., on Front Street, to design and sell heirloom-quality goods such as kitchenware, comforters, and coffee mugs; and Scotsma

In April 2015, Kardea Brown left behind her job in social services for a life cooking in front of the camera. She’d recently impressed Food Network executives after a boyfriend signed her up to audition for a pilot, but the suits wanted her to hone h

Rhett Turner will go to almost any lengths to tell a good story—in this case, about whooping cranes. “The days started at four in the morning,” he says of the shooting schedule for Journey of the Whooping Crane, his recent documentary about North Ame

Chances are, you’ve never seen Florida’s official state animal in the wild—not even you rural Floridians. Florida panthers are stealthy creatures, despite their size, and do most of their prowling from dusk to dawn. More important, they’re profoundly

During a recent visit to Los Angeles, Devon Gilfillian had a little time to kill before he was due in the studio. So his manager arranged a last-minute songwriting session at the home of Jonas Myrin, a Swedish artist best known for his work in the Ch

Q Eighteenth-century Georgia was really just King George’s penal colony, right? A Georgia wasn’t penal in the strict sense, like Devil’s Island in French Guiana. But as conceived by its founder James Oglethorpe and his trustees in London, Georgia w

It’s five days until the MTV Video Music Awards, and Jerry Lee Atwood’s small Union Western tailor studio buzzes with activity. Atwood created Lil Nas X’s Western suit for his groundbreaking “Old Town Road” video, and three weeks before the awards sh

El Presidente is a rum drink for those who don’t care for limes. You may dislike the little green orbs because you have digestive issues. Or perhaps you have a serious personality flaw—I mean, who doesn’t like limes? Or maybe you just believe that li

April McGreger, who for eleven years ran the beloved pickle and preserve business Farmer’s Daughter outside of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is in a mixed marriage. She was raised a Christian in Mississippi. Her husband, the illustrator Phil Blank, gr

AGE: 79 HOME BASE: Charleston, South Carolina KNOWN FOR: Her work as a pioneering cooking teacher, television personality, and author of fifteen cookbooks, including her latest, Nathalie Dupree’s Favorite Stories & Recipes, released this fall. Dupre

The text from Jess came at about the same time a plate of fresh-shucked oysters—fried soft and floated on chervil-flecked tartar sauce alongside a stack of pickled vegetables—hit the bar top: “I’m happy and with my boys.” After moving our son into hi

A few years ago, when Brandon Carter was opening FARM, his restaurant in Bluffton, South Carolina, he pored through lists from nearby farmers, searching for exciting ingredients. “I’d never heard of Candy Roaster squash, and was intrigued by the name

Planes mostly, but also trains and automobiles deliver an average of 275,000 passengers to Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport every day. They grab PowerBars and boxed salads from kiosks, hunker down for a few minutes in the food court

Columbia has long been a South Carolina gem, and when it comes to Southern-made goods, the city’s local artisans hold their own. The area has fostered a growing community of creatives, ushering in a new era alive with expression and originality. From

Clockwise from bottom left: KNIFE This pocketknife from Son of a Sailor is practical and not too precious ($150; sonofasailor.co). HAT Whether you’re walking the dog or hunting with one, this cashmere beanie by Savedwill cap your look ($225; saved-n

We didn’t want another dog. We being my wife and I. We’d lost our beloved yellow Lab Buddy the previous year and were still grieving, I suppose. Buddy—beautiful, superior, imperious Buddy—had been (locally) famous for eating a three-pound cheese ball

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH ROCK ISLAND AUCTION COMPANY A lifelong antique-firearms collector from Corpus Christi, Texas, peered down the barrel of a silver-and-gold-inlaid Winchester Model 12 with a Monte Carlo stock. He was making a last-minute pass thro

When I was a child in the declining days of the solidly segregationist South, when Jim Eastland was still a Mississippi senator and Herman Talmadge was his Georgia counterpart and George Wallace was governor of Alabama (the list of similar, ahem, “st

We had just three nights and four days in the Castaway Cottages, not near enough time in paradise if you consider the six-hundred-mile round trip to Panama City from northeast Alabama, getting lost twice in Montgomery, and the motoring power of a six

So that’swhat we are? Emotional desperadoes? Clearly we are seeking a geographic cure for something out here. Why else would we be on this remote blackwater river, churning along at five miles an hour, overwhelmed by the exotic flora and fauna—and th

A block from the seaside strip’s bars and tacky T-shirt shops lies a hidden gem that comes with a bittersweet love story. Chicago lawyer Hugh Birch gave his daughter, Helen, this thirty-five-acre estate, with its tropical gardens and eclectic design,

ALLISON MOORER IS BAREFOOT ON THE GRASS OF HER Nashville front yard, holding up a water hose and spraying the hell out of a struggling fern. “I am determined to keep this little thing alive,” she announces, her eyes fixed on the trembling plant. Moor

TO TRACY WOODARD, EVERY BITE OF FOOD AND scrap of fabric has a story to tell. “People should know where the food they’re putting in their bodies and the fibers they have in their homes come from,” Woodard says. For years, she and her husband, Ty, had

MAKER: Cathead Distillery PRODUCT: Hoodoo Chicory Liqueur; $35 LOCATION: Jackson, Mississippi THE FLAVOR OF HOODOO CHICORY LIQUEUR LEG- ba Reserve is familiar yet not. On first sip, it comes off like a cousin of a coffee liqueur. But it’s more hig

MAKER: Southern Andiron & Tool Co. PRODUCT: Fire tools; $495–$1,250 LOCATION: Brookhaven, Georgia “I’M A FIREPLACE NERD,” SAYS TREY MILLER, WHO with his wife, Marjorie, founded Southern Andiron & Tool Co. in an Atlanta suburb. Fascinated with the

MAKER: Taste of Satira PRODUCT: Gullah Geechee crab boil sack; $15 LOCATION: Cross, South Carolina “I’M NOT A CLASSICALLY TRAINED CHEF—I’M A HOME COOK AND proud of it,” says Pamela D. Jones Mack, the founder of Taste of Satira. “I cook with heart.

MAKER: Stono Knife Works PRODUCT: Blue Ridge Camp Knife; $325 LOCATION: Taylors, South Carolina BLADESMITH ALEC MEIER LITERALLY DREAMED OF this knife. While visiting his parents in Franklin, North Carolina, he glimpsed a three-dimensional topograp

MAKER: Blue Delta PRODUCT: Custom pants; $500–$600 LOCATION: Tupelo, Mississippi TAKING A SAVILE ROW APPROACH TO AN AMERICAN wardrobe classic, the design team at Blue Delta creates its denim or stretch cotton pants by making a personal pattern for

$5–$95; sunhousecraft.com Seven years ago, Cynthia Main left the shop she ran in Chicago, where she repurposed salvaged building materials, to study barrel making at a farming skills school in Michigan. There, she impulsively opted in to a broom-mak

A picker’s truck piled high with black walnuts. Opposite: The Nut Wizard, an indispensable tool of the trade. IT’S THE ICE CREAM THAT DOES ME IN. I’m touring the sixty-five-acre Hammons Products Company plant in Stockton, Missouri. In business sinc

I his,” Branko Pjanic is telling me, “is what we call breaking the sombrero.” He’s plunging a four-foot steel tool, essentially a jumbo potato masher, into an open barrel of cabernet franc grapes. From Spanglish to English, breaking the sombrero tran

The narrow heart-pine stairs ascend above the bustle of the sporting goods store in Thomasville, Georgia, the scent of gun oil growing stronger with each squeaky step. It’s the last few wooden treads that seem to draw back time’s curtain. Antique Eur

Strike a tuning fork against the floor of Capricorn Sound Studios, and you can still hear reverberations of the “Macon sound.” In 1969, local impresario Phil Walden heard Duane Allman bend guitar notes that defied physics, and built a studio around h

The Hidden Florida issue? My first thought: Florida Man. We know the meme, the legend, the guy who keeps running over himself with stolen lawn mowers and trying to cash a check for $368,000,000,000 that a homeless man sold him for $100. Now, at last,