Alabama
Slurp and Sip
Opening
Rob McDaniel’s aha moment came at Swan Oyster Depot in San Francisco, after he and his wife, Emily, stood in line waiting for barstools at the tiny fish counter. “I told Emily that we should know what we want when we sit down so we don’t take up too much time,” the Birmingham chef recalls. “A lady overheard and turned around and said, ‘You do not rush yourself here. Take your time and enjoy it.’” Inspired by that sage advice, this spring McDaniel opened Bayonet, a fifty-four-seat raw bar adjacent to his celebrated restaurant Helen in downtown Birmingham. On any given evening, Bayonet’s menu might offer a swordfish Reuben, a tuna burger, or a blue cobia schnitzel, along with caviar, ceviche, and plenty of oysters from the Gulf. “Auburn has a shellfish lab on Dauphin Island; we raise oysters in Alabama, so we wanted to be as sustainable as possible,” McDaniel says. “But I don’t want to have blinders on to the other awesome stuff that’s out there.” And no meal at Bayonet is complete without a martini stirred tableside, with a plump, salty oyster at the bottom of the glass.
Arkansas
Glowing to the Chapel
Traditions
For forty-five years, green light has permeated the windows of Thorncrown Chapel, just outside Eureka Springs. But it isn’t stained glass that illuminates the holy confines; it’s the Ozark setting itself. Sunlight bounces off of the chlorophyll of brilliant oaks, dogwoods, and pines, and shines through the structure’s 425 windows. Designed by the architect E. Fay Jones, the nondenominational church has welcomed millions of visitors since it opened in the summer of 1980. When guests enter the sanctuary, most are awestruck, some are speechless, and a few even shed a tear when they witness the grandeur of the Ozarks while surrounded by more than six thousand square feet of glass, says Thorncrown pastor Doug Reed. “One of the most profound things ever said was from a young, probably three-year-old, boy,” Reed remembers. “He walked in and said, ‘Mama, is this heaven?’”
Florida
Havana Good Time
Food
The oldest restaurant in Florida, and the biggest Spanish restaurant on earth, Columbia Restaurant in Tampa’s Ybor City is commemorating 120 years of service. The small restaurant group, which today includes seven locations, began when an immigrant from Havana opened a corner saloon to serve cigar-factory workers. His descendants have expanded many times, and the original restaurant now fills an entire city block. With 1,700 seats around white tablecloths, each of its fifteen dining rooms is extravagantly decorated—flocked maroon wallpaper, a secret door that leads to a speakeasy, a marble balustrade, and hand-painted tiles galore. Columbia also happens to be the country’s number one consumer of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce. As the fifth-generation owner Andrea Gonzmart Williams recalls, “The Lea & Perrins executives were like, ‘What is a non–steak house, a Spanish-Cuban restaurant, doing with all this sauce?’ Then they came and saw the ‘1905’ Salad.” Named for the restaurant’s founding year, the crisp combo of iceberg lettuce, tomato, ham slivers, and Swiss cheese gets a basic dressing of olive oil, white wine vinegar, oregano, and a lot of garlic. When servers toss it tableside, they add lemon and a generous pour of Worcestershire.
Georgia
Peach State Home Runs
Sports
America’s pastime is in full swing—can you smell the hot dogs grilling? At Truist Park’s new Outfield Market, though, Atlanta Braves fans will also get whiffs of nachos topped with Kogi barbecue short ribs from the Marietta-based Taqueria Tsunami; Korean cheese-steaks from the acclaimed local deli Fred’s Meat & Bread; and beignets from Mo’Bay Beignet Co. in Mobile. The stadium’s new eight-stall food hall opened after a region-wide call for entries, just in time for the season and the MLB All-Star Game on July 15. (G&G superfans know to pregame with a proper old-fashioned at our own Garden & Gun Club across the street at the Battery Atlanta.)
Also this year, the new Columbus Clingstones—the Braves’ Double-A affiliate so named as a nod to peaches—are marking their first season in Georgia after moving from Pearl, Mississippi (where they were the Mississippi Braves). At Columbus’s freshly renovated Synovus Park (formerly Golden Park, a century-old stadium that has seen at bats from such immortals as Hank Aaron, Jackie Robinson, Ty Cobb, and Babe Ruth), it’s “just an errant throw from shortstop to land in the Chattahoochee River,” says the Clingstones’ general manager, Pete Laven, who has no doubt fans will quickly fall in love with their home team. “It’s our hope that every time fans come, they see something they’ve never seen before—whether it’s someone who comes once or ten times a year.”
Back in Atlanta, Georgia State University is also moving to hallowed ground, constructing a new thousand-seat baseball stadium on the former Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium site, where the Braves clinched the 1995 World Series. And in Athens, the University of Georgia Bulldogs’ Foley Field just finished a $45 million renovation—the general admission outfield lounge is better than ever, with great views and ample access to peanuts and Cracker Jacks aplenty.
Kentucky
Mountain Melodies
Music
The Laurel Cove Music Festival (June 12-14) in Pineville is the “don’t call it a music festival” music festival, says organizer Jon Grace. What began in 2019 as a small gathering to showcase the best up-and-coming talent from Appalachia has remained tiny and utterly charming. The 1,500 tickets always sell out quickly, but hope remains: Organizers will release about fifty more tickets the week before the event. A rock cliff towers behind the stage, a small pond mirrors light up front, and it’s all tucked into old-growth pine, hemlock, rhododendron, and mountain laurel at Pine Mountain State Resort Park, Kentucky’s oldest state park. The festival has been the first headline stop for such acts as Charles Wesley Godwin, 49 Winchester, and Wyatt Flores. Run entirely by volunteers, Laurel Cove draws fans from all over the country, testifying to the power of music in even the most remote Southern holler.
Louisiana
Fuzzy History
Food
Perched atop soil unusually high in iron ore, the town of Ruston was once the crown jewel of Louisiana’s peach belt—in part because of a local rumor that credited the iron, in part, with producing a variety with superior sweetness. “Ruston Reds started as a bud sport, almost a freak of nature,” says Joe Mitcham Jr., a second-generation peach farmer at Mitcham Farms. “I’ve always considered the flavor of our peaches to be due to the soil.” By 1951, the peach had become so integral to Lincoln Parish that residents started an annual Louisiana Peach Festival (June 7) to show off their crops. This year, the homegrown arts and music shindig marks its seventy-fifth anniversary with live music, an arts market, and plenty of sweet fruit.
Maryland
Heights of Success
Outdoors
In 1925, Maryland’s first state forester, Fred Besley, started a contest for the biggest trees by species in the state. He received 450 entries, and a notable tree list ensued. A hundred years later, that list is still going strong as the Big Tree Program. Over the years, an additional 4,678 trees, including elms, sycamores, white oaks, and yellow poplars, have qualified across Maryland, using the same system Besley developed: Add the sum of a tree’s circumference in inches, its height in feet, and a fourth of its crown spread in feet. If the point value totals either over three hundred or 70 percent of the current state champion’s value, the tree is in. John Bennett, the program’s volunteer chairman, recently finished compiling a catalogue of the biggest native trees ever recorded. “I call them the GOATs, or greatest of all time,” he says. Some, like the towering Wye Oak and all the 1925-listed trees, have since fallen. But many standouts remain, including the state champion tree and one of Bennett’s favorites, a ninety-six-foot-tall, four-hundred-year-old white oak that grows proudly in front of the Calvert Brick Meeting House in Cecil County.
Mississippi
New Home For a Nomad
Opening
The New Orleans–born artist Walter Anderson journeyed through China and Costa Rica, paddled two canoe trips along the Mississippi River, and rode his bicycle across the United States, all of which influenced his art. Fittingly, late this spring, the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs is slated to open the Traveler, an expansion dedicated to Anderson’s adventures. Located in a hundred-year-old house behind the museum, the Traveler is an art exhibit, coffee shop, and event space all in one. “Anderson was all about experience,” says Julian Rankin, the museum’s executive director. “Getting in touch with nature wasn’t a passive endeavor. So a lot of what we’re doing here is creating a community space where people can come for programs, dialogue, coffee, breakfast, and all the rest, enacting the philosophies that Anderson championed.” Out front sits a painted Volkswagen Beetle inspired by Anderson’s watercolors of New Orleans streetcars, and inside, the mugs come from his family’s Shearwater Pottery.
North Carolina
Old School, New Folk
Traditions
To experience the magic of the John C. Campbell Folk School, nestled into Western North Carolina’s rolling hills in Brasstown, visit on a Friday afternoon. That’s when adult students gather in the historic dance hall to share their week’s work, sometimes recalling how they had never used a power tool or a loom beforehand. Now they have crafted Appalachian-style banjos, woven oversize rag rugs, or painted breathtaking vistas at the school’s 270-acre campus, learning about themselves along the way. In 1925, former Kentucky schoolteacher Marguerite Butler and Olive Dame Campbell, a missionary from Massachusetts, established the school based on a Danish model: no grades, no degrees, just communal skill sharing in pursuit of an enriching life. Today it’s a hands-on mountain getaway for those willing to leap out of their comfort zone. Family-style meals, contra dancing, and carving nights round out the creative escape, with the Friday show-and-tell providing a satisfying epilogue. The giddiness is palpable. “People have been coming here for a hundred years,” says blacksmithing instructor Sean Fitzsimmons, “and having the best week of their lives.”
South Carolina
Capital Improvements
Theater
In 1924, the architect Arthur W. Hamby designed and built Town Theatre in the heart of downtown Columbia. A century later, the oldest continuously operating community theater in the country (within a structure designed to be a theater) celebrated its building’s centennial by completing a long-awaited facelift. After workers shored up the dressing rooms upstairs and the lower floor, COVID hit. Finally, early this year, the theater added brand-new seats, repaired flooring, recarpeted, and refreshed the wallpaper and paint in the lobby. “We’re kind of the great-grandmother in terms of the theater community,” says Shannon Willis Scruggs, the executive director. “You could look at almost any theater that’s around Columbia and there’s some connection, some string that connects it to Town Theatre.” Each summer, the venue puts on a show that involves local nonprofits and organizations, such as the Columbia Animal Shelter and Home Works of America. This summer’s show, Disney’s The Little Mermaid (July 11–27), will also incorporate ZFX Flying, a Louisville-based service that will help characters such as Ariel, Ursula, and Scuttle take to the air.
Tennessee
Writ Large
Books
In the five years since Leah Stewart took over as director of the South’s grandest literary gathering, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference (July 15–27) has only gotten grander. For nearly two weeks in July, writers will assemble “on the mountain” at the University of the South’s leafy campus. Aspiring and established fiction and nonfiction writers, poets, and playwrights will meet for morning workshops where the vibe emphasizes community over competition. “It was always a welcoming place for some, but we’ve done our best to make it welcoming for everyone,” Stewart says. What will never change is “the magic of being in a place as beautiful as Sewanee, as well as the magic of gathering with others who care as much about the power of language as you do.” The public is welcome at the evening events, when such writers as R. O. Kwon, Luis Alberto Urrea, and A. E. Stallings will read from their work.
Texas
Beacons of Bravery
Openings
When Patrick Brady saw the Huey helicopter located in the new National Medal of Honor Museum, it took him straight back to Vietnam. “I got in it,” he says. “I checked it out, of course, and made sure it was authentic.” Brady, a retired army major general, received the nation’s highest award for valor for his actions on January 6, 1968, when he piloted multiple flights into a combat zone to rescue fifty-one wounded soldiers. He used three different Hueys that day, replacing his aircraft after each was hit with bullets or had its controls shot away. Now Brady is one of the 3,528 Medal of Honor recipients celebrated at the new $200 million museum in Arlington, which uses interactive and immersive exhibits to tell medalists’ stories. “These are just ordinary people who in a moment of extreme danger or stress did something extraordinary, and we all have that potential in us,” says Cory Crowley, the museum’s executive vice president. This summer, the museum will throw a Fourth of July barbecue alongside the Arlington Independence Day Parade. Brady says he hopes the events and exhibits stir patriotism in visitors. “What we did—valor, courage, whatever you want to call it—isn’t important. It’s only useful inasmuch as it’s inspirational. The medal is just a symbol.”
Virginia
(Re)Storied Past
History
As Devin Canaday enters the Bray School in Colonial Williamsburg, he thinks of his ancestors Mary and Elisha Jones, who are listed on the 1762 school register. “When I walk into the space,” he says, “I wonder where Elisha sat. I wonder if Mary was there.” Until recently, America’s oldest existing school building for Black children remained unrecognized. The Bray School, which operated from 1760 to 1774, educated both enslaved and free Black students. Later the building served as a dormitory for the College of William & Mary and then housed its ROTC program. Only in 2020 did historians confirm that the original school remained intact under centuries of renovations. The building has since been moved a few blocks to the Colonial Williamsburg Historic Area and is undergoing restoration that’s set to be completed for a June opening. When it operated, the school taught religion and basic skills like reading and sewing, says Maureen Elgersman Lee, director of the William & Mary Bray School Lab, which works with partners, including members of the descendant community, to identify relatives of the original students.
Washington, D.C.
Tiny Treasures
Art
Even before there was a name for them, insects—or “little beasts,” as Dutch artists often called them in the late 1500s—captured imaginations and helped launch the field of natural history. A new exhibition, Little Beasts: Art, Wonder, and the Natural World (May 18–November 2), at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., explores that early intersection of art and science. Alongside nearly seventy-five prints, drawings, and paintings of jewel beetles, dragonflies, and other creatures by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European artists sit sixty real specimens from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History collection. “During the period covered in this exhibition, artists and naturalists began to study insects closely for the first time, and they were amazed at what they saw,” says Alexandra Libby, a cocurator on the project. In today’s period of biodiversity loss, that sense of wonder is particularly relevant—at the end of the exhibition, find the contemporary Texan artist Dario Robleto’s contribution, a film exploring the tenderness and empathy that connect art and science through time.
West Virginia
Rhode Less Traveled
Outdoors
In late June and early July, pinkish-white flowers begin to light up the mountainsides of West Virginia as great rhododendrons—designated the state flower in 1903—come into bloom. Though the moisture-loving shrub grows statewide, including at New River Gorge National Park and Blackwater Falls State Park, for a spectacular, meandering view, take Stuart Memorial Drive in Monongahela National Forest. This 10.3-mile forest road—unpaved but maintained and open to the public—climbs up to 3,900 feet from the Shavers Fork river valley to Bickle Knob and Stuart Knob, two of the area’s highest peaks. Along the way up, look out for blooming mountain laurel in the oak-hickory forests, wild ramps, and the endangered running buffalo clover. The top of the ridge is the main attraction: Here in the high-elevation spruce-hemlock forests, the understory is a colorful blanket of rhododendrons dripping with clusters of bell-shaped flowers called trusses.
—Larry Bleiberg, Helen Bradshaw, Caroline Sanders Clements, Robert Alan Grand, Gillian Kendall, Lindsey Liles, Mark Powell, Grace Roberts, Michael Farris Smith, and Danielle Wallace
