Caroline Sanders Clements is the senior editor at Garden & Gun and oversees the magazine’s annual Made in the South Awards. Since joining G&G’s editorial team in 2017, the Athens, Georgia, native has written and edited stories about artists, architects, historians, musicians, tomato farmers, James Beard Award winners, and one mixed martial artist. She lives in North Charleston, South Carolina, with her husband, Sam, and dog, Bucket.
Arts & Culture
Southern Pets Through the Centuries
A new exhibit at the Charleston Museum explores the bond between people and the animals they love
As collections manager of the Charleston Museum, Jennifer McCormick has spent a lot of time organizing the more than 40,000 photos in the archives, and over the past few years, she started to notice something: Even in the mid-1800s, people wanted to capture images of their pets. That realization inspired the exhibit, In the Company of Animals: Pets of Charleston, which opens this week and will run through the end of the year. It gives visitors a glimpse into the lives of Charlestonians and their beloved companions from 1897 through the 1930s. “There are a few cats and other animals, although not as many as dogs,” she says. “The same as it is today.” Also the same: the universal feeling pets inspire. Photos in the exhibit include a sharecropper’s son with his puppy taken at Magnolia Plantation in 1926, Charlotta Drayton and her terrier on what would have been a two-or-three-day automobile trip to Asheville, North Carolina, and Franklin Frost Sams, a physician and amateur photographer who captured many of the other photos in the collection, with his goat in his South-of-Broad backyard.


















