Twenty-plus years of documenting the South's vernacular art, visionary environments and traditions….plus modern art exhibits, Faulkner and Eudora, and This Week's Various. Welcome.
Lem Motlow and his brothers set up shop in Birmingham, culminating in 1904 with their own distillery — they were the nephews of Jack Daniel of Jack Daniel’s Distillery. Being that Tennessee enacted prohibition in 1910, it seemed a smart move to have operations elsewhere, and it wasn’t until 1915 that Alabama had its own statewide prohibition.
It turned out that due to the different water sources, the whiskey tasted different which wasn’t a good selling point, and more of the nation headed toward prohibition which really sealed the deal on this ill-fated outpost of a family distillery.
It was Lem Motlow who reopened the JD distillery in Lynchburg after prohibition.
This letter from Jesse B. Motlow to Felix Motlow was written in 1905, inviting Felix for a visit as there had been no yellow fever in Birmingham.
(from a visit to the Birmingham History Center Museum which is no longer extant, 2012)
Texas Monthly has a feature on 98-year-old David Adickes who’s the Texas sculptor behind the huge president heads and other enormous concrete pieces you may have seen, especially if you’ve spent time in Houston. Where will these wind up?
(most of my SculpturWorx pics taken on a 2012 visit. More here.)
Finally, finally made it to H.D. Gibbes Store in Learned, Mississippi for supper. We’d been there during the day before it becomes a restaurant and have been meaning to return for when it’s all steaks on paper plates. Even on their website, they say “what’d ya expect from an ol’ broke down store?”.
Following, pics from both visits:
No reservations, so we sat on the porch and waited our turn but did it the right way, getting there right at opening.
Salad? Salad.
I ordered the lamb chops which were pretty good – a lot of char though, along with potato and squash
and buttermilk pie, always. Someone said it was the best buttermilk pie on the planet and mmmmm not sure about that but was it good? yes.
Would come here again just for the ambiance and to support this kind of business and tradition. Thinking of others that remind me of this place — some country store-turned-restaurant, some just restaurant, like Taylor Grocery — a post of places in that genre for next week…xoxo!
Absolutely loved our stay at The Thompson Hotel in Nashville. It’s in the Gulch and it was easy to get around. The on-site restaurant, Marsh House, gets great reviews and not only did we have supper there, it was so good we went back for brunch too. Andddd there was a visit up the elevator to L.A. Jackson, the rooftop bar. The hotel is a part of AmEx Travel’s Fine Hotels + Resorts so lots of benefits for card holders.
Brent had the pork chop with balsamic pickled figs, fried brussel sprouts, fingerling potatoes and a bechamel
I went with the grilled Tractor Hat Farm hanger steak with a romesco, charred broccolini, rosemary potato, and creole fried oyster aioli
Hopped over to Sambuca to listen to live music — that was fun.
Went back & upstairs to the LA Jackson rooftop bar.
snacked on venison poppers
Then, Marsh House for brunch — ordinarily I wouldn’t be excited to go the same place two days in a row, but since this would be a different type of food AND it had been so incredible the night before…and, hi, this cinnamon roll was incredible
The omelette was dainty and perfectly omelette-y and the potatoes…yessir.
The surprise was that the oysters on this eggs benedict were the best fried oysters of my life and for somebody who’s had their share, HOW does this happen in Nashville and not somewhere around Apalachicola? I have no idea but goodNESS they were incredible.
Found a retro Taco Bell in Huntsville, Alabama just off the Parkway. This one doesn’t have a much-older sign like the one that exists in Savannah:
…but the one in Huntsville DOES have a fun ’90s interior:
The $.59/.79/.99 menu kept me going in college, with the help of the $.99 Super Value Meal at Wendy’s. Anybody miss the enchirito? Yeah.
In 2020, when Taco Bell was discontinuing the Mexican Pizza (though I think it’s back? not sure.), I had to get it one more time. I don’t even eat fast food much at all and Taco Bell almost never, but there’s such a sweet nostalgia.
Most camellias here have almost completely finished their blooming and I’ve been thinking of Miss Eudora so often when seeing them. Southern Living posted in January about a letter she wrote to Diarmuid Russell, published in Julia Eichelberger’s Tell About Night Flowers: Eudora Welty’s Gardening Letters, 1940-1949 (here at Amazon, here at Bookshop). She penned about dreaming of “all the billions of camellias in the world” and how they were condensed to millions, then hundreds, and then to one, the original.
At the end of the dream, she said there was a sound, like that of a jewelry box closing. And that was that.
This is how people were before texting. She writes Russell about camellias and he’s writing her about Solomon’s Seal (fellow garden friends: I don’t have any, but sounds like it is fond of shade and you can put it where you’d think of for hostas).
Eudora’s mother would wrap camellia blooms from home in wet cotton and send them via express train from Jackson to her in NYC. Later when Eudora was living in Jackson, she would be the one sending camellia blossoms to her literary agent up there.
One book about Eudora Welty and and flowers is One Writer’s Garden : Eudora Welty’s Home Place (here at Amazon, here at Bookshop). She had the Night-Blooming Cereus Club (can you imagine the phone tree to let each other know it’s close to blooming, since it’s just for one night at a time?). Also among her friends was a really interesting bunch of writers: Frank Lyell, Hubert Creekmore, and Nash Burger, plus Lehman Engel who won five or six Tony awards.
(Tangent time:) Lehman Engel had an incredible, incredible career beyond what earned him Tonys. BMI has to this day a Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop. He’s related to the Orkins who owned the Alamo and Capri Theaters in Jackson. Engel died in NYC and is buried at Jackson’s Beth Israel cemetery with his family.
Now, Eudora had a salon going on. For laughs, her friends would dress up in the fashion of Vanity Fair features and take pictures of one another, like this pic used as the cover of To Absent Friends.
After seeing the cereus on the side porch of her home, I decided I needed one. In fact, I got one for me and one for Anne and for some reason I just keep forgetting to give her the other one, even though it’s been a year.
The crazy crazy crazy part is that I actually found these online and the person selling it wouldn’t give me her address until I was in the city limits. So I drive up there at the appointed time, message her that I’m indeed in the city limits, there’s no answer. She was napping (she’s older). Then I’m thinking I’m just going home, it’s nuts, and by the time I get in the next county she’s messaging, apologizing for the snooze. So I run back and get two and in the process realize that I used to be related to her by marriage (not mine, ha) but that was such a not-great story/outcome that I decide to keep that little nugget to myself.
I’ve managed to keep both cereus’ alive and they look…happy I guess but this is not the most gorgeous plant in the universe. No matter, when it’s bloom time, people will know!
Above, the cereus on the porch at the Welty home / museum, from my visit in 2023
Magnolia, the newsletter of the Publication of the Southern Garden History Society, had a feature last year about the cereus, including that mention of the cereus was as early as the 1820s in Mississippi newspapers. They say, “This tradition, of course, is the part-social, parthorticultural phenomenon in which proud cereus growers would announce an imminent bloom in the newspaper, often in the form of an open invitation for friend and stranger alike to converge on their porch to witness the spectacle late at night. (It is not uncommon for cereus flowers to start blooming around 10 p.m. or later.)”
Welty wrote in 1943: “A nightblooming cereus opened down the street and had three flowers—we went to see it and looked at it with matches.”
When Googling the cereus, I found this at the Linnean Society of London about Isabel Wilkerson’s grandmother:
Once a year on a midsummer night that could not be foretold, a curious plant called the night-blooming cereus would decide to undrape its petals…
“My night-blooming cereus is going to open tonight,” she told them.
[The neighbours] would arrive at my grandmother’s front porch around midnight.
They rocked in the porch swing and waited…
The opening took hours. Sometime around three in the morning, the white petals began to open, and the women set down their sweet tea to crane their necks over the blossom. They inhaled its sugary scent and tried to find the baby Jesus in the cradle in the folds.
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