Pigeon Forge, Tennessee is one of the South’s most familiar family vacation towns. Cabins, pancake houses, souvenir shops, roadside attractions, Dollywood, and the Smoky Mountains have made it a place generations of families know well. But in July of 1987, that familiar image was shattered. Ann Robertson Jones, a 42-year-old mother and local business owner,…
Tag: history
The Aviary: The Passenger Pigeon
The Passenger Pigeon once traveled across North America in numbers so immense that its flocks could transform the appearance and sound of the landscape. Observers described skies darkened by birds, the thunderous noise of countless wings, and migrations that continued overhead for hours or days. The birds gathered in colonies containing millions of individuals and…
SBP Podcast Episode 18: Anne Bonny: Pirate Queen, Pirate Legend
Anne Bonny is one of the most famous pirates in history — and perhaps one of the most mysterious. She sailed during the final violent years of the Golden Age of Piracy alongside the infamous Calico Jack Rackham and fellow female pirate Mary Read, becoming one of the most feared women in the Atlantic world….
Southern Reads: Blood and Treasure
Blood and Treasure is the kind of history book that reminds you why some figures never really leave the American imagination. Daniel Boone is one of those names that most people know before they ever really know anything about him. He exists somewhere between schoolbook history, frontier legend, old television reruns, coonskin-cap mythology, and the…
SBP Podcast Episode 17: The Dixie Mafia and the Vincent & Margaret Sherry Murders
On September 14, 1987, Circuit Court Judge Vincent Sherry and his wife, Biloxi city councilwoman Margaret Sherry, were found murdered inside their home on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. There was no forced entry. No robbery. No obvious sign of a random attack. At first, the case seemed to point in several directions. Local politics. City…
The Hellbender: The River’s Last Secret
There are creatures in the South that feel like they belong to another time. Not folklore. Not exaggerated. Not misunderstood. Just old. The hellbender is one of them. If you’ve ever stood in a cold, fast-moving Appalachian stream—western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, north Georgia—and felt like the place itself had weight to it… like it…
Southern Reads: The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster
I know, I know… this book is not a true “Southern” book, but we wanted to mix it up for our Book Club, and Bigfoot, well…Bigfoot is sort of awesome! But, at some point while reading The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster, it becomes clear that the book is…
Venus Flytrap Facts, Habitat, and Care Guide | North Carolina Native Plant
The Venus flytrap: everyone’s seen it snap shut on a bug, but most folks don’t realize it’s a true Southern original. This isn’t some exotic curiosity from deep in the jungle, or a greenhouse novelty that wandered in from nowhere. It’s rooted in a very particular patch of the American South—wet, wild, and fire-shaped, right…
Southern Reads: On Trails
For our January 2026 Book Club selection, we read On Trails, a book that quietly reshapes how you understand movement, land, and the invisible systems that guide both. Robert Moor’s On Trails is not a hiking memoir in the traditional sense, nor is it a straight work of natural history. Instead, it is a slow,…
SBP Podcast Episode 13 : High Tide, High Times (Part 2): The Gentleman Smugglers & Operation Jackpot
When most people think of drug smuggling busts in the United States, they picture high-speed chases in Miami or massive DEA raids in Los Angeles. Few realize that one of the most significant crackdowns in American history didn’t start in those big cities, but along the seemingly quiet coastlines of South Carolina. In Part 1…