I’m almost maybe sure that in South Carolina we were fishing in the vicinity of the Kiawah River, or maybe not. I know we met our guide, John Irvin, at a public boat launch on Folly Island, and that both the Kiawah and the Stono Rivers are near Folly Island. At least I think it was Folly Island.
Coastal South Carolina is a confusing mess of rivers and streams and islands and creeks, and ins and outs and ups and downs. Look it up on Google Earth. Locate Charleston and then study the surrounding coast. It’s like the spread out pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that almost but don’t quite fit together. It’s a jumble, a hodge-podge, a physical kerfuffle . . . What I’m used to in Texas is a reasonably coherent system of big bays and barrier islands. From what I can tell coherence isn’t how South Carolina works.
In South Carolina, even if you stand in the same spot, everything changes over the course of the day. There are tides in South Carolina, tides that demand consideration, tides that changed how we fished. Today, where we keep our skiff in Port O’Connor, the tide will range from a low at 2 pm of -.03 feet, to a high of one foot at midnight. It’s a tide of about 15 inches. That’s a smallish tide, even for Port O’Connor, but add a foot and the tide would be judged large. The moon tonight is a waxing sliver so there’s less lunar pull, and late-fall tides on the Texas Coast are usually low anyway. Sometimes we might get a big tide, two feet or more, but even the small tides move bait, and the moving bait triggers fish to feed. Still, the tides are generally so small they don’t really mandate how we fish.
South Carolina is different. Today at Fort Sumter the high tide at around 10 am will be well over five feet, and the low tide at 4 pm will be just a bit over sea level. That’s a five foot tide. When we fished in South Carolina the tide was taller than me, almost seven feet. Between the morning and the afternoon the tide moved enough so that if I’d only picked a low spot and stood still then sooner or later I would have drowned. At low tide we saw mountains of oyster beds. At high tide the oysters were gone and we could fish in the grass. We could fish where six hours before there was only dry–ok soggy–land.
That South Carolina tide was surprisingly magnificent. It’s not magnificent like the Rocky Mountains or the redwood forests or the Gulf Stream waters, but every day twice a day it is the most splendid thing. I was surprised by it, sure . . . I’m used to itsy bitsy tides and this ain’t no itsy bitsy, but I was also awed by it. The South Carolina tidal flats are better than mere surprise. They are magnificent.
John told us that at low tide South Carolina folk would often harvest a bushel of oysters for home consumption. At home I see oyster beds often enough. Over the years I have lost a good dozen flies to oyster beds. I suspect our skiff’s fiberglass is scarred with oyster scrapes. I suppose that if I wanted I could harvest my own bushel where I usually fish in Espiritu Santo Bay, but in South Carolina harvesting oysters appears to be a way of life. While I might be queasy about eating an oyster I randomly harvested from a Texas bay, for Lowcountry South Carolinians it’s an expectation.
But this is about fly fishing, not oystering. I have a theory about redfish, and my theory mostly involves me not catching them. If I appear, they do not, and South Carolina held true. We fished for redfish with John for two days, and Kris caught a very nice red. I think she caught it sight-casting but I’m not completely sure. I got one hit blind-casting where John told me to cast, which hit I diligently missed. John saved the trip by taking me to an oyster reef where there were small speckled trout, spotted sea trout, and I caught a couple of those blind-casting.
I think I’m required by South Carolina law to mention that speckled trout are not trout, but I don’t think anyone would ever confuse the two. If you squint real hard, spotted sea trout resemble trout in a way that a redfish or flounder or even a black bass do not, and it’s easy to see where they got their popular name. They look troutish. I don’t think though that anyone ever thought they lived in rivers and gobbled mayflies.
Speckled trout aren’t really much fun on a fly rod, but they are the great favorites of Texas gear anglers. They’re voracious, run in packs, are excellent on the table, and are reasonably easy to find in legal sizes. And a trophy winter speck is many a Texas gear angler’s life goal.
But the specks I caught were no one’s life goal. They were pretty, and certainly they satisfied my personal goal of a South Carolina fish, but I felt like I’d left something on the table. I wanted a South Carolina redfish. On the other extreme, I had been ecstatic only a few months before with my tiny North Dakota bluegill. It’s all relative, and with my South Carolina speck I’d left things undone.
Now that I’ve offended all of South Carolina in Part One, it seems worthwhile to mention some other stuff. There’s always some magazine or travel email declaring that Charleston is the very best U.S. vacation destination, even better than Fargo, North Dakota. I’m certain there are many good things to say about South Carolina, and I do like the food. There are lots of fish.
Populationand lGeography
In 2023, there were an estimated 5.374 million South Carolinians, making South Carolina 23rd of the U.S. States by population. In the 1830 census, there were 581,185 South Carolinians, with 265,784 free and 315,401 slaves, more slaves than free. Of the free residents, 7,921 were reported as free colored. Female slaves outnumbered male slaves by about 4,500, and white males outnumbered white females by about 3,000.
There has never been a decennial census when South Carolina did not report some growth, but there were never any huge gains. From 1860 to 1870, during the Civil War, growth was a minuscule .03%. It’s estimated that as many as 20,000 South Carolinians died in the War, so that certainly slowed down the numbers. Between 1920 and 1930, growth was only 3.3%. That would have been the height of the Great Migration and the early beginning of the Great Depression in the agricultural South, so South Carolina is probably lucky to come out with a net gain.
From 1910 to 1930, South Carolina’s Black population dropped from about 55% of the total population to about 30%. During the Great Migration, Philadelphia was a particularly popular destination for South Carolina Blacks, and Philadelphia rhythm and blues would re-migrate to South Carolina juke boxes in the 1960s as Beach Music.
In the most recent census, more than half of South Carolinians live in six metropolitan census areas, the largest being Greenville-Anderson-Greer with 928,195. Nearby Spartanburg accounts for another 355,241. Greenville and Spartanburg are in Upstate. Columbia, the state capitol, located in the Piedmont, has 829,470, and Charleston in the Lowcountry has 799,636. While the combined statistical metropolitan areas are pretty large, there are no individual cities with populations larger than 150,000. Columbia has 133,803, Charleston has 132,609.
In the 2020 census, 60.3% of South Carolinians were Anglo, 25% Black alone, and 5.8% were two or more races. Hispanics were 6.9% of the population.
The state’s three regions, the Lowcountry coastal plain, the Piedmont beginning at the fall line, and Upstate (which includes South Carolina’s slice of the Blue Ridge Mountains), are together mildly uncomfortable when they sit down to Thanksgiving dinner, each boasting pride of place, and each fiercely protecting its perceived prerogatives. I have heard that the state geographically balances things like highway and education funding so that no area feels slighted. It’s the smallest Southern state, 40th in size among the U.S. states with 32,020 square miles. It’s a miracle that so much discord can be be contained by such a small package.
Politics
South Carolina is Republican. In the 2024 election, Donald Trump carried 58.2% of its 2,548,140 votes. In 2020 Trump carried 55.11% of 2,513,329 voters.
Lindsay Graham and Tim Scott, both Republican, are South Carolina’s U.S. senators. There are seven congressional delegates, and only Jim Clyburn, in South Carolina’s most gerrymandered Congressional District, is a Democrat. Presumably the gerrymandering minimalizes the statewide effect of traditionally Democratic voters. Every elected state official is Republican, and in the General Assembly the senate is 30 Republicans to 15 Democrats. The house is 88 Republicans to 36 Democrats.
It’s a mighty red state. The one Congressional District that voted Democratic for President in 2024 was also Jim Clyburn’s Congressional District.
2024 Presidential Election Results by South Carolina Congressional District, Wikipedia.
Pat Conroy
There was never a more geocentric author than Pat Conroy (1945-2016), and in the 70s and 80s he was all the rage. The Prince of Tides, The Great Santini, Lords of Discipline, South of Broad . . . He even wrote a good, readable South Carolina cookbook. I used two of his recipes, the oyster bake and the Frogmore stew, for my daughter’s birthday this year. There are, I suspect, similar recipes throughout the Gulf Coast, but Conroy makes them seem peculiarly South Carolinian.
Readers of a certain age (and I’m certainly one), were introduced to South Carolina through Conroy, and all-in-all it’s a pretty good introduction. Conroy’s families are often as not full up with disfunction, but even his villains have their moments, and correspondingly his heroes have their villainy. It may be a complicated world, but end of the day his books are readable and his place, coastal South Carolina, is likable.
A number of Pat Conroy’s books have made pretty good movies, though not the cookbook. No one’s ever made a movie of the cookbook, and that’s a shame. It might be short on plot, but it would be long on character development, mostly mine.
Food
There are things people eat in the South (including Texas as part of the South) that weren’t traditionally eaten elsewhere: barbecue, grits, okra, greens, cornbread, pecan pie, biscuits . . . From Southern region to Southern region the particular versions of those things vary. In my parents’ house, for instance, we usually ate turnip greens, not collards or mustard greens. Central Texas barbecue is mostly beef, while other Southern barbecue (including East Texas) is mostly pork. Recipes in Shreveport probably have more in common with Dallas than New Orleans.
Questions of race and food and the sources of Southern cooking are fascinating, but as a general matter everyone loves iced tea, maybe sweet or maybe unsweet, fried chicken, and cornbread, maybe sweet or maybe unsweet. Traditionally Blacks and Whites, poor and rich, ate more or less the same stuff, though I would never put sugar in the cornbread. I have tasted it though, and as a child I put sugar in everything else, including rice and grits and iced tea.
Notwithstanding the South’s generalized food traditions, there are some places in the South that are Meccas for food creativity. New Orleans of course, Central Texas for barbecue, and the South Carolina Low Country. For Central Texans it’s all those German and Czech butcher shops, while for New Orleans it’s all that all dat. For the Low Country I suspect it’s a combination of wealth, copious inshore seafood, the preservation of African culture by the Gullah Geechee, and rice.
Other than Louisiana, the ultimate Southern seafood extravaganzas, the Frogmore stew and the oyster bake, hail from South Carolina. South Carolina lays claim to being the source for shrimp and grits and vinegar-based barbecue sauce for its whole-hog barbecues. South Carolinians don’t just eat black-eyed peas, they throw in rice snd whatnot and turn them into hoppin’ john.
I already owned a copy of The Pat Conroy Cookbook, but before we went I dug it out and read parts. I also bought Gullah Geechee Home Cooking, and used it some. The Gullah Geechee recipe for okra gumbo is not so different from my mother’s. It’s tomato and okra based, but of course the author adds shrimp. South Carolinians put shrimp in everything I reckon, including no doubt the cornbread and the iced tea.
In Charleston, at the Fort Sumter gift shop, we bought a copy of Charleston Receipts, the 1950 cookbook of the Charleston Junior League. Whatever negative things one might say about Charleston, The Junior League, or South Carolina, Charleston Receipts is a masterpiece. There are 22 recipes for shrimp alone, including Shrimp for Breakfast and six different shrimp pies.
"Fry bacon until crisp. Save to use later. Add bacon grease to water in which you cook rice . . . add shrimp . . . "
Hampton Plantation Shrimp Pilau, Charleston Receipts, 1950, 38th printing, p. 75. As if these people don’t already have a jar of bacon grease handy.
Fish
We’ve had a good redfish fall in Texas at Port O’Connor, with lots of fish, so we were primed for redfish, and would go to Charleston to fish some more for them. There are other South Carolina fish to fish for, Native brook trout in the Upstate, redeye and largemouth bass, even a striped bass spawning migration, but right now I’m mostly thinking about redfish and saltwater.
When we were last at the skiff in Port O’Connor, I brought home the boat box of redfish flies I’d stowed nine years ago. They were pretty sadly rusted, as though I’d soaked them in tears for all the fish I haven’t caught. I had to throw most of the flies away, and since then I’ve been tying redfish flies to replenish the box and to take to South Carolina. I’ve been using materials and receipts from Sightcast Fishing, which specializes in Texas Gulf Coast flies. They do well-designed variations of classic Texas saltwater flies, their materials are creative, and their flies are pretty. Of course if you can find them, redfish will usually eat almost anything you throw at them, but still . . . it’s nice to know that what I throw looks good to me, even if the fish ignores it.
For much of its history, if you were in need of a moral compass, you could do the opposite of whatever South Carolina was doing and have a pretty good chance of getting things right.1 South Carolina as often as not was a self-righteous, pompous Dickensian church beadle, proclaiming the virtues of starving and beating orphans for fun and profit. It seems always to have been peculiarly obsessed with wealth and status. It’s really hard to like much of South Carolina’s past.
South Carolina was the only original colony whose founders owned slaves. Instead of coming direct from England, a majority of its early settlers came from the sugar plantations of the West Indies, particularly Barbados, where slavery was already a going concern. Charleston became a major slave market for the Colonies, and between 1803 and 1807 South Carolina squeezed through Charleston the last legal shipments of approximately 50,000 slaves. In most slaveholding states, it’s estimated that somewhere north of 30% of whites owned slaves. In South Carolina, the number is estimated at 50%. Until the export in the 1830s of a goodly number of South Carolina slaves and their owners to better cotton land in Alabama and Mississippi, black slaves in South Carolina significantly outnumbered white residents. Until the 1730s, a majority of South Carolinians were African-born.
South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun was the mastermind of the first threat to the Union, the 1830s Nullification Crisis. Because tariffs to protect northern manufacturing increased the cost of goods in South Carolina, Calhoun (then Vice President) came up with the useful notion that a state could nullify any federal law it didn’t like. South Carolina did just that, but before the question could be tested Andrew Jackson worked a compromise with lower tariffs. It’s one of the reasons Jackson is on the $20 bill. Before Lincoln, Jackson first saved the Union from South Carolina.2
In 1856, South Carolinian Congressman Preston Brooks brutally beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor because of an antislavery speech by Sumner criticizing Brooks’ first cousin once removed. Brooks resigned his seat later in 1856 for reasons other than the beating, and was almost immediately re-elected. He died a year or so after the re-election, and good riddance. It was almost four years before Sumner recovered sufficiently to return to the Senate.
John McGee, Southern Chivalry–Argument Versus Clubs, 1856, National Museum of American History (Caning of Charles Sumner by Preston Brooks). McGee’s engraving is wrong in an important respect. According to eyewitnesses, Brooks beat Sumner not with the tip of the cane, but with the heavy gold knob. The cane is on exhibit at the Old State House in Boston.
It is usually remarked that Brooks used a gutta-percha cane for the beating, though gutta-percha is never explained.3
The Bishop of Charleston, Patrick Lynch, was a slaveholder and a prominent slavery apologist. According to The South Carolina Encyclopedia, before the war he was the legal owner of about 95 slaves, most of them the property of the Diocese. He was the Confederacy’s delegate to the Vatican.
South Carolina’s U.S. Senator James Hammond, child molester (of his own teenage nieces) and slave rapist (one of whom may have been his own daughter), dared the free states to threaten Southern slavery in an 1858 speech declaring that cotton was king:
“What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? I will not stop to depict what everyone can imagine, but this is certain: England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South. No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.”
Hubbard & Mix, Negro Quarters, T.J. Fripp Plantation, St. Helena Island, S.C., circa 1863, Library of Congress.
In hindsight, there are three ironical twists to Hammond’s proclamation. First, much of our cotton now comes from India and China, not the U.S.4 If Hammond had been right, even for that moment, he would ultimately have been wrong. Had the South’s secession succeeded, an independent slave South, increasingly isolated and economically irrelevant, would have ultimately failed because someone else would have produced the cotton.
The second twist is that because its government lacked meaningful central authority, the South never stopped producing cotton during the war. Planters continued production, even while the planter class was largely exempted from the Confederate draft. During the war cotton was slipped out of the South by blockade runners or through Mexico. Presumably quantities were reduced, but there was never the cessation of manufacturing that Hammond had projected. Worse, by allowing the production of cotton, the South didn’t grow sufficient food. As the War progressed, starvation in its cities became widespread, and Southern White hunger hastened the War’s end.
Detail of photograph by Henry P. Moore, Slaves on Plantation of Confederate general Thomas Drayton, Hilton Head, S.C., 1862, Library of Congress.
And of course the third twist was that Hammond was just plain wrong. Cotton was not king. The South lost the War and never received the support from foreign nations that Hammond had expected.
Then South Carolina was the first state to secede, and then it kicked off the War by firing on Fort Sumter.
After the War, South Carolina was a leader in voter repression and Jim Crow. It even produced its own powerful version of the Klan in the 1870s, the Red Shirts. In July 1875, at Hamburg, S.C., approximately 100 Red Shirts attacked 30 black militiamen, killing two and then torturing and murdering four more. One white died. The Hamburg Massacre kicked off the Red Shirt violence of the 1876 gubernatorial election. Immediately following Hamburg approximately 100 Blacks and two Whites were killed in Ellenton, and five Whites and three Blacks were killed in Cainhoy.
The Red Shirts at Hamburg were led by Benjamin Tillman, who later served 24 years as a U.S. Senator from South Carolina. Tillman justified the execution at Hamburg of Simon Coker, a black state legislator. Coker had asked to pray. According to Tillman, while Coker was kneeling in prayer, it was declared that he was taking too long and “[t]he order ‘aim, fire,’ was given . . .”, presumably by Tillman. Tillman wrote as justification that at Hamburg the Red Shirts were in a battle to protect the Anglo Saxon way of life, which, whatever that may be, sort of begs the question.
Mike Stroud, Meriwether Monument, 2008, HMdb.org, used in accordance with site restrictions. Monument in John C. Calhoun Park, North Augusta, S.C., commemorating Thomas McVie Meriwether, the white casualty of the Hamburg Massacre, who “gave his life that the civilization builded by his fathers might be preserved for their childrens children unimpaired.”
The home of the founder of the Red Shirts, Confederate Brigadier General Martin Gary, was restored by the Daughters of the Confederacy in Edgefield, South Carolina, and is operated by a 501(c)(3) as a Red Shirt shrine. Admission is $5 for adults.
Segregation was defended in South Carolina into the 1970s. In 1964, Strom Thurmond, a former pro-segregationalist Dixiecrat nominee for President and U.S. Senator from South Carolina, supported Barry Goldwater against Lyndon Johnson and began the exodus of Southern Democrats to the Republican Party.
Brigadier General Martin Gary, founder of the Red Shirts, circa 1861-1865, Duke University. He looks quite the mad zealot.
As an aside, I had assumed that none of my ancestors came through South Carolina, but there are at least a couple of fifth great-grandparents buried near Spartanburg, a Mary [?] and John Birdsong. Birdsong was a Revolutionary War major, and died in 1790, well before the Civil War. By the War my later Birdsong-related ancestors had moved on, though generally not from the Confederacy. They were just in different places. I suppose I carry some of the weight of South Carolina’s history, but one really couldn’t ask for a better last name to ponder than Birdsong. ↩︎
Don’t tariffs just make your eyes glaze over? Apparently we’re going to have to revisit them soon enough. Who knew that tariffs could cause price increases? ↩︎
Gutta-percha is a kind of rubber obtained from a tropical tree, the Palaquium gutta, and the first widely available thermoplastic was produced from its sap. Demand for gutta-percha in the 19th and early 20th centuries threatened the trees. In addition to canes for beating abolitionist senators, gutta-percha was used among other things to insulate the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cables and to revolutionize golf by providing the first solid-cores for golf balls. It is still used for root canals. ↩︎
My Granddaddy was my family’s latest cotton farmer, but certainly not the first. During the Depression he once gave my Momma a bale of cotton to pay for her college tuition, so like a lot of Southerners, Black and White, I have a relatively direct tie to cotton. Notwithstanding the South’s early claim to cotton, now a lot of our cotton comes from somewhere else. It is irony on irony that much of China’s cotton that comes to us in Chinese-produced tee shirts and whatnot is grown by forced labor in the Uyghur region, where China is ethnically cleansing its Muslim minority. ↩︎
For trout in North Georgia we took 5-weight rods with floating trout lines. We used long 9-foot 4X fluorocarbon leaders with weighted nymphs. I took an Abel disc drag reel, kinda the pinnacle of obsessively over-built trout reels, but it didn’t get much of a workout. For all the trout I caught I could have used a spool of bright yellow sewing thread, or kitchen twine, or bailing wire, with any of them tied to a stick I picked up on the riverbank. It would have been harder to cast, but I would have caught just as many fish.
In saltwater we fished with 8-weight rods and floating redfish lines, with 7-foot 16 lb leaders. We used the guide’s flies, which if you squinted real hard looked a bit like tarpon toads. They were prettier flies than what I use at home for redfish. My redfish flies look like deformed bits of cotton plucked straight from the boll and colored brown with a Magic Marker. I forgot to take a photo of the guide’s redfish flies.
We could have used the guides’ rods instead of hauling our own to Georgia, but how could we ever amortize their cost if we didn’t haul them with us? We gotta get our money’s worth.
Barbecue
I found a list of Georgia barbecue places on the internet, and on the way to Savannah we stopped at one. Because I didn’t particularly like the barbecue, I’m not going to mention it’s name. Just remember, it’s somewhere between Ellijay, Georgia, and Savannah. I’m sure there are better places than the one I chose, but Georgia being Southern I expected anything that made a list to be quality barbecue. This wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good either. Maybe I’ll try again someday.
We did get a pretty good Cuban sandwich in Blue Ridge, but as a Texan I have strong barbecue opinions but am mostly ignorant about Cuban sandwiches. I thought it could have used some pickles, but what do I know?
Donuts
We stayed in the northside Atlanta suburbs for wedding festivities. Two mornings we ate Atlanta suburban donuts, once at a utilitarian donut shop next to a gas station, Marietta Donuts, and once at an artisanal donut shop, Doughnut Dollies. Both had good donuts, and Doughnut Dollies managed to walk that fine line between too much imagination on the one side and boredom on the other. That’s not easy to do when you’re hawking artisanal doughnuts. I especially liked the frosting on Doughnut Dollies’ strawberry and orange doughnuts. All that fruit made me feel healthy.
Restaurants
Ok, so the barbecue we tried wasn’t great, but we otherwise ate a lot of good food in Georgia. In eight days I gained eight pounds.
The first night we went to a Korean place, Woo Nam Jeong Stone Bowl House, on Atlanta’s Buford Highway. Atlanta seems mostly to be either Anglo (50.7% in the metro area) or black (32.4% in the metro area), but that’s mostly. There is a Hispanic and Asian population, and Buford Highway is this strange culinary accident where a lot of Asian and Hispanic mom and pop restaurants have landed. I could have gone back to that Korean place for every subsequent meal. The food was so elegant but at the same time so homey and delicious that it was impossible not to be happy. All those dishes of pickled stuff couldn’t have been more beautiful. And all the bowls matched, which is more than you can always say at our house.
I suspect I could eat for days on Buford Highway.
Lunch Saturday we ate at Mary Mac’s Tea Room. It’s an Atlanta meat-and-three African American institution that serves huge–and I mean really really huge–portions of Southern food. Covering the walls they had photos of famous people who’d eaten there. There were several of Jimmy Carter and, of all people, the 14th Dalai Lama. I guess the Dalai Lama knows a good meat-and-three when he sees it. They didn’t ask for my photo for the wall, but I suspect that’s only because I couldn’t clean my plate.
Sunday evening we ate at a Vegan Mexican/Cuban place, La Semilla. Vegan Mexican/Cuban seems to me a strange combination, more because of the Mexican/Cuban than the vegan, but it was completely successful and very hip. I’m sure some of that hipness rubbed off, and you’re now reaping the benefit. Our friend Shelley can’t eat dairy, and she declared the vegan queso the trip highlight, because queso.
In Savannah we ate at The Grey, which is one of Georgia’s best-known restaurants. They priced accordingly, but it was worth it. If nothing else, it’s located in the old Savannah Greyhound Bus station, and who can resist repurposed 1930s streamlined modern art deco architecture? We couldn’t decide what to eat, so we copped out and ordered the tasting menu. They also had the greatest cop-out martini ever, named for one of the owners who could never decide what she wanted. It was advertised as a mix of curated gins and vermouths, with both a twist of lemon and olives. It was the perfect martini for the indecisive, and could only have been improved if they’d both shaken and stirred it. It was excellent, and if I’d drunk two it would likely have been more excellenter. I only had one and I could still barely speak English.
We ate at Common Thread, which was also highly recommended, expensive, and excellent, and we got ice cream at Leopold’s because we were walking down the street and there was a line. Who can resist a line at an ice cream parlor, and if you can, why would you want to? There’s a lot of good food in Savannah. There’s a lot of good food in Georgia, though the jury’s out on the barbecue. Did I mention I gained eight pounds?
The Civil War
Georgia was the industrial heart of the Confederacy. From 1863 to War’s end, Georgia was the final focus of the Union’s Western campaign. After the Confederates under General Bragg defeated the Union under General Rosecrans at Chickamauga, Ulysses Grant took charge of the Western campaign. Grant changed the War. Under Grant, General Sherman led the Union in two of the most important campaigns of the War, the Battle of Atlanta and Sherman’s March to the Sea. I had three great-great grandfathers at Atlanta, two Confederate, one Union. Those Union victories cut off the Army of Northern Virginia, and with Grant’s Virginia campaign the War ended.
Chickamauga, September 18-20, 1863, was a major Union loss, and the War’s second bloodiest battle. There were more than 34,000 Union and Confederate casualties, and more than 4,000 deaths. That means that over three days, 34,000 Americans, Southern and Northern, were shot, stabbed, or blown up, and more than 4,000 of them died. The Union fought at Chickamauga to capture the Chattanooga railroad hub and open Georgia for Union invasion. The South fought to destroy the Union’s Army of the Cumberland. The South won the battle, but under Bragg they didn’t cripple the Union army. Because the South failed, two months later at Missionary Ridge Chattanooga fell to the Union under Grant. That defeat at Chattanooga may well have ended the South.
We visited the Chickamauga battlefield, and weirdly it’s in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Congressional District. It’s odd that one small region could produce two such catastrophes.
Chickamauga National Battlefield. Apple Maps.
Back to Atlanta. In addition to wedding festivities and eating, we visited the Botanical Garden and the High Art Museum, but best of all we visited the strange Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama at the Atlanta History Center. The History Center has a solid presentation about the Battle of Atlanta, of which the Cyclorama is only a part, but the Cyclorama is its own attraction. It’s a 358′ x 49′ hand painted canvas, which is a painting longer than a football field. It may be the largest oil painting in the world.
Some interesting tidbits about the Cyclorama. According to the history center, Southern troops at the Battle of Atlanta outnumbered Northern, but the Cyclorama was painted in the 1880s in Ohio, a Union state. In the painting the South is vastly outnumbered. When the Cyclorama was first moved to Atlanta in 1891, many of the Union soldiers were repainted with grey uniforms to show the South winning the battle. It’s a problem with history. It’s hard not to slant the presentation.
Where We Stayed
In Atlanta we stayed in the Roswell DoubleTree. It was fine, but where we stayed was less important than that we were in the suburbs, and (except for the Atlanta Brave’s Truist Park), a lot of Atlanta eateries and attractions seem to be located centrally within easy driving range of downtown. Every time we went somewhere–well every time we went somewhere other than Total Wine, REI, or the wedding–we had to drive 20 miles. If I ever go back to Atlanta, I’ll stay somewhere central.
In North Georgia we stayed at a B&B, the Overlook Inn. If you’re going to some relatively remote mountain destination, you’re statutorily required to stay in a B&B. It was pretty, and on our second night we ate dinner there. Kris always complains about B&Bs because on the mornings we fish we never get to eat the breakfast, but she didn’t complain about this place, maybe because our friends the Marmons were there. And the dinner we ate there–all four of us had the smoked trout–was great. The Georgia mountain views were also great.
In Savannah we stayed at a restored 1960s motor lodge, The Thunderbird Inn. Who doesn’t like a restored 1960s motor lodge? This one had everything you could want except Magic Fingers, a swimming pool, and free parking. The turndown service was a Moon Pie and RC Cola, and there was 24-hour coffee and popcorn in the lobby. The rooms were small, the colors bright, and the sign was neon, so it was almost perfect in every way. It was also very central, but everything in Savannah seems reasonably central.
Where We Didn’t Go
When we fished in North Carolina we stayed with our friend Bryan, and his family had given him a week in Blue Ridge, Georgia, for his birthday. We went to Blue Ridge, and we had a good Cuban sandwich there, but Bryan didn’t go to Blue Ridge for the Cubano. Bryan went to Bill Oyster’s six-day bamboo rod building class. He hadn’t been yet when we stayed with them, but later he sent me pictures of the classes and the rod he built.
Now I can’t find Bryan’s pictures. They’re on my computer somewhere, probably under my virtual bed, or in a virtual drawer in my virtual closet. They were great photos, and I was jealous. Bryan made a beautiful rod.
Bill Oyster is famous for his rod-building class, and maybe more famous for his bamboo rods and his metal engraving. Bamboo rods aren’t explicable. They’re best compared to an old Jaguar E Type, or a 1956 Martin D-28, or a first edition of Absalom, Absalom. It may not be the most useful thing in the world, but it’s so . . . irreplaceable, beautiful, timeless . . .
One of Bill Oyster’s bamboo rods built for Jimmy Carter. Photo shamelessly cadged from OysterBamboo.com
And Bill Oyster makes some of the most beautiful bamboo rods in the world. He made two for Jimmy Carter, who was a serious fly fisher. They were gorgeous things, with gorgeous engraving. Oyster told a story to the American Fly Fishing Museum about how he made the first rod for President Carter, and how Carter was going to fish it a bit, sign it, and then it would be sold as a fundraiser for the Carter Presidential Library. Carter fished it a bit and then told the Library that they’d better buy another because he wasn’t giving back the first.
I remember talking to Kris after Bryan went to Blue Ridge, and she just didn’t get it. Why would somebody pay good money to build something, when for the same money they could buy a rod from a real builder? I’m still baffled by her response. Why wouldn’t you want to build your own bamboo rod? And also the prices aren’t the same. The rod class currently costs $2,950–and almost all the classes for 2024 are full. Oyster also has some fly rods listed for sale online, and an 8′ 5 weight lists for $5,760. The cheapest rod listed is a 8′ 9 weight saltwater rod for $3,320.
8 5-weight Bill Oyster Master, photo shamelessly cadged from OysterBamboo.com
Isn’t that rod-building class a bargain?
I don’t know though. That 8′ 5 weight looks pretty sweet. I might have to get a prettier reel though. And I might have to give up some stuff, like food.
Benedetto Guitars are made in Savannah, but I’m afraid they’re out of my league. I guess Oyster fly rods are also out of my league.
Playlist
Georgia had a great music playlist. Blind Willie McTell, Gnarls Barkley, Harry James, R.E.M., Cat Power, James Brown, Trisha Yearwood, Gladys Knight, Little Richard, Fletcher Henderson, Otis Redding, The Allman Brothers, The B-52s, Ma Rainey, Indigo Girls, Jessye Norman, Robert Shaw, Robert Cray, Kaki King . . .
There’s also Atlanta HipHop, plus there all those great songs about Georgia. I could listen to Rainy Night in Georgia once a day from here on out, and never get tired of it. There’s Georgia on My Mind, I Been to Georgia on a Fast Train, Midnight Train to Georgia, The Devil Went Down to Georgia, and if you get tired of those there’s Moon River and Skylark.
That playlist is good enough to keep me happy on a six-hour drive, through Georgia, on a rainy night.
Blind Willie McTell
Guitar
I took the Kohno and practiced some. I should have found a transcription of Moon River.
