A Few More Photos from the South

Wrapping up my road trip from South Carolina to Virginia... here are a few not-quite-random photos along the way. First, two signs from Wilmington, N.C.:


What is a trip to the South without a boiled peanut sign?


Wilmington is located on the Cape Fear River, so this name makes perfect sense for a business selling or fixing generators in Wilmington. But if you don't know that geographic reference, it sounds instead a like it's a place that generates fear while located on a cape (like Cape May, for instance), or maybe it generates a fear of capes. (And therefore could be considered a name that's bad for business, akin to the Endwell Animal Hospital).

We also stopped in Greensboro, N.C., which is home to the International Civil Rights Center & Museum, located in a former F.W. Woolworth store where four black students from a nearby college began the wave of lunch counter sit-ins that swept the South, starting in 1960:


Unfortunately for this blog, the museum doesn't allow photography inside, so I don't have any interiors to share, but yes, the museum does contain the original lunch counter, and the full tour does a good job of putting it in context from past to present.


This plaque marks a less well-known and more recent historic moment in Greensboro, which seemed anomalous to me back when it happened almost 40 years ago. Wasn't the Klan dead, I thought then: but today it seems a bit too current.

Finally, two quintessential Southern images:


A magnolia, showing its second flush of blooms well into July. (This species does not grow in Minnesota.)


And pork brains on the menu at Oscar's Restaurant in Roanoke Rapids, N.C.