Where is the split between the South and Southwest? (Houston: home, theatre)

[ParaguaneroSwag]

We all know the crossroad between the South and Southwest is in Texas. But where exactly is it? Now obviously, most of Texas has a lot of both Southern and Southwestern elements. That’s not going to change. But is there a definitive line that one side is a lot more southwestern with the other being a lot more southern? To me, Houston and DFW are well more southern. With SA and ATX being well mkre southwestern.

[turf3]

Find the place where the angels dance on the head of the pin, and that's it.


Why even post stuff like this?

[alaskaflyer]

I think you've got it. Look at satellite photos. Where the trees fade away...there's the SW. Near the I-45 corridor to the north, and the I-35 to the south.

[ParaguaneroSwag]

Originally Posted by alaskaflyer

I think you've got it. Look at satellite photos. Where the trees fade away...there's the SW. Near the I-45 corridor to the north, and the I-35 to the south.

That’s geographically. But what about culturally? Many parts of Austin still have deep southern ties, just a lot less than Houston and DFW.

[supfromthesite]

American historians often write of a contrast between the South, a closed reactionary society, and the West, free and open and characteristically American. The dichotomy thus presented is a false one. The West is the South. That is, to the extent that the West is a theatre for heroic action, rather than just a place to start a new business, it is the Old South transmitted to a new environment. The cowboy, to the degree that he represents the embodiment of a code of life rather than just a person who tends animals, is nothing more or less than the Virginia gentleman on the plains.

It is no accident that the most famous Western novel, written by a Pennsylvanian, Owen Wister, and set in Wyoming, was called The Virginian; nor that the most memorable character in Robert Service’s Alaska poems was from Tennessee; nor that John Wayne’s best Western movie, The Searchers, begins in 1865 with the hero riding up to his prairie home in tattered gray.

But the Southernness of the American West is not just in the realm of romance. The romance in this case merely reflects the facts. Boone, Crockett, Lewis and Clark, the heroes of the Alamo, Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, Jesse James, nearly all the epic heroes of the frontier were Southerners. The “cowboy humorist” Will Rogers was the son of a captain in the Confederacy’s Cherokee brigade. You will hear nothing except Southern accents today on America’s only remaining frontier, the North
Shore oil fields.

We repeat: The West is only Western because it is Southern, because it bears the impress of the culture of the Old South rather than the Old North. That is why Oklahoma produces cowboys, oil wildcatters, country music singers, writers and scholars, evangelists and outlaws, and Kansas produces wheat and an occasional communist.

-J Evetts Haley

[ParaguaneroSwag]

Originally Posted by supfromthesite

-J Evetts Haley

Yes! For good reasons, people associate the South with African Americans. Great reason of course. But white southerners have a specific culture too. Which extremely abundant as far as Tarrant County and Amarillo. And Austin’s suburbs as well. I always show them this when someone tries to say Austin isn’t a southern city.

[Treasurevalley92]

Physically, at the Treeline.

Culturally....Midland, maybe.

[Treasurevalley92]

Originally Posted by supfromthesite

-J Evetts Haley

There is a town in Idaho called Atlanta that has an interesting history:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta,_Idaho

Also, that town is way back in the middle of nowhere...like as in 2 hours of 1-way gravel roads along a cliff and a river "back there."

[Thoreau424]

Go out west of the Hill Country and look for the Official South/Southwest Border signs

[supfromthesite]

Originally Posted by Treasurevalley92

There is a town in Idaho called Atlanta that has an interesting history:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta,_Idaho

Also, that town is way back in the middle of nowhere...like as in 2 hours of 1-way gravel roads along a cliff and a river "back there."

There's a town called Dixie in that same county. Also one called Mountain Home... Could be after the city in Arkansas? Maybe a long shot