Southerners developed an acute sense of place as a result of their dramatic and traumatic history and their rural isolation on the land for generations.
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The first inhabitants of the region, Native Americans, saw the land of the Southeast as sacred ground, with all the happenings in their specific places related to the rest of the cosmos. Native Americans named prominent physical landmarks and plants and animals in their local areas; their place names survive as evocative descriptions of the landscape.
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Folk artists draw from the long memory of people living in isolated rural areas for generations. They learn from older generations and convey the texture of life in a particular southern place through painting, carving, sewing, and other crafts.
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(Sociologist) John Shelton Reed has concluded that "southerners seem more likely than other Americans to think of their region, their states, and their local communities possessively as theirs, and as distinct from and preferable to other regions, states, and localities."
from the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Charles Regan Wilson, general & volume editor (Vol #4, page 254)
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