Paring Old Dixie Down: The Dixie Highway and the Mapping of a Vernacular South

Abstract

This study attempts to approximate the boundaries of the American South using the frequency of “dixie” in the names of public establishments. Our analysis discovered anomalous clusters of these establishments in the immediate vicinity of the old Dixie Highway system. This nascent highway system acted as a significant driver of tourism and commercial development during the early 20th century. To verify the overrepresentation of “dixie” names along the route, we approximated the methods of prior studies, recording all instances of “dixie” from approximately 1,600 phone book directories in the contiguous 48 United States and mapping them by ZIP Code. Using this method, we find 39 percent of instances of “dixie”, in the ten states the system crossed, lie within a 0.5-kilometer buffer of the route. After removing these instances, we demonstrate that their exclusion significantly shrinks the regional hotspot. We conclude that prior scholarship utilizing this technique has inflated the size of the region by including instances of establishments named “dixie” to signal close proximity to the Dixie Highway system. Likewise, we conclude that qualitative scholarship on naming conventions, as well as the theoretical basis for using aggregated names as proxies for vernacular regions, are underdeveloped, and further work is needed in both areas.