Down the Old Dixie Highway Through the Cradle of the Civil War

Luverne, Ala.

Just south of this rural county seat along U.S. 331, a dispiriting bong-bong-bong and a dashboard warning light alerted us to that bane of vacation-season travelers: a tire going flat along the roadway. It might not seem a great place to break down. There’s a tongue-in-cheek Internet meme these days featuring an illustrated map of the U.S. with comical state stereotypes and the Deep South walled off as “The DO NOT TRAVEL Zone.”

More ominously, the NAACP and two LGBT organizations issued “travel advisories” earlier this year, darkly suggesting that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s effort to remove critical race theory and discussion of adult sexuality from classrooms puts travelers at risk.

A lot of people are in transit during the summer, many of them Midwesterners like me, headed to the beaches of Florida, trusting the nation’s modern road system, with its well-lit rest stops, travel plazas and full complement of familiar fast-food outlets every 20 miles or so. Compare that with a century ago, when much travel south was by way of the old Dixie Highway, an early-automobile-era skein of roads connecting the Midwest with Florida.

Following the Dixie Highway’s distinctive red-and-white DH signs, Yankee tourists bounced through ragged back roads in the South, camping out along the way, fording overflowing streams, repairing their own breakdowns and saying howdy to the locals. Mind you, this was with Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s incendiary march through the region still a living memory. The Dixie Highway was promoted not only as a commercial and travel necessity, but as a unifying effort. “The meandering, unpaved routes,” College of Charleston historian Tammy Ingram wrote in a 2014 book on the Dixie Highway, were intended as “symbols of modern-day progress that would heal the lingering wounds of the Civil War.”

When our tire alarm went off, we limped back to Luverne—pronounced Loo-verne, population about 2,500—and found Stephens Garage. The lot was gridlocked with cars, trucks and tractors in every imaginable state of disrepair. Inside, a mounted deer head kept watch over a display of hunting supplies. A padlock served as the front door’s security apparatus. Boxes of 5.56 ammunition suitable for AR-15-style rifles were stacked above motor industry T-shirts and camouflage baseball caps. The setting might have unnerved some of my neighbors up north.

Stephens Garage is a family-owned business, and on the afternoon we arrived, it seemed the whole family was there. The matriarch, a smiling woman of 50 or so, took us under her wing as soon as we explained our problem. She pulled a workman off another job to check our tire.

“Can we get these folks back on the road?” she said. “They’re driving down to the beach.” A daughter-in-law smiled out from behind the counter in the business office, where she was seeing to paperwork with a baby girl strapped across her chest. A son attended to other things, then took the baby for a while. A grizzled guy at the parts counter talked an African-American woman through repairs made to her weed-eater and helped maneuver the thing out the door. As we waited, we listened as the mom gave an apparently elderly and puzzled customer instructions over the phone on how to check the oil in his car.

“That’s OK. You just bring it up to the shop and we’ll do it for you, honey,” she ended. Soon after, word came back on our tire. “Just needs a plug,” the matriarch told us. “You’re lucky. Some other folks today needed a new clutch. We had to order it.”

It was good news, but a greater relief was that we had fallen among nice people. Unfortunately, many assume a pleasant and helpful person is masking a certain poverty of character and a lack of respect for progressive social theories. Hospitality and friendliness is regarded as phony, as though a brusque demeanor is a marker for honesty.

The old MTV reality show “The Real World” asked what would happen when “people stop being polite and start getting real.” If memory serves, what happened was that everything from harsh words to heavy furniture flew and the cast split into warring factions.

The Dixie Highway was far from a smooth journey geographically or politically. But it merged North and South “in a quintessentially modern monument to national unity,” according to Ms. Ingram. In 1915, the New York Times

The U.S. has traveled a long and unfortunate distance from a bone-jostling network of rugged roads intended to help heal the Union to a sleek system of four- to eight-lane highways that, for all their speed and comfort, can’t seem to keep the nation from pulling itself apart.

As we were leaving the Stephens family’s garage to get back on the road, I decided to buy a T-shirt and then—as is my tendency—forgot to take it with me. They mailed it to me. That was nice of them.

Mr. Lee is an Indianapolis writer.