THOM 12 | Spring / Summer 2019

Catalysts
“Due South has gone through several
iterations,” says the center’s board president,
David Middleton. “It’s awesome to see how
far we’ve come, but I think it [Due South] is
still evolving a little bit. Part of celebrating
the music and artisans of our region the right
way is that we never let this experience stay
stagnant. We never get too comfortable.”
From its earliest days, Due South has been
an open-air entertainment experience
with just enough grit to make it not only
palatable but delicious. The springtime
festival’s reputation as a shared event where
friends can come together to celebrate
a love for music and food is no happy
accident, though.
For his part, Due South’s co-founder
David is admittedly not a musician, but
as a graduate of Vanderbilt University
in Nashville, Tennessee, he has a love of
music ingrained in him. So it makes sense
that during a joint family vacation with
fellow Thomasville creatives Ben and Haile
McCollum, when an idea for how to sustain
the friends’ shared passion came up, it
struck a chord in all of them.
“We were all sitting at an outdoor concert
in Idaho and thought, ‘Thomasville needs
something like this,’” says Haile, owner of
Fontaine Maury and a fellow Vanderbilt
alum. “This was before First Fridays,
before everyone started celebrating our
downtown, the way we do now. It just
seemed like an event our neighbors would
love to come together for.”
At the time, Haile held a spot on
Thomasville Center for the Arts’ board
(which David now oversees) and knew
that the nonprofit was on the hunt for a
springtime festival that could balance
out its fall series, the Plantation Wildlife
Arts Festival.
And soon everything began to harmonize.
What started as a conversation between
friends has resulted in an experience, one
that has completely changed the way a
community lives in a section of its city.
Right on cue, Due South sang life into the
new Creative District, an area surrounding
Thomasville’s Ritz Amphitheater, which
had yet to make a name for itself among
locals. The concert sold out the very
first season.
Amping up the coolness factor of this
artistic, albeit rural, community was step
one, but Due South quickly evolved into
much more. In a few short years, layer on
layer was added to what had begun as only
a single-day event to create the lineup
we know today.
“This has been the goal all along,” says
Michele Arwood, the executive director
of the center and another major piece of
the puzzle. “We wanted Due South to feel
completely different from anything else
going on in our region and allow it to evolve
over time. The best way to do that is to
involve the community in the design and
music lineup every year.”
What started as a conversation between friends has
resulted in an experience, one that has completely
changed the way a community lives in a section of its city.
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