Penn State Abington Professor Wrote A Book Highlighting 'South Of The Border' Billboards

ABINGTON, PA — Anyone who has driven up and down the East Coast has surely come across those iconic signs for 'South of the Border,' the roadside attraction located just over the North Carolina state line in South Carolina.

One such traveler who became so completely enamored with those South of the Border signs and billboards was P.J. Capelotti, a professor of archaeology at Penn State's Abington campus.

Capelotti, who has spent more than four decades recording the history and archaeology of "mudflats and marshes and interstates and aeronauts," according to Penn State Abington, recently published a book about the so-called 'gateway to the southeast' titled "Your Sheep Are All Counted: A Roadside Archaeology of South of the Border Billboards."

The book, which is available through Whitman Publishing and elsewhere, delves into the history of South of the Border, which opened back in 1949 as a small beer depot in response to an alcohol ban in neighboring Robeson County, North Carolina, but went on to rise to the status of cultural icon.

"In the decades since, it has evolved into an enduring roadside attraction replete with shopping, food, motels, games, gambling and more," reads a Penn State Abington news release about the book's release.

Capelotti — whose research interests, according to Penn State Abington bio, include history, archaeology and anthropology — called South of the Border "perhaps the last great Eastern Seaboard survivor of the unique attractions that once lined America's roadsides."

"Highway billboards are notoriously difficult to pin down in time and space," Capelotti said in a statement. "We think of them as more or less permanent wayside navigation markers along our roads and byways, when in fact they appear, evolve, and vanish for a variety of reasons: changing advertising campaigns, increasingly harsh and unforgiving winds and weather, and the roads themselves being re-routed, widened or straightened."

According to the university, Capelotti used thousands of surviving images of South of the Border signs and billboards to create a visual catalog of several hundred billboards advertising the iconic highway stop.

Most of the images come from Capelotti's own collection, which he snapped during the decades of driving through the American south in his pickup truck.

Other images were taken during the 1980s by University of Pennsylvania architecture scholar John Margolies, according to Penn State.

"For those of us who were young passengers on the drive between the Northeast and the South in the '60s and '70s, South of the Border planted a love and a nostalgia for billboards in our young brains as our post-war families ventured their station wagons onto US-301 and later I-95 in search of the beaches of Florida," Capelotti said in his statement.

Today, South of the Border offers a wide array of things to do, including family attractions, dining and shopping.

It also contains Reptile Lagoon, which South of the Border says is the largest indoor reptile display in the entire United States.