About the site

FIVEMILE tells you what is going on in Graysville, Cardiff, and Brookside right now. The weather. The creek. When the council meets. What is happening this weekend. That is the whole idea, and it is why the address is fivemile.now.

This is one place. One creek, the same hills, the same weather over all of it, and a good many of the same families. We cover it that way.

Thirteen more places along this creek belong to it too. Coalburg was a mining camp, where Sloss, the same company that bought the Brookside mine, worked it with prisoners leased from Jefferson County. Republic is where the creek is measured, so every reading of the water on this site comes from there. Three of the sixteen took a charter and the rest did not, which is the only line worth drawing between them, and all sixteen have a place in Heritage.

• 📣Put it where people can find it. What the weather and the creek are doing before you go out in them, where the greenway runs, and what is being planned for here. We put it up plainly and leave the deciding to you.
• 🕰️Keep it afterward. A year from now somebody wants to know what the creek did last March, or what used to stand on a lot. The Facebook groups are good for talking and no use for remembering. This is the other half.

Photographs, announcements, and events are welcome from anybody in any of the three towns. Write to fivemilec@gmail.com.

By sending us a photograph you are giving us permission to publish it on this site with your name, unless you tell us not to.

• 🤝Be neighborly. Treat everyone the way you would if you ran into them at the mailbox. Disagreements are fine. Disrespect is not.
• 🚫No hate speech, bigotry, or discrimination. Anything that targets a person for their race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or identity will not be approved. Period.
• ✍️You are responsible for what you send. Everything is reviewed before it goes up, and anything published here is published because a person decided to publish it.

Tell us and we will fix it. Write to fivemilec@gmail.com. Somebody reading this almost certainly knows more about some corner of these three towns than the site does, and that is the point.

My name is Joe Graham and I put the site together.

My family has been in this part of Jefferson County for eight generations. The Graham side is from Mount Olive, where we still keep a family burying ground. My mother's people lived closer to the water. My grandfather kept a garden in Republic, and that is where I learned this creek, crossing the underwater bridge and fishing with him on hot afternoons.

I served on the Cardiff town council, in Seat One, from 2018 until February 2024. I watched the town's government come apart from the inside, and that is part of why this site exists.

Most of the photographs here are mine. If you have one you would like to see featured, send it to fivemilec@gmail.com.

• 🛠️I use AI, and I answer for it. Claude helps me write the code, draft pages, and check my work. If I ever put AI to work on these pages in a new way, this section will say so before it happens.
• ⚙️Some of it runs on its own, by rules you can read. The news page gathers headlines twice a day and sorts them by written rules, with every headline linked to whoever reported it. The archive search and the monthly edition work the same way: they count what is on file and fill in sentences written in advance. Nothing on these pages is made up by a machine while you read it.
• 📷Some things are never made up. No generated photographs, and no invented quotes, people, dates, or history. When something is not known, the site says so. Around here people can recognize their own grandparents in a picture, and a fake one would be unforgivable.
• 🙋The mistakes are mine. Using a tool is no excuse for getting something wrong. Tell me and I will fix it, and say that I fixed it.

This is an independent community website built on personal time and personal money. Contributions support the development, upkeep, hosting, tools, and expansion of the site itself. They do not go to the City of Graysville, the Town of Cardiff, the Town of Brookside, or to any official municipal account.

I am building this because these three towns are home, and I want the place to have a living record that is useful, welcoming, and worth returning to. Support helps me keep documenting it, improving the site, and adding the tools this project still needs.