Right now

FIVEMILE is a community publication for Graysville, Cardiff, and Brookside, the three towns at the lower end of Five Mile Creek in Jefferson County, Alabama.

It carries the weather and the creek, the dates the councils meet, the gardening and the fishing, the photographs people send in, and the coal camp history that explains how three towns ended up in a row along one creek. All of it is kept rather than posted, so what you read here in March is still here in November.

Three small towns can go years without hearing much from each other, and a good deal gets decided in that quiet. This is one place to keep up with all three: what the creek is doing, when the councils meet, what is permitted into the water, and what the ground looked like before any of it. The more people who read it and send things in, the more of it there is to keep.

Sixteen places sit along this creek between Coalburg and the Graysville end, and three of them filed incorporation paperwork. Coalburg was a mining camp Sloss worked with prisoners leased from the county, Blossburg had more coke ovens than Coalburg or Brookside, and Republic is the bend where the creek is measured, so every water reading on this site comes from there. All sixteen are in Heritage.

They are alike for the same two reasons. Coal put most of them on the map, Graysville being the farm town that kept its own shape, and the same water runs past every one of them in turn. The mines are gone. The creek is not.