A small linguistic misunderstanding rippled outward from Fairhope, and it is worth setting straight, because it says something about how a place gets read from the outside.
Mayor Tim Kant, quoted on the growing popularity of small electric carts as a means of short-haul transportation, observed that they might prove especially popular in the “fruit and nut section” of town. The phrase raised eyebrows among some alert-to-prejudice readers elsewhere, who took it as a slur aimed at the people who live there.
It was nothing of the kind.
Fig, Orange, Pecan and Satsuma
As Fairhopers and most nearby residents of any duration are well aware, the “fruit and nut” section refers not to the residents but to the street names. The older neighborhood near downtown is laid out along thoroughfares named Fig, Orange, Pecan, Satsuma, Pomelo and their kin — a naming convention that gave the area its nickname long before anyone thought to be offended by it.
“We’ve always called it that,” Kant said. Then, with the resignation of a mayor who has been quoted before, he added: “Maybe I should say the older section of town when being quoted for publication.”
Why the streets are named that way
The names are a legacy of Fairhope’s origins. The town was founded in 1894 by a group of Iowa reformers who established a single-tax colony on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, inspired by the economic theories of Henry George. They laid out a town of generous lots and wide streets on a bluff overlooking the water, and they named those streets for the fruit and nut trees that flourished in the Gulf Coast climate — satsumas above all, the cold-hardy citrus that became a commercial crop across Baldwin County and lent its name to a Mobile County town as well.
The result is a neighborhood grid that reads like an orchard inventory, and a local shorthand that has survived more than a century of newcomers.
The carts
The subject that started it all — low-speed electric vehicles — was not incidental. Fairhope’s older section is precisely the kind of place where they make sense: flat, compact, walkable, laid out on a grid, with a downtown a few minutes from most front porches and a bluff-top park at the end of the street. Communities across the Gulf Coast were beginning to grapple with where such carts could legally operate, and Fairhope, with its short distances and steady stream of visitors, was a natural candidate.
The misunderstanding was, in the end, harmless. But it is a familiar experience in a town like Fairhope, which has spent the last several decades being discovered — by retirees, by tourists, by magazine writers ranking small Southern towns — and which now must occasionally explain itself to an audience that did not grow up knowing which streets are named for citrus.
The people who live on Fig and Pecan know. They have known for a hundred years.