A joke about Alaska, and a phone call that was not one
There was a moment, not long ago, when the idea of staging a family announcement just to watch the reaction was genuinely tempting. The plan was to tell the three adult daughters — all married, all settled in their own states — that if Dad ever retired, Mom and Dad were moving to Alaska to become homesteaders. The point was never Alaska. The point was to see three faces on a FaceTime screen decide, in real time, whether their parents had finally lost their minds.
The temptation came from experience. This is a family with a history of big-move announcements. There was the year in Pascagoula, Mississippi, when they bought an 1850s farmhouse across town that needed a complete refurbishment, and the years when moves carried them across state lines entirely. By now, the daughters have learned that when the phone rings and both parents are on the line with a particular tone in their voices, something is up.
So when the real announcement finally came, it was almost anticlimactic. The husband spoke first, the way he usually does. Your mom and I bought a small lot down south, he told them, and we are going to build our forever home in Fairhope, Alabama. Three faces on the screen nodded and smiled, and one of them answered with something close to relief. Makes perfect sense, she said. West Virginia winters can be brutal.
Nobody mentioned that South Alabama summers can be brutal too. They would find that out soon enough, in the form of a storage facility energy bill.
Roots that run through Pascagoula and the Eastern Shore
The path to Fairhope did not start in Fairhope. It started in Pascagoula, where the three daughters were raised while their father ran a car dealership there for many years, and where the family still keeps good friends. It ran through decades of Gulf Coast weekends — trips to the Eastern Shore, afternoons along Mobile Bay, the farmlands and equestrian neighborhoods east of the bay, fresh seafood whenever the craving hit. The Grand Hotel at Point Clear was a fixture of those visits, as it has been a fixture of the Eastern Shore since the nineteenth century.
When the daughters grew up, they scattered the way children do. One landed in Texas, one in Louisiana, one in Tennessee. The dad stayed involved with his office in Morgantown, West Virginia, which is why the family has kept a residence there and why the winters kept coming up in the conversation. A house in yet another state was not going to shock anyone. What made sense to everyone — even from three time zones of adult children — was the destination.
Fairhope has that effect on people. The city sits on a bluff on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, and it has been attracting arrivals for more than 130 years. It was founded on November 15, 1894, by a band of reformers who followed the economist Henry George and gave their experiment what they thought was at least a fair hope of succeeding. The name stuck. The colony became a city in 1908 with roughly 500 residents, and the newcomers never really stopped coming — artists and writers and craftsmen first, then vacationers who arrived by bayboat from Mobile, and in recent decades, families looking for exactly what this one was looking for.
The numbers tell the same story from the other direction. Baldwin County’s population estimate for 2025 stands around 265,000, and the county has ranked among the fastest-growing counties in Alabama and the nation for a decade, adding roughly 30 percent to its population between 2014 and 2024. Since 2010, Fairhope alone has added more than 9,000 residents, second in the county only to Foley. Most of the people a newcomer meets on the Eastern Shore these days are, like this family, transplants. The welcome they receive is part of the region’s infrastructure as surely as the roads are.
The logistics nobody warns you about
As anyone who has relocated to Fairhope will attest, the challenges of moving in are copious, and all of them are worth the effort in the end — but the middle part is a tangle. This family’s version included a home that sold very quickly in one state and a lease on a condominium that was ending in another, which meant the household’s possessions had to be split three ways: what came to Alabama, what went into storage, and what stayed behind for the West Virginia residence that the husband still commutes to.
The rental that made the transition possible was a house off Highway 181 in Fairhope, arranged through Shamrock Rentals, which walked the family through establishing a temporary residency while the new home went up. For the belongings that had to wait, CubeSmart Self-Storage became the third member of the moving team. General manager Chris Lane turned out to be the kind of local resource that makes a move less stressful — the company’s motto, “It’s What’s Inside That Counts,” refers to the lengths the facility goes to in order to keep its climate-controlled environment genuinely controlled.
That is not marketing fluff in a Baldwin County summer. The facility’s energy bills run $3,000 more per month during the hot season just to keep the units cool, and the staff goes further still, offering solutions for humidity control and musty odors — including a product called Damp Rid, with moisture-absorbing crystals, demonstrated for customers who have just moved a household of furniture into a Gulf Coast August. Anyone who has opened a storage unit on the Eastern Shore in September understands why.
The heaviest single lift belonged to Eastern Shore Transfer, which earned its place at the top of the family’s list of local encouragers. The company sent two strong, dependable young men in a truck all the way to Texas — ten hours each way — to retrieve the contents of the condominium, arriving with the tool kit necessary to disassemble the beds, and reassembling them again once the rental house off 181 was secured. Ten hours down, ten hours back, and beds that slept the family the first night. That is the service you remember.
Family closed the remaining gaps. The middle daughter, her husband, and a soon-to-be-born grandson had recently relocated themselves, from New York City to New Orleans, which put help within a four-hour drive instead of a plane flight. With that support, the work stayed focused on whatever needed to be done next — the only sane way to run a move this size.
A golf cart, a corner lot, and a spec house that felt like home
The Fairhope chapter actually began two years before the moving trucks, on one of those seafood-craving visits down from West Virginia. On that trip, the couple met Walter Billups, a real estate agent for The Colony, whose office was headquartered in a spec house — a charming one-level southern cottage, exactly the style and size of home the couple could already picture themselves living in. Sometimes the best sales office is simply a good house.
Billups did not need a hard pitch. He loaded them into a golf cart and rode them through the development’s properties, past the stately southern oaks and the sprawling green spaces that would sell the place more effectively than any brochure. This corner lot is still available, he said, and that was effectively that. The lot was secured, and the couple began the process that turns a dream of a forever home into a construction schedule.
The developer’s high standards made the decision easier. Working with Stuart Construction, the family was assigned an architect, a designer, and a superintendent, and the build proceeded under that professional leadership — one decision at a time, one walkthrough at a time, with the couple overseeing the project in person from the rental off 181 while the husband continued to split his weeks with Morgantown.
They make it work. That has been the arrangement all along: a business in West Virginia, a residence in West Virginia, a construction site in Fairhope, and a family spread across four states, all slowly converging on a bluff above Mobile Bay where a town founded by utopians in 1894 keeps proving that a fair hope, given enough time, becomes a home.
Weeks away
As this is written, the countdown is measured in weeks. The rental off 181 still holds the beds Eastern Shore Transfer reassembled, the CubeSmart unit still holds the rest, and the forever home is nearly ready for its furniture. The daughters, it turns out, never needed the Alaska joke. The real announcement — Fairhope, of all places — made perfect sense to them on the first try.
That is the quiet endorsement in every story like this one. The children who grew up in Pascagoula and scattered to Texas, Louisiana, and Tennessee looked at their parents’ plan and recognized it immediately as a return, not an escape — back to the bay, back to the seafood and the oaks and the equestrian farms, back to the Eastern Shore they had been visiting all their lives. The winters of Morgantown had their say as well. But the last word, as it usually does on the Gulf Coast, belonged to the water.
For the growing ranks of newcomers filling in Fairhope’s new neighborhoods, the lesson of this household’s move is a practical one. The town that began as an experiment in 1894 has had more than a century to perfect the art of receiving new arrivals, and it shows: a real estate agent with a golf cart, a moving company that will drive to Texas and back without complaint, a storage manager who worries about your furniture’s humidity, and a builder with an architect, a designer, and a superintendent assigned to your family by name. A forever home, it turns out, is built by a whole community before the first wall ever goes up.