What you are reading
Alabama Saloli is a trail notebook from Killen, in the Shoals — Lauderdale County, on the Tennessee River between Florence and the locks. Saloli is the Cherokee word for squirrel. The voice is a gray squirrel on purpose. The history underneath it is not a joke.
The useful parts of the site are the marker notes, the verse stash, the porch recipes, and the baseball desk. Weather is a live sky report for seven Alabama cities. Gallery, painter, I Spy, and Acorn Run are toys. Toys are allowed. They are not the reason the nest exists, and they are not a substitute for a page that tells you something.
If a page is only a button, a picture, or a game, do not treat it as the site. Start here, then walk the marker trail.
How a marker note is built
Alabama’s roadside markers are usually metal plaques set by a local class, a historical society, or the Alabama Historical Association. A plaque is short. It names a place, a year, and one fact the county wanted drivers to stop for. It does not tell you what happened before the plaque or what is still standing.
Each note on this site tries to carry four things:
- The place you can actually stand — town, road, or park.
- The county, so a Shoals marker is not mixed up with one in Hale or Jefferson.
- The year that matters, not the year the sign was bolted down.
- A trail note in Saloli’s voice after the public history, so you can tell the two apart.
A Killen note can start at Lock Six: the Muscle Shoals Canal, the 85-foot drop in 14 miles, the 1918 closing, and the backwater of Wilson and Wheeler. The same shape fits Handy’s Florence cabin, FAME, 3614 Jackson Highway, Ivy Green, or the Sheffield months of a teenage Harland Sanders. Farther trails — Moundville, Horseshoe Bend, 16th Street Baptist — belong when the plaque is real. Alabama history does not stop at the river bridge. The trail page only shows markers the nest keeper has buried.
If a date or a spot is wrong, say so on X @AlabamaSaloli. A marker that cannot be corrected is just a story with a bolt in it.
The animal on the masthead
The portrait is an eastern gray squirrel, Sciurus carolinensis. That is the common squirrel of north Alabama yards, pecan orchards, and oak woods. Grays cache nuts one at a time, forget a share of them, and plant the next oak by accident. They are diurnal. In a Shoals winter they stay active. They do not den up for months the way a groundhog does. A cold week means shorter trips and a fatter tail over the feet, not a disappeared animal.
What they take from a Killen picnic is not mysterious: pecans, acorns, sunflower seed, and any watermelon left on a low table. Chocolate is off the list. Bird feeders are a negotiation they usually win. Fox squirrels, the larger rusty ones, show up in more open pinelands farther south and are a different animal. If the tail is gray and the yard is in the Shoals, you are looking at the same species as the nest portrait.
None of that is a license to feed them junk, and none of it is a pet guide. A wild gray that takes seed from a porch is still wild. The site’s job is to notice them, not to collect them.
What is ours, and what is not
- Verses are public-domain scripture in a plain KJV-style wording, filed as daily, weekly, or seasonal. They are not a commentary and not a church.
- Markers mix published local history with a trail note. The note is the opinion. The place and year should be checkable.
- Recipes are porch food — pecans, peanuts, cornbread — written so a human can cook them. Flip a card for ingredients and method.
- Weather is a forecast from Open-Meteo for Florence, Tuscaloosa, Mobile, Birmingham, Montgomery, Auburn, and Huntsville. It is not a National Weather Service warning desk.
- Baseball is a Shoals diamond desk, from Rickwood to the Trash Pandas, not a wire service.
- Merch is print-on-demand on TeePublic. This site does not take the payment.
Ads, on purpose
Some pages may show Google AdSense. Ads do not write the markers, and they do not appear on the nest-keeper desk or on Acorn Run. If a page feels empty next to an ad, that page is failing. The fix is more trail, not another unit. Details on cookies live in the privacy note.
Corrections, recipe swaps, and “you missed a marker” notes go to the contact trail.