Loxley, Alabama

Loxley is named for a Michigan lumberman who came south to cut pine. Around nineteen hundred, John Loxley established a logging camp in the virgin longleaf pine forests of southern Baldwin County, setting up a sawmill and a small-gauge railroad to haul timber out of the woods. Workers drawn by the camp stayed on, and a town grew around them.

The train depot opened in nineteen oh six on the Fort Morgan Line, and the post office followed, making the settlement official. As the pine forests were exhausted and the lumber industry faded, Loxley's farmers turned to strawberries, which thrive in the sandy Gulf Coast soil. The Baldwin County Strawberry Festival, held every spring, is the town's claim to fame, celebrating a crop that replaced the trees that built the place.