Welcome to the Shoals Fernhill Edition, featuring a favorite neighborhood + a local ritual

Welcome to Fernhill Edition, a community lifestyle publication from Fernhill Realty designed and created to celebrate The Shoals.

We are beyond excited for this new chapter as we dig a little deeper into this beautiful place we call home and get to know our surroundings, our history, our culture, and our neighbors better than ever.

Think less real estate and business updates, more people spotlights, interviews, special events, and feature stories that show you a new way to see your community, or remind you of forgotten corners.

Because Home isn’t just the four walls where you keep all your stuff.

It’s the environment around you and the people who drive the same roads you do.

Home is your community. It's our community.

In that spirit, this blog is a celebration of place.

We look forward to sharing more about it with you every Thursday.

We love The Shoals and its people. And we are honored to have you here with us.

Thank you for reading,

Matt Golley
Fernhill Realty + Fernhill Edition

Feature Story

Seven Points of commerce + celebration

Do you remember the first time you drove through the intersection at Seven Points in North Florence?

If the traffic light stopped you, you may have had to think twice before you were certain which light to follow. And maybe you also noticed there are only six roads that meet at the point, which might make you wonder where the extra road went, or if it ever existed.

For the first several decades the area was established, the 100 block of Howell Street was the seventh road. It ran between Royal and Chisolm and was home to the popular Northside Florist. Today that block is gone. So is the two-story brick building that housed the Whorton Drug Company, which was demolished and replaced with McDonald's.

As early as the 1910s, North Florence was a busy shopping area with businesses similar to today, including a menswear store, a grocer, an ice cream spot, and an auto repair place. While some of the original buildings have been torn down, much of the architecture from the 1950s remains.

Today, the intersection is still famously controversial, and its storefront inhabitants run restaurants and vintage clothing shops, sell esoteric and artful gifts, provide beauty and wellness services, home hardware supplies, and more. Alongside commerce is a creative vibe where artists and makers keep the arts district alive.

Our Fernhill offices are in Seven Points. We chose to call it home precisely because of its unique history, its artistic bent, and the entrepreneurs and savvy small business folks who populate the store fronts of storied North Florence.

Last month we celebrated a live music festival on Wood Avenue presented by Southern Native, a gift shop and screen printer. In a few weeks we will gather for the Seven Points 12th annual art crawl, a steady representation of the area’s dedication to art and its importance in our culture.

We hope you’ll join us.

Local Ritual

Community is the ritual with Abraham Rowe

We asked photographer Abraham Rowe, whose studio resides in Seven Points two blocks from the main intersection, what ritual keeps him creative and connected to The Shoals. Short answer: “Events”, he said.

“Being involved in those community events, [Handy Street Party, Seven Points Art Crawl] I've kind of taken a strong role in helping produce them and being a part of them and promoting them. It's brought me a lot of personal joy, a lot of community connection.

“I get so much satisfaction out of bringing people into our neighborhood and into our business district and seeing it come alive like it was.

“[Seven Points] was a graveyard 12, 14 years ago when we moved in, and now it's kind of starting to come alive. It's just fun to be a part of reinvigorating our neighborhood and to me it's extremely meaningful.”

Abraham says that attending and helping to foster such events also fosters friendships with other entrepreneurs and finding collaborations to work on projects together. “When you're in that situation, you come out of it with a plan or an idea of something else that you're gonna do with this person you saw that you haven't seen in 3 months.”

That magic in connection and inspiring one another is Abraham’s community ritual. We have to agree, it’s a good one.