12 Things Alabamians Do That Baffle the Rest of the Country

Alabama’s constitution runs two and a half times longer than the world’s next-longest constitution.

That’s not a typo.

At 369,380 words, it’s long enough that dozens of pages exist just to settle business in one single county.

These are the habits Alabamians live by that baffle the rest of the country.

1. Picking a Side Before a Name

Ask an Alabamian a question, and there’s a decent chance you get a color before you get an answer.

Crimson or navy, that’s the real handshake.

The Alabama-Auburn football rivalry, nicknamed the Iron Bowl after the state’s old steel and pig-iron industry, has run since 1893, but the two schools refused to play each other for 41 straight years over a fight about player expense money.

State lawmakers finally stepped in.

The Alabama Legislature threatened to withhold funding from both schools until they agreed to a new game, and the series resumed in 1948.

It hasn’t skipped a year since, and a neighbor will fill you in on the score before lunch the next day whether you asked or not.

2. Voting on One County’s Business

Alabama’s governing document doesn’t just run the state; it micromanages it.

At 369,380 words, the Alabama Constitution is the longest active constitution anywhere in the world, more than two and a half times the length of India’s, the next-longest document.

That length comes from packing in local business county by county.

Mobile County’s own amendments alone fill dozens of pages.

So when one county needs to settle a hyper-local matter, the whole state sometimes winds up voting on it, not just that county’s own courthouse.

Nobody trims it.

3. Dunking Chicken in White Sauce

Ask for barbecue sauce in north Alabama, and there’s a real chance the bottle that lands on your table is white, not red.

It looks like ranch.

The taste doesn’t come close.

Big Bob Gibson mixed the first batch of mayonnaise, vinegar, and black pepper in Decatur back in 1925, dunking whole smoked chickens straight into the bucket.

The fat in the mayonnaise kept the smoked white meat from drying out over three hours of hickory smoke.

Almost a century later, Alabamians still smother chicken in it, and they wave off tomato-based sauce as an outsider’s idea of barbecue.

4. Planning Trips Around Dry Counties

Prohibition ended nationally in 1933, but large stretches of Alabama never got the memo.

Twenty-six of Alabama’s 67 counties still ban alcohol sales outright, and several more only allow it inside certain towns.

So the errand run looks different in those pockets of the state.

A shopper who wants wine with dinner just drives to the next town, or the next county, and comes right back.

Nobody blinks.

It’s such a normal Friday-night move that a package store two hundred yards past a dry county line can outsell the package stores sitting deeper inside a wet county.

5. Thanking a Bug With a Statue

Boll weevils wiped out most of Coffee County’s cotton crop in 1915, and Enterprise, Alabama had two choices: Fold, or say thank you.

The town said thank you.

A statue went up downtown in 1919, a woman holding a boll weevil over her head, right in the middle of Main Street.

It’s the world’s first monument built to honor an agricultural pest.

Losing the cotton forced farmers to plant peanuts instead, and peanuts made the county richer than cotton ever had.

A plague became a parade.

6. Crowning a Peanut Festival Queen

That same peanut boom turned into a full festival forty miles south in Dothan, Alabama.

The National Peanut Festival has run since 1938, complete with a parade, a fair, and a beauty queen crowned in the peanut’s honor.

George Washington Carver himself spoke at the very first one.

These days the festival stretches ten days and pulls in well over 100,000 people.

It’s a pageant for a legume.

Nowhere else builds a ten-day fair around the crop that saved it.

7. Throwing Moon Pies, Not Beads

New Orleans gets the Mardi Gras headlines, but Mobile, Alabama beat it to the party by about fifteen years.

Mobile’s Mardi Gras traces back to 1703, making it the oldest Carnival celebration in the country.

Floats still roll through town every year, tossing the usual beads and doubloons.

The real prize flying through the air is a Moon Pie.

Catch a good one, and dessert’s already handled.

8. Tossing a Fish Into Florida

Every spring, crowds gather on the beach at the Flora-Bama, the bar that straddles the Alabama-Florida line, to throw a dead fish across the state border.

The mullet toss is exactly what it sounds like.

Contestants stand in a 10-foot circle on the Florida side and heave a mullet into Alabama, chasing throws that have topped 150 feet.

It benefits local charities.

That’s the whole event.

It happens every year on the last full weekend of April, rain or shine.

9. Rolling Two Oak Trees

Win a big game at Auburn, and fans don’t head to a bar first.

They head to Toomer’s Corner.

Rolling Toomer’s Corner means draping two oak trees in toilet paper until the branches disappear, a tradition that took off after the 1972 Iron Bowl, when Auburn fans stormed the corner with every roll they could find.

The originals didn’t survive.

A rival fan poisoned the oaks after the 2010 Iron Bowl, and the university had to replace them in 2015.

Fans still show up with armloads of toilet paper every time Auburn wins.

10. Racing Rattlesnakes for Fun

Every March, the town of Opp, Alabama fills up with people who came to look at venomous snakes.

The Rattlesnake Rodeo has run for more than 60 years, complete with snake shows, snake races, and a stage full of country music acts.

Handlers work the crowd, showing off live rattlesnakes up close.

Vendors fry the meat and sell it by the plate.

It tastes like chicken, according to just about everyone who’s tried it.

Tens of thousands show up.

11. Wearing Houndstooth Like a Jersey

Paul “Bear” Bryant made a black-and-white houndstooth hat his sideline trademark through the 1960s and 70s, coaching Alabama to national titles in it.

It won over an entire state.

Decades after Bryant retired, houndstooth still works as shorthand for Alabama football.

Fans still wear it everywhere.

Shirts, scarves, purses, coats, even shoes come stitched in the pattern, worn well outside of football season.

A coach’s hat turned into a wardrobe.

12. Training Kids for Space Camp

Huntsville, Alabama built the rocket that put astronauts on the moon, and the city never let anyone forget it.

Everybody calls it Rocket City.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Marshall Space Flight Center designed the Saturn V rocket right there, and Wernher von Braun’s rocket team called Huntsville home starting in 1950.

Kids still show up by the busload.