Citronelle's identity has two layers: 19th-century mineral-springs tourism brought the first wave of named hotels along State Street, and the 1955 discovery of the Citronelle Oil Field — at the time one of Alabama's largest — brought the second. The city sits 34 miles up US-45 from downtown Mobile, far enough inland that summer dewpoints run a few degrees cooler than the bayfront. The Census median year built is 1982 across about 1,900 housing units, with 81 pre-1939 structures in the State Street historic core.
South Alabama Utilities — the renamed Utilities Board of the Town of Citronelle — runs the municipal system from 17 wells in the Pliocene-Miocene aquifer. Those same mineralized strata that fed the 19th-century "healing waters" reputation are the technical reason modern installs here are dominated by hardness and naturally-occurring iron. A softener handles the hardness, which is the part we treat directly; iron in the same groundwater needs dedicated equipment we do not install. Drinking-water RO at the kitchen tap is a common add for households cooking heavily or filling kettles for coffee.
The oil-field heritage matters indirectly for filtration: it has shaped a community that takes groundwater monitoring seriously, and residents tend to be more familiar with water-quality testing language than the typical suburban customer. Periodic third-party panels are a more common conversation here than in the newer Mobile County subdivisions.