18th annual Whistle Stop Festival set for downtown Irondale

Irondale residents and others will gather Saturday to celebrate the city's history at the 18th annual Irondale Whistle Stop Festival.

The event includes live entertainment, historical displays, children's activities, vintage fire engines, food vendors and other attractions.

The festival is in historic downtown Irondale, an area that inspired Fannie Flagg's book, "Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe." The setting for the story was the cafe Flagg's great aunt once owned, which still operates as the Irondale Cafe.

The festival will take place mostly on 20th Street in an area bounded by First Avenue North and Fourth Avenue South. Admission is free.

Councilman Christopher Crews, who is organizing the event, said musical entertainment, with a variety of styles, will start at 9:30 a.m. and last until 10 p.m. Other attractions at the festival will run from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Those who attend the festival can compete in traditional carnival games, including a ring toss and bean bag toss. They can match wits on an 8-foot-by-8-foot checkerboard.

They can also explore the city's past at the Irondale Historical Society and view the creations at Studio by the Tracks, a nonprofit organization formed in 1989 to provide free art classes to special needs adults and emotionally conflicted children.

Crews said the theme of this year's festival is "stepping back in time."

In 1883, a post office was established as Brevard in what is now Irondale. It was renamed Irondale in 1887, a few months before the four-block town was incorporated, according to the Irondale Historical Society's Web site.

The town's name came from the Irondale Furnace, which made pig iron but was destroyed during the Civil War, before the town was established, according to the historical society.

The arrival of railroads, beginning in the 1880s, spurred Irondale's growth. The Seaboard Railroad began to run through Irondale into Birmingham in 1905, according to the historical society. The Norfolk Southern Railroad's Norris Yard, one of the first automatic switching yards, was built in Irondale in 1951, according to the historical society.

Crews said trains that still roll through the city always add to the atmosphere at the Whistle Stop Festival.

There will be free parking at Irondale United Methodist Church and a free shuttle to the festival, Crews said.