Welcome to Brookside, Alabama

St. Nicholas Russian Food Festival

2009 festival Hours:
Saturday November 7 from 10 am to 4 pm.
Sunday November 8 from 12 noon to 5 pm.
The first weekend in November the St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church in Brookside holds the St. Nicholas Russian Food Festival. Begun in 1981, the event increases in attendance each year. St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church welcomes you to its annual Food Festival held the first full weekend in November of each year. Tours of the temple are available.
The ladies of the Sisterhood of St. Olga have prepared the food and pastries from recipes handed down from relatives and friends who immigrated to Brookside from Western Ukraine and what is now known as Slovakia. Be sure to visit our Russian Beriozka Store for imported gifts and souvenirs.
Take-out or eat in. Samples from the menu:
IMPERIAL PLATTER $14.00 Stuffed holupki (cabbage), kolbasa and kraut, baked piroshki (meat pie); boiled pirohy (potato/cheese) halushki (dumplings); cucumber salad, pigachi (cheese/potato bread)
VEGETARIAN PLATE $6.00 Kasha (buckwheat groats) with mushrooms; halushki (dumplings); cheese/potato pirohy; cucumber salad, pigachi

Take a look at the full menu

Brookside Alabama on Five Mile Creek

“Brookside, Alabama, a quiet mining town in western Jefferson County, developed from the efforts of Sloss-Sheffield Iron and Steel Company to produce its own coal for use in the blast furnaces located in Birmingham.  Brookside grew up around the coal mines of Sloss. Brookside’s unique ethnic makeup, however, sets it apart from other similarly founded Alabama towns.  While quite a variety of ethnic groups called Birmingham home, Slovaks were the dominant ethnic group in Brookside.  Slovak immigrants left their homes in Nieletz, Saros, and other villages in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to settle in Brookside, Alabama, in the 1890’s.  By 1910 Slovak families constituted approximately 37% of Brookside’s population and they had established two churches, a school, a social organization, and firmly rooted their eastern European traditions in the fabric of their own, and Brookside’s daily existence.”
Staci S. Simon (Glover)
Masters Thesis 1997
University of Alabama at Birmingham

Brookside Today

Today Brookside is reinventing itself as a recreation destination.  The beauty of Five Mile Creek, abundance of wildlife and rugged hills surrounding Brookside make an ideal location for canoeing, picnicking, fishing, hiking, bicycling, mountain biking and running.  The city is proud to be constructing the western end of the Five Mile Creek Greenway that is planned to extend from Center Point Reed Harvey Park, through Tarrant, Fultondale, Jefferson County, Brookside and Graysville.   When the Greenway is complete the Five Mile Creek Greenway Partnership will connect over 16 miles of rails to trails, 36 miles of canoe trails and over 20 miles of parks and pathways throughout the Five Mile Creek Watershed.

Throughout the development of the Greenway, local history will be the connecting strand, weaving the history of coal into the beauty of the trails.  Coke ovens, coal tipples, miner’s villages, and the oral history of the people will be included in the trail designs.