Alabama's original beach party
The National Shrimp Festival has been held on the second weekend in October since 1971, according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama. The Coastal Alabama Business Chamber runs it with hundreds of volunteers, and its own site calls it Alabama's original beach party. Organizers put the crowd at nearly 250,000 over four days, and getting onto the festival grounds costs nothing.
The food is the main act. More than 50 local and regional vendors cook shrimp boiled, fried, steamed and every other way, alongside crab cakes, conch fritters and lobster rolls. Two stages run music all four days, and there are arts and crafts booths, a sand sculpture contest, a children's village, a 5K and a pageant. The grounds sit at the public beach where Highway 59 meets East Beach Boulevard.
The 2026 festival was set for October 8 to 11 and then called off. Organizers canceled it because of Tropical Storm Isaias, citing forecasts of high winds, heavy surf and rain all weekend, and put the safety of visitors, vendors and volunteers first. The chamber has already posted the next one: October 7 to 10, 2027.
How shrimp built a beach town
Until the 1940s this was mostly beach and wetland that few people could reach. The Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, finished in 1937, opened the area up. The first beach hotel went up in the early 1940s at the end of a rough road, and the post office opened in 1947. Gulf State Park was dedicated in 1939 and now covers 6,150 acres, with two miles of beach.
Shrimping grew with the town. Local boats worked from around 1918, mostly catching bait for other fisheries. Around 1956, deep water trawling for shrimp to sell as food became common, and shrimp turned into an economic mainstay. That same year residents won a city charter, which a judge threw out in 1957 before the Alabama Supreme Court restored it in 1958. The town has since come back from Frederic in 1979, Ivan in 2004 and Sally in 2020.
