The City of Brewton is getting ready for a big birthday.

In conjunction with the state Department of Tourism’s Year of Small Towns and Downtowns, Brewton is celebrating its 125th anniversary as well as the 30th anniversary of the Alabama Blueberry Festival.

In addition to the traditional Blueberry Festival events, the weekend of June 19-20 will include a concert, outdoor movie and fireworks. Churches have also been encouraged to hold homecomings on that weekend.

We’ve been looking forward to this event for months, even using “125” as part of our theme for our annual Progress edition that published in February.

As we approach the anniversary weekend, we will be looking at more ways to help celebrate our community and its residents.

In today’s issue, Lisa Tindell reports on the annual Blueberry Festival cookbook — a tradition that was started by the late Peggy Bracken. So many of Brewton’s residents have been involved in different aspects of the festival and of our treasured history over the years, and we look forward to telling about more of those connections.

We hope that some of you will share your favorite memories of Brewton in coming weeks. If you have a memory to share, please email it to newsroom@brewtonstandard.com with the subject line “Brewton memories. We will publish some of the submissions in an upcoming issue.

Kerry Whipple Bean is publisher of The Brewton Standard. She can be reached at 867-4876 or by email at kerry.bean@brewtonstandard.com