For 364 days out of the year, the airstrip about six miles west of Depot Square belongs to the United States Navy. Student pilots out of NAS Whiting Field fly touch-and-go patterns over Conecuh County farmland, logging hours on a runway most Evergreen residents never set foot on. It is called Middleton Field, or by its FAA code, KGZH, and it has spent most of its working life as a training ground, not a gathering place.
Then the third Saturday in October arrives, and for one day, the runway apron fills with lawn chairs, food trailers, and a few hundred civilian airplanes that have nothing to do with flight training. This year that Saturday is October 17, and the event on the calendar is the 23rd Annual Sausage Festival and Fly-In, hosted jointly by the Evergreen-Conecuh Chamber of Commerce and the Southeast Regional Fly-In. If you have lived here a while, you already know the day exists. What is less obvious is why it works, and why a county of under 12,000 people ends up hosting an aviation event that pulls aircraft in from across the entire Southeast.
A Runway Built for Cargo, Repurposed for the Navy
Middleton Field was not built with festivals in mind. It went up in 1931 as an emergency landing strip for Contract Air Mail Route 23, one of the small airfields that kept the early airmail system running between larger hubs. The Navy took it over in 1943 as an outlying field for pilots training out of Pensacola, and it still functions that way today under Whiting Field's flight training program. According to a 2007 FAA count, the field logged 134,005 aircraft operations that year, an average of 367 a day, and 96 percent of that traffic was military. The airway beacon at Middleton Field is listed on the Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage, a small marker of just how long this stretch of asphalt has been doing quiet, unglamorous work.
That history matters because it explains what makes the October festival unusual. Most small towns that want an air show have to rent space at a commercial airport or build something from scratch. Evergreen already owns 200 acres of paved runway with a nearly century-old aviation pedigree. The city just has to ask the Navy to share it for a day.
What Actually Happens on October 17
The public-facing part of the day is the part most residents know: arts and crafts vendors, food trucks, a car show, and a kids' area spread across the festival grounds, running from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and free to attend. That is the Sausage Festival half.
Running alongside it, and often overlapping it, is the Southeast Regional Fly-In, known locally as SERFI. This is the part that turns the runway into the main attraction. SERFI brings in aircraft fly-bys, aircraft judging, a Young Eagles program that gives young people a first flight, an FAA safety seminar, pancake breakfasts, and a Fly-Market where pilots and vendors trade parts and gear. Admission runs differently depending on who you are:
- Primary pilots fly in for free
- Adults pay $5 for a single day or $10 for all three days
- Children under 12 get in free
That three-day pricing structure is the detail most people on the ground miss. The public festival is a single Saturday, but SERFI itself is built as a multi-day gathering for pilots, meaning aircraft and visiting flyers are already gathering on the field before the sausage vendors ever set up their tents. The Saturday crowd is seeing the middle of something longer, not the whole event.
Why This Only Works in a County This Size
Conecuh County had 11,597 residents at the time of the 2020 census, and Evergreen itself is smaller than that. A county this size does not have the tax base or the land to build a dedicated event center or an air show venue from the ground up. What it has instead is a working military outlying field that happens to sit on city-owned land, close enough to the Chamber's downtown office at 100 Depot Square that both halves of the day feel like one event rather than two separate ones stitched together.
That combination, a repurposed 1931 emergency airstrip, an active Navy training agreement, and a downtown chamber willing to organize a food festival around it, is not something a larger town can copy easily. Bigger cities have commercial airports with security perimeters and scheduled traffic that make a public fly-in logistically difficult. Evergreen's airfield is small enough, and slow enough most of the year, that opening it up for a Saturday does not disrupt much of anything.
The Rest of the Year at Middleton Field
October is not the only time the runway turns into a public square. Every first Saturday in March, Middleton Field hosts the Collard Green Festival, now in its tenth year as of the March 7, 2026 event. Evergreen has carried the title of Collard Green Capital of Alabama since the state legislature named it so in 1973, and the March festival leans into that with a collard green and cornbread cook-off alongside a steak cook-off and another car show.
Put the two events side by side and a pattern shows up. Middleton Field is not a one-off festival site that happened to work once. It is a recurring civic space that the city and the Chamber return to twice a year, using the same runway for two very different local identities: the collard green town in spring, the sausage and aviation town in fall.
The sausage half of that identity has its own long story. Conecuh Sausage traces back to Henry Sessions, who returned home after World War II and started what he called Sessions Quick Freeze in Evergreen in 1947, a business that let neighbors bring in hogs and cattle to be slaughtered and stored in his rentable meat locker. It was his hickory-smoked pork sausage recipe that outgrew the original business. The company now runs a plant with about 100 employees producing 35,000 to 40,000 pounds of sausage a week, with a retail store and gift shop still operating in Evergreen's Industrial Park. The festival named after that sausage is not a marketing tie-in. It is named after the thing the town has actually been making since before most current residents were born.
If You're Going
A few things worth knowing before October 17 rolls around:
- Arrive earlier in the morning if watching aircraft matters to you. SERFI's own arrival procedures ask visitors to stay alert on taxiways and in parking areas during arrivals and departures, which means the public is walking on active flight surfaces during the event, something that never happens the other 364 days of the year.
- The festival grounds and the fly-in share the same gate, but pricing is separate. Walking the craft vendors and car show is free. Getting close to the aircraft judging and Fly-Market falls under SERFI's day pass.
- Kids under 12 get in free, and the Young Eagles program gives young people a first flight at no cost. Ask at the SERFI booth to see what's available that day.
- If planes are not your thing, Conecuh County's other October options include the Sepulga River Canoe Trail, known for its limestone walls and quieter paddling, and Evergreen City Park, which has a lake, ball fields, and walking trails if you'd rather skip the crowd entirely.
None of this requires planning a trip. It requires knowing that the airfield most of us drive past without a second thought spends one Saturday behaving like the busiest piece of ground in the county, and that the reason it can pull that off traces back to a 1931 airmail strip and a Navy training agreement most residents never think about.
Conecuh County runs on details like this, the kind that do not show up on a map but shape how a place actually works day to day. If you are weighing a move to Evergreen, Repton, Castleberry, or anywhere else in the county and want someone who can talk you through more than the listing sheet, PHD Realty has been working this ground for years. Contact us when you are ready to talk about what living here actually looks like.
