The Five-mile Creek Greenway consists of two pathways, one being a 3-mile walking trail around the tiny town of Brookside. The trail winds around a campsite and follows Five-mile Creek. The other is a repurposed Birmingham Mineral RailRoad consisting of a corridor of crushed stone starting at Black Creek Park in Fultondale and running under US-31 and I-65, through the two well-maintained Black Creek parks along the creek and then via a high bank above Black Creek on the left until it reaches Shady Grove Road and the town of Gardendale. The first stretch is three miles, and the second stretch after Shady Grove Road is 2 miles.
The trail runs East to West until it turns North for a while along Plum Road – it also used to be called Jew Hollow Road, Jew Hollow being a mining camp operated by the Pratt Coal & Coke Company at a mine north of Dogtown, says BhamWiki, including the information that three dry-goods stores operated by the Gordon, Kronenberg and Levowitz families largely explain the name. The road that parallels the trail goes through Coalburg. At the East end is the Fultondale Coke Oven historical park with remnants of bee-hive ovens.
The rail trail is flat and approachable for walkers, new bikers and children. The developed crushed stone path ends shortly after you come to a commemorative shelter with a red-painted bicycle. Five-mile creek and Black Creek were considerably polluted during the period of productive coal extraction in the Warrior Coal Fields northwest of Birmingham, but now there is interest in cleaning up the rivers and creeks, although more residential communities have also been established in this area. Five-mile creek paddling route information is available here at the Brookside, Alabama website. Here is a useful map and more information about Five-mile Creek canoe launches.
Black Creek originates from various sources in Fultondale and flows into Five-mile Creek – which you can see here at the left about a week after a tornado struck the area, so it’s flowing pretty fast, it seems to me. This location is at the Canoe Launch in Brookside where they will drive you up the creek a piece and deposit you with a canoe or kayak to float back to the launch where you will recognize it by a small stop sign.Five-mile Creek is much more extensive than Black Creek and is said to originate at a spring in Chalkville. It is actually 43 miles long and winds constantly in its path, eventually flowing into the Locust Fork River.
