Uncle Fletch will Hit the Athens Square on Saturday, Sept. 26

The Uncle Fletch Hamburger Festival will return to the Courthouse Square in Athens from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 26. There is no admission fee for the festival.

"I get so excited about Uncle Fletch that it is hard for me to keep myself in check," said festival committee chairman Jeff Weinstein. "This year is going to be even better than last year, it's going to be spectacular."

Just like last year, there will be the traditional hamburger cook-off to crown the best burger chef around, the McDonald's burger eating contest, Whataburger bobbing for burgers, and the Weinstein Team mooing contest. This year, however, the committee is cranking things up a notch by adding $1,000 in prize money to the cook-off. Prizes include:

• $600 for First Place
• $250 for Second Place
• $150 for Third Place
• Trophy for Uncle Fletch Spirit
• Trophy for Best Decorated

"I think if you love competition, you need to be part of Uncle Fletch. What you have is people coming from all over that want to claim that they have the best hamburger in the world," said Weinstein.

There is still time to enter a cook team. Call Autumn Davis at 903-677-5333 for more information. The entry fee is just $20.

Another new feature for 2015 is the addition of the Extreme Engineering zipline. Extreme Engineering said that all proceeds from the zipline during the festival will go to charity.

"Basically, you will be ziplining through the square. How awesome is that?" said Weinstein.

The committee also has the "pickle plunge" dunk tank, the TVCC Cardettes and band, and several vendors lined up for the festival.

Make sure to come hungry, because all sorts of food is scheduled to roll in.

First are the hamburger vendors, the local folks who are going to be dishing up the festival's namesake. They include:

• The Athens Christian Preparatory Academy
• Chick's BBQ
• The Uncle Fletch Booth, manned by Kris Baumann - TVCC Men's Head Basketball Coach

There will also be snow cones provided by Parad-ICE Sno Shaved Ice.

And for those people who might want something to go with their burger, there will be four specialty food trucks coming down from Dallas. They include:

• The Butcher's Son
• Texas Burrito Company
• Mad Grill - Clean Mean Pan Asian Cuisine
• Very Individual Pizza - flat bread rogue pizza

All the fun is planned to celebrate Athens as the Home of the Hamburger, the invention of Fletcher "Uncle Fletch" Davis.

Uncle Fletch served his then-unnamed sandwich at a cafe on the Athens square in the late 1880s. Then in 1904, he traveled to the St. Louis World's Fair where a reporter from the New York Tribune wrote a story about the hamburger.

For more information about the festival, please click here.