Drive St. Andrews Road on an ordinary Tuesday and you will pass a Chipotle that has only been open since April, a Little Caesars sitting where a general store used to be, and the low green roofline of Moore Park sliding by on your right. None of it looks like anything in particular. It is the road you take to get somewhere else.
For two days at the end of September, that same stretch becomes the busiest half-mile in the Midlands. The Irmo Okra Strut returns to Moore Park on September 25 and 26, 2026, and if you live within earshot of St. Andrews Road, you already know the drill: the parade closes it, the shuttle buses take over Woodrow Street, and parking turns into a small negotiation. What is easy to miss, because the festival is loud enough to swallow everything around it, is that this corridor has been working overtime all year, not just for one weekend. The Okra Strut is not an island of activity dropped into a quiet stretch of road. It is the loudest version of something that has been building on this same half-mile since spring.
What Actually Closes, And When
The Town of Irmo's road closure list runs longer than most people expect. Streets around Moore Park close starting Friday, September 25 at noon and stay closed until Saturday, September 26 at 11:30 p.m. The piece that affects the most daily commutes is narrower: St. Andrews Road, from Wescott Road to Lake Murray Boulevard, shuts down specifically for the parade from 8:50 a.m. to around noon on Saturday.
If you live off that stretch, plan your Saturday morning around it rather than through it. A few practical notes worth keeping on your phone that weekend:
- Parking inside Moore Park runs $10 at the gravel lot near the entrance, card or Apple Pay only, no cash accepted.
- Free shuttles run every 20 minutes from the Irmo Wellness Center at 7182 Woodrow Street and Union United Methodist Church at 7582 Woodrow Street, starting at 6 p.m. Friday and 9 a.m. Saturday.
- No pets are allowed inside the park during the festival, a rule the Town added for crowd safety given how dense the footprint gets.
- The festival itself is free to attend. The $10 covers parking, not admission.
The Two Days, In Order
The weekend runs on a schedule that has stayed fairly consistent for years, with a couple of new additions in 2026.
| When | What's happening |
|---|---|
| Friday, Sept. 25, 6 p.m. | Opening ceremonies at the Prisma Health Amphitheater |
| Friday, Sept. 25, 7 p.m. | Live music: The Big Time Band and Monsters of Yacht |
| Friday, closes 11 p.m. | Gates close for the night |
| Saturday, Sept. 26, 9 a.m. | Parade begins on St. Andrews Road, runs to Lake Murray Boulevard |
| Saturday, morning | Inaugural Okra Strut 5K, presented by Palmetto Citizens, finishing at the parade route |
| Saturday, afternoon | Okra eating contest, kids' amusements, food and craft vendors at Moore Park |
| Saturday, 4 p.m. | Elizabeth as Taylor, a Taylor Swift tribute set, closes out the day |
The 5K is new this year. It is chip-timed with a flat, certified course, and if you want the guaranteed shirt and finisher medal, registration closes September 8. It is a small addition, but it says something about where the festival is headed: not just bigger, but more woven into the kind of everyday activity Irmo residents already do on weekends anyway.
Where The Name Actually Came From
The festival's origin is stranger and more local than most people realize, and it has nothing to do with anyone's actual affection for fried okra.
The Lake Murray-Irmo Woman's Club formed in 1961 with the usual mandate of local clubs at the time: raise money, fund public projects, keep the town moving. By the early 1970s, they had their sights on something ambitious for a town this size, a proper library for Irmo, and no clear way to pay for it.
The idea that solved the problem came from the radio. WIS personality Gene McKay was riffing on air about an old building he'd noticed at the corner of Fork Avenue and Woodrow Street, a two-story general store called the Ancient Irmese General Store. He wondered aloud what the "Ancient Irmese" must have been like. Probably short, he guessed, a farming people who lived off okra. It was a throwaway bit. The Woman's Club heard it and ran with it.
That October, they held a small arts and crafts fair at Seven Oaks Park and called it, simply, the Okra Strut. They started frying okra to sell. Seven years and thousands of servings later, they had raised enough to fund Irmo's first library, built on St. Andrews Road, a few blocks from where the general store used to stand. The spot where McKay first noticed that building is now the Little Caesars on St. Andrews Road, which means the road that closes for the parade is also, roughly, the road the whole tradition started on.
The festival now runs under the Town of Irmo and an Okra Strut Commission, and the money it raises still goes back into the community: scholarships, civic and school organizations, and improvements to public spaces. Attendance averages around 25,000 people most years, with some years pulling closer to 60,000, which tells you this stopped being a neighborhood craft fair a long time ago.
The Part The Festival Page Doesn't Tell You
Here is the piece that matters if you already live here and are tired of treating Okra Strut as a once-a-year disruption: the amphitheater at the center of all this, the Prisma Health Amphitheater at Moore Park, has been Irmo's actual live music venue since 2013. It does not go quiet for eleven months and wake up for the festival.
This past spring, it hosted its first-ever Spring Concert Series, three Friday nights in April and May under the name "Irmo Town Limits," presented by State Farm. A Bon Jovi cover band called Shot Thru the Heart played the opening night. Moonkatdaddi and a Motown act called Let's Get It On followed the next week. The series closed with a 90s tribute act, 90210 Radio, and food trucks and vendors on-site the whole time, including Kona Ice, Roy's Grille, Cox Family BBQ, and KW Beverage with Craft and Draft. None of that required a festival to justify it. It was just a Friday night program the Town built because enough people show up.
Walk a few blocks in any direction from Moore Park and the same pattern holds. Down on Lake Murray Boulevard, The Bistro has settled into a full weekly schedule of lunch and dinner service, with a seasonally rotating contemporary American menu built around ingredients from local farmers. A short distance from there, Tavern on 6 opens its bar every afternoon at 3 p.m. with a daily happy hour, the kind of place locals treat as a standing plan rather than a special occasion. On Woodrow Street, the same street where the free shuttles stage during Okra Strut weekend, Sipp Social has opened its doors. Up on Kennerly Road near the traffic circle, Searsport Rug Hooking moved into the Big Red Barn. And a new Chipotle opened on Dutch Fork Road this past April, the tenth Columbia-area location for the chain, which is a small but real sign of confidence in the corridor's daily foot traffic rather than its festival-weekend spike.
None of these businesses are betting on 25,000 people showing up in September. They are betting on the several thousand who drive past every ordinary Tuesday. That is the part worth sitting with. The road that closes for two days every fall is the same road that has quietly filled in, block by block, all year. The festival is not an exception to how this corridor behaves. It is the loudest week of a pattern that has been running the whole time.
If You're Already Making Plans For The Weekend
If you live off St. Andrews Road, block off your Saturday morning between roughly 8:50 and noon, and use the shuttle lots on Woodrow Street if you're driving in from elsewhere. If you're not planning to attend at all, the same closure window is the one thing worth marking on a calendar so it does not catch you off guard on a grocery run.
And if watching this corridor fill in over the past year has you wondering what it means for the value of the block you're already sitting on, that is a conversation worth having over coffee, not a festival brochure. I have spent years working this same stretch of Irmo, Chapin, and the Lake Murray area, and I am always glad to talk through what is actually happening on your street, no pressure attached. You can reach out to Heather Shuler any time to schedule a consultation.
