Turnout of 4,500 estimated at festival
HUNTSVILLE — If Saturday’s turnout at Scott High School is any indication, the Heritage Festival is a hit.
Festival planners estimate that around 4,500 folks turned out for Saturday’s frontier days event, which was centered around the school’s Museum of Scott County and was carried out by Scott High students and staff.
“We actually counted 3,700,” Museum curator Gary Sexton said. “But we didn’t have counters at two of the gates, and we didn’t start counting until 11 o’clock. So I’d say 4,000 to 4,500 is a very safe estimate.”
Sexton said that the attendance was about what organizers hoped for, and will hope for in the future.
“Our goal is to put on a quality festival,” he said. “We’re going to continue to do just what we did.”
Nearly 100 students of Scott High’s 700+ student body participated in some way in the festival, along with a large number of the school’s staff. The festival featured a wide variety of activities from days gone by in Scott County, including flint-napping, rifle-making, a sorghum mill, the making of apple butter, and a large number of other things that Scott Countians’ ancestors might have taken part in that are lost arts today.
“What was kinda neat about it was there was really something for everybody,” Sexton said. “Some folks hung around the sorghum mill a lot, some around the goat milking a lot, and a lot of folks hung around Ernie Smart and his flint-napping exhibit a lot. You could see that people kinda had their thing and hung out at one place, while others went and saw everything, and then you had people who just sat around and renewed old friendships. I had a lot of people tell me they saw people they hadn’t seen in 20 or 30 years.”
Sexton said that the professional demonstrators on hand for the festival were complimentary of the event, calling it one of the best festivals they had ever attended.
Plans are already underway for next year’s festival; Teachers involved with the event were to have met at the school on Tuesday to discuss next year’s event. Planning for the event will begin in earnest next spring.
Festival attendees who found there was not enough time to take in the museum itself, or who would like to return to simply spend more time perusing the museum will find the facility open each Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 12 p.m. until 5 p.m.