Moore: This is Ozarks at Large. I'm Matthew Moore. We are in the midst of festival, fair season here, not just in the Ozarks, but across the state of Arkansas. Here to join us to talk about festivals and fairs, the history of them across the Ozark region, is our pal, Jared Phillips. Jared, welcome back.
Phillips: Hey. Glad to be here.
Moore: There is a long history, of course, as there is with just about any topic of history of something in the Ozarks. Right. We're here to talk about some histories of fairs and festivals across the region.
Phillips: Yeah. I mean, I know listeners may not believe it, but fall is actually around the corner, despite what the mercury in the thermometer might be telling us. But this week, the Washington County Fair, which is the largest county fair in the state, is going. It's been going since before the Civil War. And there's countless festivals that are getting ready to happen across the Ozarks.
So you listeners have probably heard the Original Ozark Folk Festival being advertised out of Eureka Springs. And that's got its own story there. And other folks might know that there's the Hootin' an' Hollarin' in Gainesville that's getting ready to happen in the third weekend of September. That's a big square dance and traditional music festival. And there's festivals all around the region.
But I got to thinking about a few that are kind of core in the listening area, ones that I know that most of us who grew up here are familiar with, at least in some capacity. So I thought I'd come and just talk a little bit about each one of their histories and think about how the festivals help us think about how we have tried to preserve ourselves as a place as we've gone on since the Second World War.
Moore: So let's start by talking about the Clothesline Fair. This is one I'm personally not familiar with, so I'm excited to learn more about this.
Phillips: Yeah, so the Clothesline Fair is near and dear to my heart. We live in Prairie Grove and this is Prairie Grove's own thing. And we do a Clothesline Fair for a couple different reasons. One, my town loves a parade, man. We will throw a parade for everybody. And we're a small town so we can get away with throwing a parade whenever we like.
Moore: Yeah.
Phillips: And so the Clothesline Fair has been going on in one form or another since around 1951. So the McCuistion family, like many other families, like the family, the Elliotts, started over at War Eagle, which we can talk about here in a minute, and other families around the country, but in particular in places like the Ozarks and Appalachia, were looking around at the end of the forties, in the 1950s and saying, man, our world is changing really quickly. And this is the era of mass produced products. And they are worried that craft people in traditional places are, A, becoming scarce, and then, B, the ones that are left are unable to make a living and therefore unwilling to pass on their traditional knowledge.
And so what they do is the McCuistions start to look around and say, okay, we should start a festival or a fair of some kind so they can come exhibit their stuff, they can sell it, and then we can kind of keep some energy going. And so what they're going to do between 1951, 1954, 1956, they're going to kind of move the festival around. It's actually going to start up in Springdale, around the grounds of the Shiloh Museum. And then by 1957, it's going to come to Prairie Grove, and that's where it's been ever since.
And the big reason for that is we have the battlefield in P.G. We got this big open space that you can go to. And for decades, the Prairie Grove Battlefield had hosted a Labor Day reunion for Civil War veterans and their families. And so there'd been a long tradition of a parade and gathering there on the grounds. And so it just seemed like a natural fit.
And so the festival has been going on in P.G. for a long time. There's like 146, 150 vendors that are going to be there this year. It started with just a few in the 1950s and it's really grown. Thousands of people come through it. But that's not really the thing, I mean, that makes Prairie Grove Clothesline Fair special. That's not really the thing that makes the Clothesline Fair stand out, though.
Everybody likes square dancing in the Ozarks. Or you at least should say that you do, right? In 1958, a fourth-grade social studies teacher in the Prairie Grove Elementary School, Peggy Parks, began kind of a sort of like a physical education plus cultural education project with her class. She had seen, if you listen to her, she had seen some other people doing some Virginia reel dancing, and she got to thinking, well, the students should be engaged in doing something like this. It's a traditional thing that we can do. And so she will start to teach her fourth-grade class about square dancing and getting them to square dance.
And so in 1958, her class goes and does a performance at the battlefield during the whole Clothesline Fair. And from there it turns into a major competition. And when I say a major competition, I don't mean like five or 10 groups of people come together and square dance and eat some supper on the grounds later. I mean, by today, in 2026, we're looking at somewhere around 800 kids are going to go and participate in the largest square dancing competition and the longest running square dancing competition in the country.
Moore: Wow.
Phillips: And it is. It's a sight. So it happens in two places, in two parts. So the first part of the afternoon on Saturday, and then it happens again on Monday on Labor Day itself, is what we call the exhibition dancing. So this is all the kids basically underneath junior high age. And they'll dance for three or four minutes. And this is kids three years old all the way up till sixth, seventh grade are going to be dancing and they'll do a three to four minute dance, and it's cute and we love it and it's amazing.
But the real star of the attraction is after about 5 p.m. on Saturday night and on Sunday night when the competition groups go in. And these are groups of eight young people who have been practicing in some cases since January. In my household, there's been square dance practicing. My oldest son is in one of the competitive groups, and my other two youngest kids are in the exhibition groups, but my oldest son's group has been going since January, like many of the other competition groups, because this is a serious business, and they have been preparing an eight minute long square dance to try to, like, go for gold, win the deal.
And the Prairie Grove square dancing style is really different than if you go around to all the other community square dances. So Steve Green, square dance teacher and caller extraordinaire in the region, works a ton with the folk school here in Fayetteville. When he came out to watch the square dance last year, he was just like, man, you guys do this a little bit differently. And it's because it's traditional square dance calls, married with a little bit of traditional mountain jigging. And so the kids are doing a particular kind of step while they're doing all the different movements. It's very different than what you would see when you go to one of the folk dances, the folk school dances up here. And it is, it is something.
Moore: Well, let's keep it in Washington County here. Let's move to the Cane Hill Festival here.
Phillips: Yeah. So the Cane Hill Harvest Festival, not as old as these other festivals. The story of Cane Hill has been remarkably preserved by Historic Cane Hill and director Vanessa McKuin and her whole staff out there. They're just doing incredible work.
And the Historic Cane Hill Festival, it's the third weekend of September, so beginning of September we've got Labor Day and Clothesline Fair. You can go right out to southwestern Washington County to go to Cane Hill at the end of September. And it kind of gets its start loosely by the folks that are still living in the Cane Hill Valley. Anybody who's been out to Cane Hill knows you come in off the ridge out of Lincoln and you drop down into this valley. And that's where the site of the old Cane Hill colleges and a whole bunch of really amazing things are down there.
And it kind of starts as like a low key community fundraiser to help keep all the buildings together, keep roofs on and keep things from falling apart. Right. Over time that festival has grown. It's really grown in the last several years.
And so if the Clothesline Fair helps preserve and evolve something as traditional and old fashioned as square dancing, right, one of the things that the Harvest Festival in Cane Hill does is it preserves one of the most traditional fall activities of Ozarkers, stretching from just after the Civil War, really all the way up to the mid 20th century and a little bit beyond. And that's the art of making sorghum molasses, right?
And so you come into the morning at Cane Hill and you can get breakfast, you can get a country breakfast put on by the Lincoln FFA. There's a lot of vendors there, just like a regular craft fair kind of experience. The Shiloh Museum is out there. There's live music, there's all kinds of great stuff going on. But especially for those of us that really are interested in the old kind of cultural ways, Cane Hill provides probably the best presentation of how we used to make, and some of us still make, sorghum.
And so they have a big cane press and they grow the sorghum, or they work with a local farmer to bring the sorghum in. We press it and then it goes into a traditional cook pan, and a member of a long standing family from Cane Hill controls the cooking. And you just press and you boil it down and you sit and chat and just have a good time with folks, just like everybody did back this time of the year, all the way up till roughly around frost. This is the beginning of the cook season, and it would last all the way until roughly Oct. 15.
Moore: The last one you wanted to talk about here was War Eagle.
Phillips: Yeah. War Eagle. I grew up real close to War Eagle. I grew up out on the Sonora side of Springdale. And so I remember, come October, all of a sudden, traffic would just be incredible to try to get around on Highway 412. I was little, I had no idea what was going on. Well, come to find out, this is one of the most iconic arts and crafts fairs, not just in the Ozarks, but in the country.
So some of your listeners may know this already, but in the 1950s and the 1960s, America went through kind of an arts and crafts revival, but not necessarily like in a building style or furniture, but more in the traditional handicrafts, right? And so it was, in a way, a response to the mass production community, or culture, that we were developing in the aftermath of the Depression and World War II. And the Ozarks, with the War Eagle Craft Fair, create what some people call the grandfather of all of the craft fairs.
And what really happens here is, just like we saw in Prairie Grove, is the Elliott family, Blanche and Lester Elliott, in 1953, '54 are getting worried that traditional Ozark crafts people do not have a venue to display and sell their wares. And so they say, hey, you know what? We're going to open up our house and we're going to create a space where these people can do this. And what this does is they create a validation for traditional handicrafts, right?
And so for a long time, the biggest rules for War Eagle, which is different than the Clothesline Fair, was it has to not just be handmade. It has to be Ozark made. It can't be from outside of the Ozarks. Some of that's changed as time has moved on. But as they start the fair in '54, by 1957, '58, the fair is becoming such a big deal for Ozark craftspeople to come in, demonstrate and sell their products that they're going to go from just having a fair in the first weekend or two of October to having an October and then a spring fair as well.
And then by 1970, thanks to the revenue that they're beginning to generate, they decide to not just put their money where their mouth is to provide a place for Ozark artists to sell their stuff. They start training Ozark artists. And so they use the revenue between 1970 and 2008 to bring in nationally renowned craftspeople into the area for two weeks in June and run schools to help teach people and keep these skills alive. Just a fascinating and just such a powerful way to help showcase and preserve and pass on our knowledge, right? And in the skills of making do in a place like the mountains.
Moore: It's fascinating too, because as we think about all three of these, really an underlying element of all of this is like feeding the local economy and keeping the money in the local economy. It's a really fascinating element of this too, that not only am I a seller selling my stuff, but I'm also walking around and buying other people's stuff locally too.
Phillips: Yeah, absolutely. Because the Ozarks were never truly isolated, right? But we're also not fully connected in a way that other parts of the country are. So we have to maintain somewhat of an insulated economy, right? And I think in the fifties, in the sixties, it's really a time of great turmoil and change in the Ozarks, right? So our popular memory is poodle skirts and Highway 66 and all this stuff. But really in a place like the Ozarks, it's a lot of change. And I think this is a reaction to that. People are trying to figure out how do we find our center, who we are as a people and a place. And then how do we incentivize people to stay here, stay home, make it work?
And I think in a lot of cases it succeeds. Maybe not as well as everybody would have hoped. There's still plenty of towns that kind of slowly dwindle off, but, man, these festivals are still here. They're still speaking into the community. They're still bringing attention into the place and still exhibiting the vibrant culture and history that we have.
Moore: I think another thing that strikes me about all three of these is it is a moment in time sort of thing, but it's not stuck in that time.
Phillips: Not at all. Yeah. Not at all. You know, the War Eagle Fair, though it was originally only for Ozark handmade crafts people, now anybody from the country is able to come in. It just has to be handmade. The Clothesline Fair, people come in from all over the region. And the Cane Hill Festival has transitioned from being something that was just a really insulated for the community of Cane Hill to keep everything going, and it's become an anchor for all this other amazing work that a place like Historic Cane Hill can do.
Because the Harvest Festival and the Bug Crawl and the Kite Festival and the art festivals that they have down there helps to underpin all this really amazing education and public outreach that Cane Hill and then other places. And it gives energy to places like Shiloh and others and how they can foster not just a preservation of the past, but an evolution, but helping to put our stamp on what the future is going to become.
Moore: Absolutely. Next month, when you come in to talk, it will be in the midst of college football season. We're going to talk some sports.
Phillips: Talk sports? That's right. Yeah. It's going to be a good time. We'll have to, hopefully the Razorbacks are going to have a bangin season. And then we'll have a lot to celebrate as well.
Moore: Absolutely. All right. Well, we'll look forward to that next time.
Phillips: All right. Sounds good.
Moore: Jared, thanks as always.
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