Kerens Cotton Harvest Festival set for Oct. 18

By Tennyson Whorton

September 26, 2008 11:01 pm

— By Tennyson Whorton
Special to the Daily Sun

The fourth annual Kerens Cotton Harvest Festival will be held Oct.18 and it promises to be a day filled with fun and activities for all ages! The festival will begin at 7 a.m. with a pancake breakfast at the Kerens Alumni Center. It will end with a street dance that evening from 8 to 10 p.m.
The traditional flag-raising will be held at 9:30 a.m. at the alumni center with a fly over by The Coyote Squadron Commemorative Air Force and the festival will be in full swing after that. Food and vendor booths will fill the main street for the entire day and offer some great bargains.
There will be continuous musical entertainment featuring country and western, gospel, swing and all tempos in between. The Ira Bradford Bustin’ Loose Band will play for the street dance. Ira puts on a great show and the dancing will take place on the beautiful brick-lined street of downtown Kerens. Bring your own chairs, please.
During the morning, there will be a chili cookoff sponsored by CASI and samples will be available. There will also be mule wagon rides, a horseshoe tournament, children’s activities, a clay target shoot, 3 on 3 basketball, cotton gin tours, an antique tractor show, a beautiful quilt exhibit in the First Presbyterian Church and old timer activities. The old timer activities will include corn husking and shelling, churning and much more.
The ever-popular Corsicana Cloggers will again perform and there will be a bounce house plus a barrel train ride for the children. Animals will be on exhibit and there will be raffles and super prize drawings. The fire department will give rides in there trucks, sirens and all.
There is still booth space available and the costs begin at $25 per booth. Call the Kerens Library now at (903) 396-2665 for information and to make reservations. The booths include food items, jewelry, gifts of all descriptions, cosmetics, arts and crafts, clothes, and much, much more.
The Cotton Harvest Festival is sponsored by Friends of the Kerens Library. All proceeds will go for the construction and maintenance of the new library building on Colket Avenue in downtown Kerens. The library was recently dedicated and you are invited to see the new facility. A book sale will also be held.
The Cotton Harvest Festival is a reminder of the days when Cotton was King in Kerens. This was the premium crop grown in the area from the mid 1800’s. At one time, there were four cotton gins in town and another outside of the city. Today there are only two in all of Navarro County. The cotton gin tour will be at the Powell gin, which is six miles to the west. Visitors to the festival will be able to see cotton fields that begin just to the east and south of the city. There will be displays of old cotton sacks that the pickers used and the scales that weighed the cotton.
You are cordially invited to attend the 2008 festival. If you would like more information about the events of the day and the times they will be held, call the library at (903) 396-2665 or go to the website at 222.KerensLibrary.org. The e-mail address is KerensLibrary@airmail.net. There will be an information booth downtown during the festival to give full details and the times of the various events.

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