It’s Lavaca Berry Festival Time!

By Jack James
This is the week we’ve worked so hard for. This Saturday is the annual Lavaca Berry Festival! This coming Saturday, October 27th, the Lavaca Berry Festival will be at the county ballfields on Featherhill Road. It starts at 9 a.m. and will be going until 4p.m.
This year we have food vendors, games, bounce arounds, raffles, 50/50 chances, and chances on winning a quilt or a real Lavaca Berry Cobbler! We have arts and handmade crafts from all around the area. Some will be selling products and some will be about awareness. There will be hayrides and photo booth opportunities. Dozens of vendors will be on hand. We have different bands playing every hour. Good country, bluegrass, gospel music that you will want to bring a lawn chair and sit and listen to them for hours, and you can!
We carefully considered several places for this year’s festival and the decision was made to have it out at the county ball fields. Yes, it is about a mile to the field. The parking for visitors is tremendous! The terrain for vendors is perfect! There are real, flushable restrooms (with an S). Enough electricity outlets to cover our vendor’s needs and the entire space is friendly to handicapped visitors.
The Lavaca Chamber of Commerce is celebrating the Lavaca berry, which saved our town back in the late 1940s and 1950s. It was a hybrid berry brought here from California. There was a time when hundreds of acres of fields of Lavaca berries here, giving work to a lot of people here, when they otherwise would have had to move out of town or even out of state to find work. They shipped many berries from here at one time, and that is what we are celebrating.
Lavaca Berries peak in the first week of June but it is so hat during that time. While we are, in fact, having a berry festival without berries, it will still be a great celebration! One lady has saved some berries and we will be raffling off a genuine Lavaca Berry cobbler!
Make every effort to be at the Lavaca Berry Festival this weekend and tell your friends about it! I’ll be in the Chamber of Commerce booth wearing an orange vest! Hopefully we will see you there!