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[music] The West Tennessee Strawberry Festival is this amazing gathering of communities, and it encompasses people from all different backgrounds, people form different geographic regions now.

It's family, it's community, it's fun.

We are the granddaddy of all of the festivals.

There are several festivals.

There's the Fish Fry.

There is the Banana Festival in Fulton.

There's the [?]

festival in Dresden, but we're the Grandaddy.

We've been around longer than any other.

It's the time of family.

It's a time of seeing friends.

Community, It's family.

Like I said, the first full week of May every year, everyone knows that's festival time.

You block off your calendar, you just know that that's where you're going to be, is in Humboldt to gather with your friends and your family that maybe you haven't seen all winter, and it's just a homecoming.

The West Tennessee Strawberry Festival is one of the most exciting things that ever happened to any city.

Thank God it happens in Humboldt, Tennessee.

We get to celebrate that little red berry that meant so much to so many people in our past, now and in the future.

Spring in West Tennessee is a time that many communities celebrate what makes their town so very special.

We take pride in where we live.

We take time to celebrate with our friends and family and take time to have fun.

For the next 30 minutes, we're going to take a trip back in time to find out how West Tennessee's largest and longest-running festival began.

We're going to learn how it has grown so large and what keeps the magic alive for the West Tennessee Strawberry Festival.

First, we'll take you inside a special museum dedicated to the history of Humboldt, home to The West Tennessee Strawberry Festival, and meet the director and see strawberry festival artifacts from over eight decades of festivals.

We'll meet the woman who keeps the festival fresh year after year with an army of volunteers.

Also, we'll meet with the mayor of Humboldt and other city leaders to find out what the West Tennessee Strawberry Festival means to them and their city.

Join us as we crank up the West Tennessee PBS Time Machine.

[music] If you look at how the Festival began, it's really neat history.

Not just the parades that we know today and the activities such as carnivals and events.

You're looking at strawberries themselves, which is what it's all about.

That dates to right after the Civil War, a man by the name of David Brandenburg moved here from Maryland to what is now the Gadsden community.

He had a couple of 100 acres, and he planted the first strawberries here in West Tennessee.

A man, by name Mr. Horine, who was his father-in-law, also came here, and they created a brand.

We don't really know the variety of those strawberries that they grew, but again, the other farmers in the area, the families after the Civil War, began to develop strawberry farms all across, especially the Gibson County, Crockett County areas, and then even across West Tennessee.

You're looking at the end of the Great Depression.

So much in our country had suffered during that time.

Humboldt was one of those in this area as well.

We had something that a lot of areas didn't have.

We had strawberries.

They were very popular, but the qu..

The strawberry festival was invented to market these strawberries in this industry and also to revamp the strawberry, make it a better quality.

At that time, you'll begin to have a festival that brings in such as boosts and exhibits that people will showcase their strawberries.

You'll have judging.

You'll also give away a prizes as well in tho..

When it first started, you were a two-day festival.

You were a Thursday and Friday, you had parades.

It was really neat.

We called it the floats parade, the Juni.. Back then, it was the baby parade.

You had kids from 0 to 10 years old.

They were on floats, kind of like we have today.

You had cars as well, but it was a two-day activity, a big parade on Friday.

It started on Main Street downtown, and it would end up at the high school property where the football field was.

A huge stage was set up.

You would have those exhibits of local businesses marketing their products.

Of course, the strawberry vendors would be set up as well.

You also had giveaways, too.

By the local businesses in the 1930s, would give away such things as a pound of flour, value to the dollar, or they would give away chairs, and you can pick the color you want, $150 value in today's money, 750 at the time.

It was really a marketing scheme to really promote this area and this industry.

It seemed to work.

[music] Well, something you think when you think of Strawberry Festival you say, "Where are the strawberries at today?"

Well, that industry began to change.

Strawberries would come in at the crossing we know today.

That's the crossing of the two railroads in the town.

We had a canning company there.

Different farmers would bring their products in, and you'll see labels that show some of the names of these companies that farmers and ones that brought them in to be housed and put in cans so they would be preserved.

There would be preservatives added, and they shipped them around the world.

We know one family, the Herndon family, even shipped as far as Great Britain.

Now, we have, I think, less than 200 acres in this immediate area that are even doing strawberries now.

By the end of World War II, you started to see that change.

Industry had changed.

First railroad was shipping those out on cold storage, on the train cars.

They would be shipped to Europe and all over.

Again, that strawberry industry moved to California, so you saw less production.

Hey, you've created a festival now, and that has stuck.

You really see a change in the industry, less strawberries produced here.

You had a Humboldt canning company that shipped them around the world.

You had an ice and cold company that kept them cold here.

That began to change, modernized, and that's where we are today.

There was a particular year that a bunch of farmers from California came to Humboldt and spent a lot of time here talking to the area farmers, local growers, things like that, because they wanted to know the tips and tricks so that they could grow berries in California.

I was told this, that when they boarded the train to go back to .. they said, "We're going to put you out of business."

They really were right, because California temperatures, it's a year-round climate to grow strawberries.

You'd go out there to California, go to Florida, and it's just miles and miles and acres of strawberry patches.

They can essentially grow them year-round, because their climate is conducive for that.

Where we morphed into more of a corn, soybean, cotton, those type of products and crops, took off more here.

Berries went more coastal.

[music] Oh, when they come to the festival, they're amazed at how friendly everybody is.

The city is clean and looks nice, and everybody's inviting.

They're amazed at how we pull it off.

It's all volunteers.

Everybody is a volunteer that works at the festival, whether they're running the horse show, or they're doing the beauty reviews, or they're doing the cornhole tournament or tractor pull.

They're all volunteers.

You've heard it takes a village.

Well, it takes a town of Humboldt to pull it off.

When you have a new general chairman in president every year, they help bring things to it, new ideas, new events.

We have Beth Culpepper who is our events coordinator, and she works very well with the presidents and the general chairmens to make sure everything runs smoothly.

I don't know how we do it without her, to be honest.

Planning starts early on, we take a month off or so to clean everything up, and we hit the ground running July ish.

We start looking back at this festival, the previous festival, what worked, what people were excited about, what we saw the best numbers at, and we start looking towards next year and thinking like, well, was there an event that maybe we need to reformat or something new we could add, what's popular around here right now.

Like this last year, Cornhole was a very popular thing, and it's taken off around here, and people have professional teams.

There was a want for that and a need for that, so we tested it out this last year, and it was a huge success.

We think this year it's going to be even better.

We just really try to look at what our visitors like.

They're very interested in food.

We always know they're going to come here and eat, so we try really hard to get good quality vendors with different types of food.

We try not to do a lot of overlapping where that's concerned.

We just really try to see what the people want.

Fortunately, we don't see as many fresh strawberries here at the festival.

We do try to incorporate as much strawberry themed things as we can.

We encourage our vendors, if you have anything that you can offer that's strawberry-related, people are going to want it.

We know here in the South, traditions are very important to us.

We always want to remember where we came from and also while looking what's going to be here in the next 10 years, how will people view the Strawberry Festival in 10 years, how do we stay relevant while also keeping our history a part of us.

I think just the people that come help us do that.

People are always excited about the Strawberry Festival.

It's always the first full week of May.

There's all free events.

We really just try to blend the old with the new.

There's a fine line and a fine road to travel on to maintain that, but I feel like we do a good job of keeping those two together.

The parades and the pageants, you don't mess with those.

Those are going to always be around, whether I'm here or in the next 20 years.

That's always going to be mostly the parades for sure, but our pageants are a huge part of what we do that week, too.

We work under a system where we have a festival president and a festival general chairman.

Those are volunteer positions.

These individuals give up hours of their time throughout the year, really two years that they serve to help with all the planning.

They put their own little spin on the festival as far as things they'd like to see, entertainment, things in the parade.

They serve a two year term.

They work closely with myself as the chamber staff, and then of course we have loads of volunteers that also work behind the scenes as committee chairs of the individual events.

Last year I was the general chairman.

You serve as general chairman one year, and then you become the president.

I'm the president of the 85th, Sherry Jo Smith was president last year, and I was her general chair, and my general chair is Anne Short.

You learn one year, and then you get to do it the next year.

Of course, I've been involved with the festival ever since I've been in Humboldt.

I've put floats in.

I've worked at the review stand.

I've emceed the territorial review.

I've peddled magazines up and down the street.

I've done a lot of stuff.

We have to plan way ahead.

Just to pick up garbage, you just don't think about how many tons of garbage is produced on Main Street around the week of the festival.

It's unbelievable, just the logistics of getting that gone.

We have security.

We'll have probably 150 people in security.

One good thing about the festival and other festivals, we share security with each other.

We'll have the Trenton Police Department here, the Milan, Paris, Jackson, Madison County Sheriff.

We've just got so many agencies that come here and help us to control over a hundred thousand people, because you have to.

You get people in, you've got to get them out.

[music] When the festival first started, it was just a two-day event, and basically it was to show strawberries and canning of them and boxing and carrying them and things.

It was also started in the '30s during the Depression to help bring some money into town.

When it first started, it was limited to two days.

Now, we're a week long.

I think what's fascinating and as an anthropologist, I look at this as the creation of a culture.

With the creation of the festival back in the '30s, we actually saw the creation of different symbols, different language, different customs, and it's like a whole culture was created springing forth from that idea of a festival.

I think that folks that come here and folks that are from around here, they have grown to rely on this tradition.

I think in this world of chaos and constant change, that it's still great to have time-honored traditions and that it gives us hope for something in the new year.

It gives us a time of fellowship, and it gives us a time where we can really focus on things that are outside, that are inside this area, as opposed to constantly turning on the TV and the internet and seeing things around the world.

It gives us a time to look back on those things that really, really count with fellowship and families and community.

I think the growth of the Strawberry Festival, from being something important to Humboldt to being something important to West Tennessee communities, is where we saw this change.

Not just the Humboldt Strawberry Festival but the West Tennessee Strawberry Festival, because we have people from all over the globe, actually.

Not just West Tennessee now that come to the festival.

I think that is a result of that growth of the festival and the theme of the festival.

I think it's very much like a big party.

I think that when word gets out that people want to join the party.

We continue to see people from all different regions come to join this party here in Humboldt.

It's exciting because in earlier years, we may see, whether it be concessions, whether it be attendees to pageants or carnival rides, the word has gotten out.

We see people from everywhere coming, and they just want to join this big party.

I'm glad to say it's been a very positive and safe gathering for people in West Tennessee.

[music] Parades have always been a part of the Strawberry Festival going back to 1934.

Now, floats have changed how they're made since then.

When you look at those early days, I've got a photograph from the 1930s, probably the first or second parade.

The Finley sisters made a lot of those floats.

They were in charge of a lot of those that were made out of real flowers.

On this float, there's two white stallions or probably ponies we would say today.

The question is, what were they made out of?

Some even said they were taxidermied.

Floats have changed over the years to the modern crepe paper and the plastics that we see today.

Cars have always been a part of the parade from 1934.

There's a story that there would be over 1,000 cars in the Friday parade in the mid-1930s.

We know there probably wasn't actually 1,000 in the parade, but the local newspapers really built it up.

The Junior Floats Parade always takes place on Thursday.

It is a non-motorized parade.

We like to tout that it's maybe the world's largest non-motorized parade.

That means you can push something, pull something, walk through, but no motors obviously are allowed.

Then our Friday parade is what we call the granddaddy of them all, like the Rose Parade.

It's on Friday, and you can see every dignitary, politician, queen, local marching band that you can imagine, they'll be here in Humboldt on that Friday.

[music] I have tons of memories of Strawberry Festival.

I guess my greatest would be when my kids were on floats.

They were in beauty reviews, and my daughter and my son too were in the pageants and making the floats, getting with people that you didn't know when you work on these floats.

It takes a lot of time to make them.

You get to know people real well.

I've made friends through the festival that I've kept forever.

I've been going to festivals since I was probably ten years old or younger and hadn't missed very many of them.

The excitement is still the same as it was when I was a little boy.

Things have changed in ways and always in a positive way, but the festival is the festival.

It's a homecoming for people.

There's people already, they're already planning on what they're going to do that week and coming home.

They're going to be coming to Humboldt, Tennessee where they were raised, their parents, their grandparents.

Me, I'm a historian of our city.

When I go back all these years to 1934 and think about all the excitement of the festival, when I get to thinking about when we had the street dance on Main Street, even as a youngster I remember it.

It was a little more hip-hop and a little bit more shakey-poo than it is back in the '30s and '40s but just think, the Gerald Company here made baskets for strawberries, cabbages, things of that nature.

They would line the streets up with cabbage baskets upside down for where people could sit, and they had big bands, big bands.

They had the big bands that would come in and play orchestra-type bands to play.

When you get to thinking about that, oh my goodness, and the excitement is still here.

It really represents family and tradition and community.

It's become something, there was a few years ago a thing that was centered around tradition, bringing it back down on Main Street to where it all began.

Now, the strawberry is there, you'll always know that red berry, but it's more about family and fun and activities and music and gathering and something that we've lost a lot in our country is community, and that's something Humboldt still has.

[music] Thank you for joining us for our trip back in time here in Humboldt for over eight decades of West Tennessee Strawberry Festivals.

We encourage you to take time to celebrate your community.

From all of us at West Tennessee PBS, I'm Peter Noll.

Have a berry-rific day.

[music] We would like to thank the City of Humboldt for opening up their doors to us and for giving us the gift of the West Tennessee Strawberry Festival.

[music] The program you've been watching was made possible through the generous financial support of West Tennessee PBS viewers like you.

Please visit westtnpbs.org and make a donation today so that we can continue to make local programs like this possible.

Thank you.

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