'We're having a festival!' Osceola Bluegrass Festival will live on after volunteers save it
OSCEOLA, Ind. --- After nearly four decades, one Osceola tradition was heading towards the end.
The Bluegrass Festival was in danger of not seeing its 36th year due to a lack of volunteers. But after a meeting held Tuesday night to save the festival, organizers said they’re now hopeful they’ll see a 50th anniversary!
“The whole goal was to bring a grassroots effort to keep the festival going and i think we achieved it tonight,” Tom Krueger said, a chairman for the Osceola Bluegrass fest.
There wasn’t an empty chair at Osceola’s town hall and they were all there to save the bluegrass festival. Tracy Brooks was one of them, she’s attending the festival every year for as long as she can remember.
“I just didn’t want to see it not happen you know,” Brooks said. “It’s something I’ve been doing once a year for my whole life. It’s a tradition for a lot of people that are from here you know even if we might live in South Bend now, we come home once a year to go to the festival and it’s important to us.”
Krueger said the fate of the festival all boiled down to Tuesday’s meeting and he’s leaving feeling pretty accomplished.
“We had a packed room of concerned citizens from Osceola and maybe even people not from Osceola, but they care,” Krueger said. “But they came together, we got their names, we have where they wanna be. We have the nuts and bolts of putting a festival on and I feel that we have the help we were looking for.”
With the support of the community today, organizers are hopeful they won’t have to worry about the bluegrass festival’s future anymore.
“Hopefully we’re gonna have people that will stay with this and we can continue to keep this festival going so we can see a 50th anniversary for this festival and beyond,” Krueger said.
This year’s Bluegrass Festival in Osceola will happen the third weekend in august.
Anyone who’s interested in becoming a food or craft vendor at the fest or wants to volunteer can contact Tom Krueger at (574) 298-5598 or for more information visit their Facebook page.