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2022 Bell Tower Festival

5/24/2022

This year’s Bell Tower Festival in Jefferson will be special.

It’s the 43rd annual Festival, but that’s not anything out of the ordinary. The extra “secret sauce” this year is that 2022 is the 150th anniversary of Jefferson’s incorporation. So the Festival committee is adding numerous extras to make this year’s celebration one to remember.

One change is to add an extra day to the weekend: there’ll be live music each evening on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Forty vendors have already reserved booth space around the square. Cash drawings will provide extra spending money for several lucky winners.

Traditional activities will return again this year: the brew station (open all three days), the Tower of Fame Award to be presented at the opening ceremonies Friday evening, the Saturday morning firemen’s breakfast, the Ding Dong Dash running events, big wheel races, the reunion rendezvous, the 3-on-3 basketball tournament, the car show, the trivia contest, and plenty more familiar goings-on.

The traditional parade, sponsored by the Jefferson Rotary Club with a 100-year theme to celebrate the club’s centennial year, will have plenty of competitive entries as well.

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But there’s a bunch of new stuff. A carnival will return after a blank in that department in recent years. And how about axe throwing? A golf tournament? A library guest artist? A bags tournament? A barbecue cookoff? A pickleball tournament? A unicycle juggler? Fire dancers? 

How would a community festival have celebrated Jefferson’s incorporation in 1872?

For starters, it would have ended after dusk, unless torchlight could have prolonged it for a short while. The celebration could have included marching bands, livestock pulling various wheeled vehicles, politicians (yeah, they were around back then too), food stands, various games of skill and luck – pretty much like a 19th Century county fair.

But no organized nighttime events. No electrified rides. No car show. No loudspeaker announcing upcoming events, or describing parade entries, or providing extra volume for the live music bands. The trivia contest would have included no post-1872 facts, thereby eliminating a whole lot of esoteric knowledge that contestants enjoy trotting out today. No 3-on-3 basketball contest – the game wasn’t invented by James Naismith until 1891. 

A golf tournament could have been held, since golf had been around for centuries. But not in Jefferson – no golf course here. No Reunion Rendezvous, since Jefferson’s first high school class didn’t graduate until 1882, a decade later. Hard to say what the vendor booths would have hawked to festival-goers back then – maybe a goodly assortment of snake oil cures.

And no Bell Tower with a four-octave carillon.

Compared to this year’s Festival, any celebration 150 years ago would have been pretty small potatoes. It would have attracted dozens, maybe hundreds, of area residents, who would have enjoyed it thoroughly. Any festival or celebration back then provided a welcome relief from the dogged daily workload that challenged rural Midwesterners—men, women, and children alike, whether in the country or in small towns. 

One of the most winning aspects of the Bell Tower Festival, like other community celebrations in states like Iowa, is that it’s organized and operated totally by volunteers. Sure, the vendors make some money, whether they sell food, souvenirs, or other products. But the entire weekend is proudly created by folks who donate hours and hours of their time, and financial donors who give considerable sums, to provide several days of enjoyment for friends whom they know and strangers whom they don’t.

The 2022 Bell Tower Festival, like the 42 Bell Tower Festivals that preceded it, is a gift to residents of west central Iowa and beyond. So are the annual festivals and fairs of the many other Iowa communities whose residents draw on their community spirit to organize and put on similar celebrations. The number of volunteers who have made such festivities a success through the years is hard to imagine. 

We owe them all a huge “THANK YOU.”

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