Events
In April 1987, Danville's local newspaper, the Danville Advocate-Messenger, sponsored the first Rally on the Square, a political rally where candidates for statewide office can make speeches and meet area voters. Since then, the rally has been held every four years in April, in advance of the statewide primary elections in May. The first Rally on the Square featured a brass band from nearby Centre College, which inspired the city to hold the first Great American Brass Band Festival in 1990. The festival has been held annually in June ever since. Constitution Square is one of the locales used for outdoor performances during the festival.
The first Constitution Square Festival was held at Constitution Square State Historic Site in 1979. The event was held annually on the third weekend in September and featured historical reenactments, crafts, food, and music. In February 2009, the Kentucky Department of Parks announced that the festival would be suspended due to budget cuts prompted by the economic recession. Shortly after the announcement, three community organizations – the Heart of Danville, the Danville-Boyle County Convention and Visitors Bureau, and the Community Arts Center – volunteered to coordinate the festival without state funds. These groups gave the festival a more arts-centric focus and renamed it the Constitution Square Arts Festival. The event continued until 2011, but was suspended in 2012.
In November 2011, the first Kentucky State Barbecue Festival was held in Constitution Square. The event, conceived just ten weeks prior by a local couple, proved very popular, and organizers have stated that the next festival will be moved to the September weekend previously reserved for the suspended Constitution Square Arts Festival.
Read more about this topic: Constitution Square State Historic Site
Famous quotes containing the word events:
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
“One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape ... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.”
—Marilyn French (b. 1929)