CLARKSVILLE — The theme of the 71st Johnson County Peach Festival is “Peace, Love and Peaches.”
On Saturday, organizers had no difficulty delivering the peace and the love.
The peaches posed a little more challenging.
With about 10,000 people expected for the four-day festival that winds up today, the event was jammed with vendors’ booths and tents, and events ranging from peach pit spitting to terrapin races. An 11 a.m. Saturday parade on Main Street boasted beauty queens, antique cars, floats, a marching band andan Elvis impersonator singing and sweating in the 91-degree heat.
But absent from the festival grounds were local growers offering yellow- or whiteflesh varieties of one of summer’s best fruits. No vendors peddled home-grown peach cobbler or jams. And Joy Osuch and her 6-year-old sonCody, like several others, inquired about peach ice cream and learned the vendor had canceled at the last minute.
Cody was disappointed, though he already had experienced his favorite parts of the festival - the parade and firetrucks.
“We’re going to start firstthing finding a peach ice cream vendor for next year,” vowed Alicia Hartley, president of the Johnson County Peach Festival Association.
Just to be clear, there were peaches at Saturday’s peach festival.
A Wal-Mart distribution center donated a truckload, which volunteers handed out free by the bag and by the crate. It wasn’t clear where those peaches were grown, but organizers seemed to think they may have come from Harrison perhaps. Wherever the fruit originated, they sported Wal-Mart pricing stickers.
Pulling together enough peaches for the state’s longestrunning outdoor festival was even more difficult in the last few years, said Hartley and other organizers. That’s when the festival was held in June. Attendees groused then about finding few or no peaches, she said.
“The problem with holding it in June,” Hartley said, “was that the peaches weren’t ready.”
This year, the festival association made several key changes, including moving the event to July to coincide with what should have been the local peach harvest.
“And what happened?” Hartley laughed. “We had all that rainy weather in the spring and the peaches came in early. While we should have had an abundance of peaches in July, they came in during June.”
Those difficulties won’t be enough to discourage Johnson County residents from celebrating peaches and their local history, organizers said.
Johnson County residents started growing peaches some time after the Civil War, according to local historians, and claim the area was once among the nation’s biggest peach producers. The region had dozens of peach farmers even 40 years ago, said Travis Stephens with the Clarksville-Johnson County Chamber of Commerce. Today, just three or four remain, but publications boast that the county still produces some of the nation’s best-tasting peaches. And the chamber’s website labels Johnson County “as the ‘Peach of the Ozarks.’”
Jerri and Emery Harmon of Hot Springs Village were enjoying Saturday’s peach festival parade after driving from their home. It was their first visit to the event since retiring to Arkansas from California about seven years ago.
There’s only one thing they would like to have seen more of.
“More peaches, peach jams, peach pies - more peach everything,” Jerri Harmon said.
The couple recalled the annual Gilroy, Calif., Garlic Festival as an example of what they expected.
“They did everything you could imagine with garlic,” said Emery Harmon. “They actually made garlic ice cream.”
“Not that we wanted garlic ice cream here,” added Jerri. “But it seems like a prime opportunity to sell a lot of peaches.”
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 11 on 07/22/2012