CLARKSVILLE — The theme of the 71st Johnson County Peach Festival was “Peace, Love and Peaches.” On Saturday, organizers had no difficulty delivering the peace and the love.
The peaches posed a little more challenge.
With about 10,000 people expected for the four-day festival that winds down today, the event was jammed with vendors’ booths and tents.
An 11 a.m. Saturday parade on Main Street featured beauty queens, antique cars, floats, a marching band and an Elvis impersonator singing and sweating in the 91-degree heat. Events ranging from peach-pit spitting to terrapin races also entertained festivalgoers.
But absent from the festival grounds were homegrown peaches. Neither the yellowor white-flesh varieties of one of summer’s best fruits were available from local growers. No booths offered homemade peach cobbler or jam. When Joy Osuch and her 6-yearold son Cody, like several others, inquired about peach ice cream, they learned the vendor had canceled at the last minute.
Cody was disappointed, though he had already experienced his favorite part of the festival — the parade and firetrucks.
“We’re going to start first thing 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. Organizers were a little fuzzy on where those peaches were grown.
Pulling together enough peaches for the state’s longest-running outdoor festival was even more difficult when the festival was held in June, as it was the past few years, Hartley said. 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 association moved 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.”
Johnson County residents started growing peaches sometime after the Civil War, according to local historians. They say the area was once among the nation’s top 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 growers 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. 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,” Emery Harmon said. “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.”
Arkansas, Pages 13 on 07/22/2012