The opening of the North Carolina Apple Festival is fast approaching.
Organizers are reflecting on what it means for one of Hendersonville's biggest and most popular annual events to reach its 80th year as they enter the final push of preparations ahead of the Sept. 4 kickoff.
"The majority of the heavy lift is behind us," Summer Stipe, a leader of the festival's organizing effort, told the Times-News Aug. 31. "We're just doing a lot of last-minute wrangling.
Volunteers will begin setting up the festival's main stage on Historic Courthouse Square the morning of Sept. 3 before apple growers and other vendors move into their booths that evening, she said.
"It's kind of the buzz that our community is excited about this time every year," she said.
More: Earlier apple season offers growers longer harvest but also risk to crop
There are 14 local apple growers participating this year, making for 140 total booths on Main Street, run by local businesses, food vendors, sponsors, nonprofits and government agencies.
The festival officially estimates that 250,000 people attend each year, based on numbers from a 2013 economic impact study.
That's more than 16 times Hendersonville's population of just over 15,000, according to the 2020 census.
But anecdotally, attendance seems to have grown significantly over the last few years, according to vendors and downtown businesses, Stipe said.
The 2013 study found that the festival contributed $12.5 million to the local economy.
Volunteers work 3,300 hours throughout the year to make the festival happen, about $110,000 worth of work if they were paid, Stipe said.
More than 200 volunteers staff the barricades, concession stands, merch tables, parade, entertainment and cleanup.
Staff members usually put in around five hours a month in the months leading up to the festival but in the week leading up to the festival many work five hours a day, the Times-News reported last year.
"Honestly, we prepare for the Apple Festival all year," Colby Creasman, an apple grower and member of the festival's board, told the Times-News Aug. 31. Her family runs Creasman Farms, south of Edneyville, and has been growing apples since the 1980s.
An early spring and a hot summer have meant apples ready for harvest about three weeks ahead of schedule. That means all the apples Creasman Farms will sell at the festival are already picked. In past years, they've been picking right up until the last minute, a stressful situation.
This year, they'll have 10 varieties, including Pixie Crunch, Honeycrisp, Cortland, Jonathan, Fuji, Senshu, Gala, Swiss Gourmet, she said.
They'll likely sell 100 bushels fresh, 50 bushels worth of cider and 25 bushels as pies and other prepared apple treats, she said. Each bushel might hold 50 to 80 apples.
Sales at the festival are "a big boost" for business but the visibility and publicity is just as important, she said.
"It's like the season opener for the home team. It gets people excited for apple season, it gets people excited for fall."
The apple sales themselves are especially important for more remote farms that don't do u-pick or direct sales.
"Some of the farms that participate in the Apple Festival only get this once-a-year opportunity to do that," Creasman said.
The festival's grand marshal, Fair Nabers Waggoner, city president at United Community Bank, has worked the festival at a local business' booth and volunteered going back decades, to the time she was a teenager, when she also rode in the parade with her high school cheerleading team, she told the Times-News Aug. 31.
She volunteers to set up booths, works one of the apple stands and helped create the Apple Grower of the Year Award 17 years ago, she said, adding, with a laugh, that she's pretty sure this year's winner is going to have no idea until the moment they're called up on stage.
"It just continues to keep a highlight on the whole reason the festival exists in the first place, which is to celebrate our rich agricultural history and all of our apple farmers," she said.
She's looking forward to riding the route in a vintage Buick that's been the grand marshal's ride for years.
One of her favorite parts of watching Hendersonville parades is waving and calling out to the people she knows in it.
"It'll be cool to be on the other side" for the first time in years, she said.
The Apple Festival began as the Apple Blossom Festival in April 1947, which included tours of apple orchards, horse racing, an air circus and a street dance.
The next year, there were no blossoms on the trees by April so in 1949 leaders decided to move the festival to the fall and combine it with the Fall Festival and the Apple Harvest Festival.
There's been an apple crop for the festival every year since then, except 1956 when a harsh late freeze killed the blossoms, the Times-News reported.
A pageant to select a festival queen was for years a central event at the festival. Now, instead, the festival appoints an "apple ambassador" before the start of the festival.
This year, the apple ambassador is Haley Marshall, a senior at East Henderson High School.
"This week has been insane," she told the Times-News Sept. 1.
She's set to start her duties at 5:45 a.m. Sept. 4, doing media interviews, greetings vendors and working the information booth.
Marshall grew up living with her grandparents and would dance in the parade with her dance class.
At first, going to the festival without her parents "broke my heart," she said. "You go to this thing and you see all these families together," she said.
She later found support in the festival.
"Despite not having my blood family there with me, I had the community as my family," she said. "When you go to the Apple Festival, there's a lot more than just apples."
The North Carolina Apple Festival runs 10 a.m.-9:30 p.m. Sept. 4-6 on Main Street in Hendersonville and the King Apple Parade begins at 10 a.m. Sept. 7.
Find more details, including an entertainment schedule and information on vendors and a map of activities at the festival's website, ncapplefestival.org.
George Fabe Russell is the Henderson County Reporter for the Hendersonville Times-News. Tips, questions, comments? Email him at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Hendersonville Times-News: Organizers reflect on 80th North Carolina Apple Festival