The 55th annual Treasure Mountain Festival is scheduled to take place Sept. 14 ‐ 17. Without new volunteers willing to oversee the event, it could be the last festival.
The Treasure Mountain Festival Association current board of directors will be retiring at the end of December 2023. If no volunteers step forward to take over the positions of president, vice president, secretary and treasurer, the association will be dissolved.
In a release to the paper, the current board stated that “it has become increasingly difficult in the past few years to find volunteers to help with the festival as well as personnel to take over the positions on the board of
directors.
“This is not an easy decision for the association board to make. There are members of the board who have been doing work for the festival and the association for more than 25 years. With the lack of response from members of the community to be volunteers or to serve on the board and maintain the business of the association, more and more tasks and responsibilities have been put on fewer and fewer people.”
The next meeting of the association will be held at 6 p.m. March 9 in the meeting room at the bowling alley in Franklin. Members of the board are urging all willing participants to attend.
For questions or more information concerning the future of the association, contact Carolyn Simmons, 304‐358‐7810 or email at cshds@yahoo.com.
My wife and I visited if not the first, one of the first TMF festivals.We visited many more after that. I can say that the trajectory has been on a downward trend for years. It was set up to allow local charitable organizations to help fund their operations. It was a very unique and very interesting heritage festival. More recently it has become the same as every other festival with outside vendors setting up, making their money and leaving. In my nine year association with the festival I never saw any real benefit to the community. Yes, we had our arguments about it but nobody could ever present any data to the contrary. I spent in excess of 50 grand trying to move TMF into a new dimension but met with the resistance that is so typical of efforts to make improvements to this community. Unfortunately, we have a bad habit of viewing things in the rearview mirror rather that through the windshield. This is the natural consequence of doing the same thing year after year.