In mid-September, 2019 my wife and I visited Liberty, Kentucky for a number of reasons, but the timing was mostly because my wife wanted to attend the local apple festival.
This photographic genre is definitely well out of my comfort zone and I have to force myself to see and make these type images. I suppose this is a good exercise, nonetheless I feel much more at home in a wide open landscape with no one around and just the sounds of nature rather than raucous crowds.
A cropped version of the photo above is posted on Flickr. I cropped it to get a closer view of several of the performers, which I think is more appealing than this wide angle view that I made to take in the sign above the stage.
This festival had all the usual things that festivals have: entertainment and lots of booths with various goods, over priced food and beverages for sale to the attendees.
Liberty, Kentucky is a typical southern, rural, small town with down home country people, deeply religious and patriotic folk. Many of the families here have deep roots going back for many generations. The intermarriage of local families means that many of the residents or descendants of them are related in some manner.
Having grown up in a small, rural, southern town, I can understand the culture here. Most of the residents are conservative and have a long history of hunting, fishing and gun use as sport and as a means of supplementing their food supply. Hence, one will see such displays as this:
Many of the items displayed in the vendor booths are hand crafted, such as these beautiful wood vessels:
And, of course, many of the locals have ancestors that fought in the civil war, probably on both sides and that history is still prevalent in many vendor displays along with the hard scrabble life of rural farm history.
Everyone knows how much southerners like sweet ice tea.
This is also Trump country.
One has to take time to pick the best hat:
I did not see any political displays for any of the current crop of Democratic Party presidential candidates. I’m guessing the progressive movement is not very popular here.
There were many items to enjoy seeing and have fun photographing at many of the vendor booths. Here are just a few.