Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 July 1895 — American Rural Festivals. [ARTICLE]

American Rural Festivals.

Of most respectable antiquity is the custom of celebrating Nature’s largess to Mother Earth, at midsummer, by a pageant in which the beneficiaries adorn themselves with garlands, to ride, drive, or walk in joyous procession. ‘‘o, 'tis the merry time 1” wrote old Stevenson in 1861, ‘‘wherein honest neighbors made good cheer, and God is glorified in His blessings On the earth.” Variants of this custom were familiar in many parts of England, and, curiously enough, their gradual disappearance from the soil of the mother country seems to have been followed by their appearance in full vigor in Puritan America. For years past our country, from Maine to California, has witnessed a series of summer rural fetes, variously conceived, carried out with more or less attention to detail, each stamped vividly with the color of the region that gave it birth, and all seeming to have been fashioned without reference to a common original.