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Festival bears the fruit of volunteers' labor

Apple Festival President Gwenn Lanning, on stage, thanks members of the Apple Festival Board of Directors during the opening ceremony.

Twenty years ago, Gwenn Lanning started working on an Apple Festival subcommittee in charge of recruiting volunteers.

Working with a friend, she found she liked the work. She never left. Lanning takes the stage as the North Carolina Apple Festival president this year. In that capacity, on opening day, she will welcome the crowd. Although the festival’s four days will lie ahead, most of the work is done before that day arrives.
Apple Festival board members may serve for years on a committee that does a defined and discrete function, as Lanning did with the sponsorship and then the hospitality committee. As she moved up, she began to see the bigger picture.
“On the executive committee, you learn so much more about it,” she says. “When you’re just on the board, you really don’t know what goes on at the festival.”
The festival has had 69 years to get it right, so there’s lots that is unchanged from one year to the next. Even so, because the festival is volunteer-run the leadership ascension relies on a ladder.
“You start as second vice president, then first vice president, then president,” she said. “There’s so many things that have to be organized.”
Gwenn LanningGwenn LanningBecause this is the festival’s 70th year, Lanning and the rest of the board decided to have a new venue and some new features for the sponsor breakfast on Friday morning. They moved the event moved from the courthouse lawn to the community room in the Historic Courthouse. Organizers have added decorations, a historic display of Apple Festival T-shirts through the years and Flat Rock Playhouse actors in period costumes from 1947.

David Nicholson, the executive director of the Apple Festival, said the volunteers are more than just a nice-to-have addition.
“I’m a part-time executive director,” he said. “I served on many nonprofit boards in my career. Most of them come in at lunchtime, eat lunch, vote and go home. When you join our board you are assigned something to do. You can look on our website and you’ll see what they’re assigned to do.
“I kind of watch over things to make sure things happen. The street fair is my responsibility clearly but everyone on the board works for the festival. It takes 35 people (on the board) to put on this festival. We take one month off a year. We take December off and we start right back in January.”
Just the T-shirt and merchandise booth alone requires volunteers working three-hour shifts from festival opening to closing.
“On the street we’ll have 35 to 40 people anytime,” he says. “It’s hundreds of people.”
Among the new features this year is the “Drive the Future of Tough” display in the 600 block of North Main Street. Ford Motor Co. will show off the new 2017 Super Duty, a 6.7-liter V-8 powered pickup. Ford is offering test drives of the new pickup on Friday only.
People always say that the Apple Festival has the same arts and crafts booths every year. Not true, Nicholson says. A third of them rotate out every year.
The festival also added more bathrooms.
“Last year because of the crowd, lines were longer than we would have preferred,” he said. “We’ve almost doubled our capacity.”
Although she is not from an apple growing family, Gwenn Lanning is a Jones from Edneyville. Many of her classmates at Edneyville High School were from apple families.
“I grew up in the apple country,” she says.
She gets a lot out of the work she does to make sure the festival runs smoothly.
“I enjoy everyone I work with,” she says. “We’re all really good friends. It’s something that’s very enjoyable.”
“Apple Festival is the biggest event we have and it brings in so many people,” she adds. Figures of annual attendance generally range from 250,000 to 300,000 people. The festival closes downtown for a full four days, attracts throngs and snarls traffic on the downtown streets that remain open.
“Sometimes the locals don’t like that but it fills the restaurants, fills the hotels,” Lanning says. “It’s a great boom for the community.”