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This weekend festival goers from around the will descend on Midwest Georgia’s favorite fall festival, the annual Hummingbird Festival in Hogansville.

Each year, the streets of Downtown Hogansville play host to an outdoor festival featuring around 200 vendors with artisan crafts, unique goods, a kid’s area, fair food and live music.

A total of 192 vendors have signed up this year.

The festival is run by an all-volunteer group to help raise money for the Hogansville Charitable Trust, which then uses those funds for city improvement projects.

For volunteers, putting on the festival is a labor of love that can take months to prepare. 

Hummingbird Festival Co-Chair Jessica Scott said the festival is completely run 100% by volunteers.

“I’m a full-time artist and mom and my co-chair Brandon [Rettke] he is a pilot and winery meadery owner here in town,” Scott said. “I think a lot of people think that all of us make a bunch of money off of this. We both put over 1,000 hours each into it.”

Scott said all of the money raised by the festival doesn’t go to the volunteers; it goes back to improving Hogansville.

“The money that’s raised from the festival is put back into the community. For instance, one of the most recent things it was used for was the purchase of the new city hall, which allowed city officials to get out of the Royal Theatre and enabled the start of its renovation process,” Scott said.

She said the Tower Trail was also recently purchased using festival funds.

The hours for the festival are going back to 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. for both Saturday and Sunday.

“Last year we had music in the evenings, but that just didn’t seem to work well with the environment and the culture. So we’ve moved all of our music to start just after lunchtime on Saturday and Sunday. Then a bunch of the businesses downtown are having specials and events and bands and so we’re encouraging people to explore Hogansville once the festival closes at 5 p.m.,” Scott said.

The other change for 2023 is the food court is moving and switching to more of a food truck line on Commerce Street. 

Scott said that the area where the food court had been located is privately owned, so they needed to move the vendors to another area. 

“We’ve now moved the court fully food truck wise on the back of Commerce Street,” Scott said. “It’s kind of just this self-contained food court area.”

Scott said the area had previously been a kid’s area, but it has been moved to Askew Park.

“It’s kind of a self-contained kids area, so we don’t have kids running through a cigar shop,” she said.

“We would like to thank the City of LaGrange and their public works personnel for collaborating with Hogansville to ensure that we had a great stage for the event,” said Hogansville Mayor Jake Ayers.

The two-day event is a decades-long tradition for Hogansville and Troup County filled with arts, crafts, food, music and plenty of fun for the whole family.

 

The 2023 Hummingbird Festival will be held in Downtown Hogansville on Saturday, Oct. 21, and Sun. Oct. 22 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free.