VILLAGES OF MINOA, FAYETTEVILLE – The villages of Minoa and Fayetteville will be closing out the summer and ringing in the fall with their yearly festivals in the park this month.
Minoa Festival in the Park
This coming weekend the Village of Minoa will be hosting its 10th annual Festival in the Park.
The event is being held on Saturday, Sept. 9 from around 2 p.m. to dusk in Lewis Park on South Main Street.
It will include live music throughout the day as well as face painting stations, magicians with balloons, a visit from the Bob Barker’s Famous Hot Dogs and Coneys food truck, and a long list of vendors arranged in a horseshoe fashion on the grass.
The crafters sell goods such as jewelry and fabrics, and other people sell everything from vegetables to fudge. The village keeps track of how many stands will be there, but Minoa Mayor Bill Brazill said there is no cost to becoming a vendor at the festival and that applications can be found at the village office at 240 N. Main St.
Like they did after the village Memorial Day parade and for the NoSmo Kings show this summer in the same park, American Legion Post 1102 will be selling barbecue chicken dinners out of the pole barn during the Sept. 9 festival.
There will also be a bonfire in the gravel section of the park and allotted space for classic cars if their owners wish to show them off.
At dusk, the firework display will begin.
Also referred to less officially as “the fall festival,” Brazill said the event gives residents a chance to learn about businesses and independent artists from around the community.
“I think it’s just great to showcase our village as a vibrant community,” he said. “We want to support our businesses and have people buy local, or have people follow the bands here and talk about how we have a great little village and how the people are so nice.”
Brazill added that it’s “special” to hit the 10-year milestone for the event and that over the last decade the local businesses have played a bigger and bigger part in the festivities.
This year the live musical acts playing under the gazebo at the Festival in the Park will be singer and keyboardist Tom Chick from 2 to 3 p.m.; Dan Wagner’s band Vagabonds from 3:15 to 4:15; I am Fool from 4:30 to 5:30; and The Degenerators from 6:30 to 8:30.
Fayetteville Festival
This year the two neighboring festivals take place on back-to-back weekends instead of on the same day, with the yearly Fayetteville Festival scheduled to kick off at 1 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 16 and lasting until the conclusion of the firework display starting at dusk.
Fayetteville’s event is being held in Beard Park on Lincoln Avenue, and according to the village’s deputy clerk, Karen Shepardson, “It’ll have pretty much the same format and premise that we’ve always had: to highlight the service groups in the area that support the community and to make it a nice community day where everyone gets together.”
Shepardson said the festival, which always lands on the third Saturday of September, wraps up the events season in the village as “one more last hurrah” of the summer while celebrating the entrance into autumn.
The booths at the Fayetteville Festival tend to bring in representatives from such organizations as the Manlius Historical Society, the Fayetteville Fire Department, the Fayetteville Public Works Department, the Fayetteville Parks Commission, the Fayetteville Senior Center, the area political committees, the Onondaga East Chamber and the Town of Manlius Police Department as well as local Scout troops, churches and sports teams like the Fayetteville-Manlius rowers.
There will also be a monkey bridge, bounce houses, games like cornhole, and activities like raffles and bubble blowing.
The musical entertainment will be Party Nuts beginning at 4 p.m. and Maria DeSantis at 6 p.m.
The Fayetteville Festival, which has been going on since about 2006, has only been canceled one year: as was the case for Minoa’s Festival in the Park, that one year without it was 2020 due to COVID.
