A fall festival celebrating all things “crow” in Chatham-Kent is shaping up to be one of the municipality’s biggest events of the year.
Downtown Chatham will be transformed for Crowfest on October 12-15 with daily activities planned including a performance by The Great Canadian Dueling Pianos, a costume contest, a Gala, a night market, buskers, and more.
“One of the things we can’t talk enough about is the quality of the buskers that are coming. They’re coming from all over the world. They’re coming from Ireland, throughout the States, and Australia. These guys are fabulous,” said Crowfest co-chair Andrew Thiel. “The interaction with the crowds is amazing… We’re going to have people blowing fireballs and doing sword swallowing.”
With several big sponsors on board to facilitate the event, including St. Clair College, Entegrus, and RM Sotheby’s, Thiel said the budget for the four-day festival is more than $150,000.
CK Mayor Darrin Canniff, who is also a co-chair for the event, said he expects the event to grow substantially in the future.
“We’re going to have a lot of people and people are going to talk about it. That’s the idea; people are going to come down here and say ‘wow, you have to go to this,'” he said. “I expect attendance to go up significantly next year once people start understanding what this really is.”
Initially, the event was planned for 15 days, but organizers shortened the festival to better suit the planned activities, which are expected to appeal to all audiences.
“We wanted to do it from October 1 to the 15th, that’s what we were looking at,” said Thiel. “We ended up dialing that back to four days… We can only have so much partying for so long.”
After initially announcing the event in February, the excitement around the event has only grown, said Canniff. The costume contest alone has already garnered interest from people across Ontario.
“You’ll see some pretty spectacular costumes, the mayor said. “We’re going to attract a lot of people from Toronto and probably further.”
Thiel added that downtown businesses will also be taking part in festival contests by decorating their buildings and storefronts.
“We were really surprised at how many people are making it their own,” he said. “ARTspace is doing a crow-themed exhibit but then we have Turns and Tale [Board Game Cafe] doing a crow-kinole tournament.
“We’re bringing this so far, but the community is really bringing it over the line.”
For more information about Crowfest including an event schedule, click here.
