March 28, 2024
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Medway hopes to draw 700 to canoe event

MEDWAY – The meticulous, time-consuming but dying art of canoe making will be the featured draw at the Katahdin Area Wooden Arts-Canoe Festival on Saturday.

Held at the Medway recreation grounds off Route 157 and the Penobscot River, the festival will feature canoe makers Jerry Stelmok and Barry Dana demonstrating their intricate profession, said Barry Davis, owner of Two Rivers Canoe & Tackle of Medway and the festival’s primary organizer.

Davis encourages people who have old wooden canoes to bring them to the festival, which typically draws about 700 people.

“People can come to the festival to learn how to build and repair canoes,” Davis said Thursday. “They can also get information on their old canoe and a value can be ascribed.”

The event is free to the public. Residents are invited to attend. Town Administrative Assistant Kathy Lee said she hoped people would attend.

“It really helps businesses by bringing people to town,” Lee said.

Featuring floatplane rides, a pig roast, woodcrafts and swimming in the river, the festival has been a Medway event for six or seven years and was blessed in 2007 with good weather.

The canoes on display were a big draw. Ranging in price from $450 to almost $5,000, the handmade canoes featured gorgeous woodworking, paint and finish. If they weren’t so useful on a river or lake, they might make great displays in a living room, so intricate and graceful were some of the designs.

War canoe and MACKRO races on the river, folk music by Dave Mussey, singer Mark Miller, Native American Drummers and Dancers, the Doughty Hill Band and a public supper, a pig roast for $6 a plate, also will be featured. The pig roast supper begins at 5 p.m.

One event typically featured at the festival, fireworks, won’t happen this year, Davis said. Festival organizers chose to discontinue them because they didn’t fit in well with the event, which runs from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., since fireworks typically start at closer to 9 p.m.

“We decided to end them because we want them to support the canoe festival, and they really didn’t,” Davis said. “The fireworks are really just for the locals.”

Davis pressed the Board of Selectmen at its July 14 meeting for more support from the town but was turned down. Board Chairman David Dickey expressed interest, but said the board “was in a bad spot with the school and budgets,” meeting minutes indicated. Dickey and Selectman Phil Perkins told Davis to seek more money at next year’s budget meeting and to offer supporting information for any budget request.

For more information on the event, go to katahdinmaine.com or call 723-4443.

nsambides@bangordailynews.net

794-8215


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