Photo courtesy Three One One Productions
This year, the Carytown Watermelon Festival falls on Aug. 14, which also happens to be the birthday of a former merchant who assisted in starting the event. “How about that? I’ve invited 100,000 people to my birthday party,” Jo Anne Draucker says.
The festival grew out of a desire to “cultivate a new image,” as Virginia Churn wrote in an April 10, 1977, Richmond Times-Dispatch feature. A year earlier, a group of merchants in the district had branded the nine-block stretch and tributary cross streets as “Carytown.” They formed Carytown Inc. to replace a dormant merchants association.
Draucker, who’s now retired, ran Ellman’s Dancewear and Premiere Costumes while holding nearly every office in the association over a 20-year span. “We wanted to show off the unique combinations of the businesses and get people to Carytown,” she says, having lived near Carytown in the 1960s and experienced its transformation from boarded-up and sketchy to urbane and essential.
The Aug. 25, 1982, “Discover Carytown Day” included a walking tour, a children’s fashion show and sidewalk sales. A seed was planted during a fateful visit by Draucker and friends to Varnville, South Carolina, where a weeklong watermelon festival has been held since 1939, replete with entertainment, contests, pageants and the crowning of a queen. Two years later, Carytown’s own melon-centric events began, with watermelons supplied by the Virginia Agricultural Growers Association, with Meals on Wheels and the Shriners distributing the slices. Early festivals included hula hoops and watermelon-eating contests, aerobics and karate demonstrations, Irish singing, a Beatles cover band and rubber-wheeled trolley-bus rides. Some 20,000 people attended in its second year.
Draucker oversaw the occasion for a decade. “I promised I wouldn’t close the street,” she says, even during an attempt at a volunteer-taxing three-day event. When she stepped away around 1992, Ernie Ferguson, who then owned the now-gone Dirt Shirt, took over. “He’d done the wine festival and other things,” Draucker says. “He knew who to call for tents and reduced rates — and he got the street closed.”
With increasing crowds almost every year, merchants began to feel some pressure. “Mostly from people’s sticky watermelon fingers getting on their merchandise,” Draucker says, chuckling. “And then, ‘Can I use your restroom?’ Ernie got more port-a-potties on the street.”
During the early 2000s, music offerings expanded under the umbrella of the Floating Folk Festival and the Rockitz productions of the late Brooke Saunders. Performers volunteered their time.
By 2008, the Ashland-based event-planning firm Three One One Productions began as consultants for Carytown’s events. In more recent years, Three One One’s summer event staff of 20 is supplemented by more than 1,000 volunteers from nonprofits in collaboration with Richmond-based Project Local. This year the Carytown Publix is providing two 18-wheelers full of watermelons. “The Shriners cut slices all day,” says Three One One Managing Partner Mike Murphy, “and the proceeds go to the Shriners Hospitals for Children.”
There are fewer musicians, but they perform longer. “Better for them, with all the hassle of setting up your gear in the heat,” Murphy says, and the performances are now sponsored by Virginia Credit Union Live. A large children’s activities area is also a feature.
Murphy adds that after the past few years, “It’s exciting to be out. And Carytown is such a cross-section of Richmond,” especially when 100,000 people show up. “It’s everything.”
The Carytown Watermelon Festival stretches from the Carytown entrance to the Byrd Theatre and starts at 10 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 14. Free. carytownwatermelonfestival.com
