Harvest Festival Hands Students History

After a two-year hiatus, the Harvest Festival returned.

Students and teachers, children and parents, and interested community members, crowded into the Athens Area Council of Aging and the Lyndon House on Thursday. They watched volunteers demonstrate crafts and skills such as weaving, making corn husk dolls, making paper, bee keeping, quilting, wood working and even washing clothes with a washboard.

"It's really an initiative of the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program," said ACCA's Elise Thornton, who helped coordinate this year's festival. "They were passionate about passing on the traditions. The youngers generation doesn't know how things were then."

More than 1,200 students were registered for the event. Wagons ferried participants between the Lyndon House and the ACCA's facility on Hoyt Street.