Oct 9, 2014 4 min read

WAYNESBURG – This weekend’s Harvest Festival at the Greene County Historical Society Museum on Rolling Meadows Road has been celebrating fall for 43 years with historic relish.

Visitors swish through the falling golden maple leaves to experience everything from old time craft demonstrations, museum exhibits and homemade food to Native American re-enactments and Civil War skirmishes.

Kids frolic, canons fire and the smell of wood smoke fills the air from the encampments and the food being prepared over open grills outside. But this year visitors will have good reason to look upward into the future and be amazed. Squonk Opera, a high-tech, high-energy performance group from Pittsburgh, will put on two shows at 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. Sunday that sends brightly colored inflatable shapes high into the air above their stage as they perform with guitars, wonderfully contrived homemade instruments, a keyboard and yes, even bagpipes that blow smoke into the air.

“We just premiered Pneumatica this past weekend at the Three Rivers Arts Festival here in Pittsburgh and it was a blast!” Squonk Opera co-founder Jackie Dempsey told her friend, Artbeat owner Linda Winegar in June. As part of the group’s successful kickstarter campaign, their new show Squonk Opera was ready to do free Pneumatica performances and workshops all over the region, at community events, schools, camps and festivals, then go on tour around the country.

One of the group’s funders, EQT, suggested that they perform in counties where the corporation did business and Greene County was on the list.

“It turned out that one of the few dates they had available was the Sunday of the Harvest Festival,” Winegar said. “This is so exciting to get Squonk Opera to perform for free. They put on a fantastic show.”

The musical lineup for this year’s festival mixes old with new. On Saturday, contemporary singer Molly Erlichman of Waynesburg will kick off the festival at 10 a.m., followed by MD & the Double P’s, a gospel and old-time music family band from Spraggs.

On Sunday, Weedrags, a progressive bluegrass band from the Washington area will play two sets from 11 a.m. until 1 p.m. Weedrags has a loyal following that crosses the generational divide to enjoy their traditional music with its cutting edge influence of modern rock and even a touch of jazz.

Squonk Opera will have plenty of room to set up its flatbed truck performance stage in the field behind the train shed and kids activities, including face painting and a duck pond game will be there, too. In between Squonk performances, the museum is putting on a Civil War Ceremony in honor of its ongoing American Civil War in Greene County exhibit that ends with a closing reception Nov. 1.

“The main hall now has these huge displays of Civil War memorabilia and mannequins in uniforms,” museum board vice president Candace Tustin said. “The ceremony on Sunday honors not only Greene County Civil War soldiers but veterans in general,” she said.

“One of the artifacts that we brought in for the exhibit is the James Purman Medal of Honor. And this year we have a town crier. Aidan, the son of board member Pat Fitch, has a sandwich board and will walk around calling out the schedule of events. There’s more demonstrations this year because we’re trying to bring the festival back to its roots of keeping the past alive. This year we have our food in the basement set up more like an old-fashioned soup kitchen with many kinds of soups, breads and apple dumplings. Plus, we’ll be making bread in the old brick wall oven upstairs.”

Demonstrators include the Winegars, who will set up a potters wheel and show the public how cups, bowls and vessels have been made for centuries.

“We’re closing Artbeat on Saturday and putting a sign on the door telling customers to meet us at the Harvest Festival,” Linda Winegar said.