Published: September 02, 2009 11:10 pm      

Area festival celebrates laborers and town history

River to Rails to mark Lincoln’s 200th birthday

CATLETTSBURG — The Gate City’s annual Labor Day celebration will kick off Friday night with the dedication of the newly renovated Oakland Avenue Park.

Festivities will continue through the weekend and include some new additions to the traditional celebration, titled River to Rails this year.

The weekend will culminate, as it has for the last decade, with country music star George Jones performing in downtown Catlettsburg on Monday night. Jones has recorded 194 charted singles over his career, which spans nearly seven decades, more than any artist in any format in the history of recorded music.

The Labor Day festival is Catlettsburg’s signature annual event. It marks the traditional holiday but also serves as a sort of homecoming event for hundreds of Catlettsburg natives who flock to town each year to reminisce and reunite with old friends, according to organizers.

Gail Sammons, a member of the Catlettsburg Leadership Community Development Club, who has helped to organize the annual event since she graduated from high school, said the festival “is just something that everybody waits for when you get into summer.”

“We try to do something that people can come back and just mingle and mix and stand around and talk. It’s really more just a big party. It’s just celebrating the fact that we lived to see another year and you see old friends,” she said.

Catlettsburg Police Chief Mark Plummer, who also serves on the organizing committee, shared the same sentiment. “It’s basically a homecoming for the people who have moved away. They all plan on coming home for Labor Day,” he said.

According to Sammons in the last 10 years since Catlettsburg’s sesquicentennial celebration, the festival has spurred a wave of other projects aimed at restoring Catlettsburg. The floodwall murals, the restoration of the park and other improvements have all in part been inspired by the sesquicentennial, she said.

“That sort of really got the town started getting cleaned up. It just got the ball rolling, since then we’ve tried to do something every year,” she said.

CARRIE STAMBAUGH can be reached at cstambaugh@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2653.