How it all began…
One morning in 1986, members of the Leesville Merchants Association flocked together to hatch the concept of a town festival. It was Sara Shealy, famous throughout the region for eggs-traordinary fried chicken served in her Batesburg-Leesville restaurant, who courageously proposed the development of a Poultry Festival for the Lexington County community. After much clucking and crowing, the head rooster called for a vote and the Poultry Festival was hatched.
What better theme to spotlight the largest agri-business in South Carolina – a $1 BILLION industry that employs thousands in production, processing, marketing of eggs, broilers, turkeys, pigeons, quail and spring chicken! Lexington County; home of Columbia Farms, Saluda County, headquarters of Amick’s Farms and Gentry Poultry Company, and Aiken County are among the state’s top broiler producers.
The first festival, staged in 1987 called the Ridge Poultry Festival, attracted over 20,000 visitors to the Twin Cities. In 1989, the event, experiencing growing pains changed its name to the South Carolina Poultry Festival to mirror the stamped of Palmetto State citizens who streamed into the town to partake of food, fun, music, crafts, and fireworks. Festival goers have clucked together through the ensuring eggs-travaganza and have packed the weekend population of Batesburg-Leesville to 100,000 plus!!!
Although the festival was originally started as a way to invite others to “Come Sample the South” in Batesburg-Leesville, it was also a tribute to the largest employer in the region, the poultry companies. Now we invite people to discover the secret that others are now finding. Come eggs-perience the eggs-cellent place to live, work, worship, and shop.
The South Carolina Poultry Festival; with a hearty blend of Southern hospitality and true American spirit regularly contributes to various area charities, organizations, and community causes such as the construction of a walking track around the town park, scholarships for high school seniors, and scholarships for Poultry Science majors at Clemson University.
Now as we near the 25th annual event, May 12th-14th, we need your help in producing on of the top festivals in the Southeast. It takes a lot of hard work, volunteers and corporate sponsors to assemble a festival boasting 6 stages of continuous entertainment, 30 food vendors, a carnival, 110 plus unit parade, 120 plus crafters and more than 30 commercial vendors. We proudly host the annual state 4H cooking contest as well as our own “Cook-Cluck-Win-A-Buck” chicken cooking contest.
For our athletic supporters, we host a 5k road race as well as golf and volleyball tournaments. We also have a great car show with over 100 entries. You can dance the night away with our street dancers Friday and Saturday evenings. Did I hear you say you want more? For your viewing pleasure and American pride, we’ll give you one of the largest pyro-musical (that’s a fireworks show set to music for you city-folk) on Saturday evening!
Without the support of the many companies and individuals like you, we would not be able to provide the quality family festival that so many have come to enjoy and eggs-pect! Come join us for this eggs-citing event attended annually by over 100,000 people. We have been blessed to have the support of many media outlets like WNOK, WCOS, WJES, WIS-TV, and WLTX. While we pay for a portion of the advertising, these outlets have provided many public service announcements and have also provided celebrity judges for contests as well as parades. We advertise on billboards and the radio. In the past, we have printed as many as 15,000 tri-fold brochures, 3000 program books, and we maintain a website. We also provide special gift packets containing gifts from some of our sponsors and the festival to more than 250 growers in our area. For more information, check out our link at www.Batesburg-Leesville.org or call 1888-427-SCPF (7273) or you can contact the SC Poultry Festival by filling out the form on the Contact page.
