Time To Trade

Trade Days Festival To Feature Native American Pow-wow, Parade, More

TRADE, Tenn. – Organizers of the 21st annual Trade Days Festival, June 26-28, have learned at least one thing during their two decades of experience: no spectacle is ever staged exactly as planned.
So this year, you won’t be handed the usual schedule of events setting forth times and places. You will enter the gates with only the fair certainty that somewhere along the line you will see Donnie Freeman and his Inter-Tribal Pow-Wow, the Kountry K-9s (dogs doing stunts), the Paul Bunyan Lumberjack Show, world-renowned magician Jimmy Dixon and the high-energy, fast-paced Puppetone Rockers.
Announcements on a public address system will steer you in the right direction at the appropriate times, and, of course, following the crowd is a time-honored strategy.
Really, it’s just another authentic component of a festival that strives to bring to life the area’s frontier days. Probably not too many of the trappers, traders and Native Americans that visited Trade Gap on foot and on hoof followed any kind of set schedule or, for that matter, wore wristwatches.
T.J. the Clown is likely to come find you while you’re strolling through the Tennessee Wildlife Exhibit, or while your kids are on the National Guard’s climbing wall.
Vendors offer local and Native American crafts, and the festival also puts on continual demonstrations of churning, weaving, quilting, making apple butter and lye soap, tobacco twisting, blacksmithing and operating hit-and-miss engines and antique saws. 
The Trade Grist Mill is a permanent fixture on the festival grounds, a newly built reconstruction of a 19th-century mill with a natural stone exterior and an 18-foot, solid oak waterwheel that delivers power to an arsenal of belts, pulleys and authentic mill equipment.
This year, the gift shop is open, where you can buy stone-ground flour, cornmeal and grits, as well as Amish jams, jellies and canned goods, local hot sauce and salsa, and old-fashioned wooden toys.
Bands, singers and cloggers playing the outdoor stage have similarly abandoned the printed schedule. The Trade Days Parade will take place on Saturday morning, and a worship service is scheduled for Sunday morning. Breakfast, followed by the traditional Blessing of the Festival on Snake Mountain, kicks things off early on Thursday morning.
The pow-wow is the main attraction, a centuries-old ceremony consisting mainly of Native American dancing in colorful costumes to the pounding rhythms of a bunch of guys blasting away on an enormous kettle drum. Numerous tribes are represented, and the event is repeated three times a day.
The Florida-based lumberjack show has toured internationally, demonstrating logging then and now, with saws, axes and chainsaws, and featuring log-rolling competitions, log-rolling dogs, axe throwing, dragster chainsaw and speed climbing.
Audience participation is invited in the form of guessing what the guys are carving. To see videos of the show, visit http://www.lumberjackent.com.
The lumberjacks will perform Saturday and Sunday only.
The Arneberg family from Oslo, Norway, stage the Kountry K-9 performances, showcasing dogs that do high jumps, stunts on slides, walk on their front feet and ride three-wheelers. The show has toured Europe and Asia, and all the dogs are shelter or rescue dogs. Visit http://www.arnebergsuperdogshow.com.
The three-day festival is a salute to Trade Gap, a colonial center of commerce that sat in the shadow of Snake Mountain at the confluence of several primitive pathways, including the Great Warrior Path of the Shenandoah and the Daniel Boone Trail.
Here, the wagon trains heading north, south and east, but mostly west, stopped to camp out and trade furs, guns and firewater.
The locals are hugely proud of the community’s fabled past, located just north of the Tennessee-North Carolina state line. Over the years, they have gotten behind the festival, bringing to it their horse-drawn carriages, antique cars, homemade goods, sun bonnets and big hats.
Admission proceeds are funneled back into the community, for a scholarship fund and toward the upkeep of the park.
Trade Days is also a big fundraiser for a lot of local clubs, nonprofit groups and fire departments – worthy causes that can regularly be relied upon to show up with the food.
Admission is $8 for adults, $5 for children ages 6-12 and free for children 5 and under. Senior Citizens Day on Friday is $5. A three-day adult pass is $20, children’s pass $10.
From Elizabethton, take 19E to Hampton and go left on 67, which winds around Watauga Lake and takes you to Mountain City. At the traffic light, go right on 421 and, in about 10 miles, the festival grounds will be on the left.
Or if you prefer steep mountain roads with lots of hairpin curves, take 421 out of Bristol. The address is 228 Modock Road in Trade, Tenn.
For more information, call the Johnson County Welcome Center at (423) 727-5800, the Trade Days hotline at (423) 727-3007 or visit http://www.tradedaysfestivaltn.com.

LOIS CAROL WHEATLEY is a freelance writer. Contact her at .