Costumes
One neat thing about the Olde Town Festival in Covington, besides the large number of history exhibits around town, were the people who wore old-fashioned costumes in line with the exhibits. Here are some folks at the old museum at the H.J.Smiths Sons General Merchandise Store on Columbia Street.
I took part in the ceremonies that kicked off the special festival week in 1984 by dressing in an old Farmer Brown costume and unveiling my pretend "time machine" made out of an old TV cabinet with a big clock dial on the front. The gag was to pretend that the time machine would take the entire town back to 1904, and then it would "malfunction" and the community would be stuck in the olden days for the next week. The malfunction was created by a bunch of fire and smoke that would hit the Time Machine just as it reached 1904. Mayor Ernest Cooper was a great sport in pretending that the whole thing was real, as shown below.
One of the more popular aspects of the Olde Town Festival was the Scarecrow Contest. When the Olde Town Festival stopped being held a few years later, it was replaced by the annual Scarecrow Festival. More information on that event can be found AT THIS LINK.
