As the air gains the first chills of fall, the people of Berea lined up in costume for the annual Berea Harvest Festival on Oct. 15.
This year brought new additions, including a viewing area for the Browns game referred to as the Dawg Pound, a diverse range of food vendors and a range of Harvest Festival traditions.
Megan Pochatek, the City of Berea’s administrator of special events, said that in moving the festival from Saturday to Sunday, the Dawg Pound allowed people to view the Brown’s game with their community while also giving more time for activities on Saturday.
“The watch party is a brand-new thing,” Pochatek said. “We decided to show the Browns because we moved our harvest festival from Saturday and added a haunted hayride yesterday [Saturday] and moved the festival to Sunday.”
In addition to the Dawg Pound, the Sunday festival included inflatable obstacle courses, a hay maze, craft booths and a candy trail that spanned most of the Coe Lake walking trail. Organizations and businesses from all over the Berea area came out to support the event, including the Berea Rotary, who handed out candy right next to the entrance.
“We’ve been helping out since the beginning, I believe,” David Skrzynski, a representative of Berea Rotary, said. “In previous years, we’ve helped with rides and whatever other activities they have, but this year, we’re just doing the candy trail.”
The festival brings out a unique blend of different food vendors ranging from seafood, cotton candy and donuts. There were also a lot of new faces representing food vendors, such as Original Donuts.
“We decided that we wanted to just start branching out to more festivals. I looked and then I saw that this one was available,” said a worker at Original Donuts.
One of the vendors selling cotton candy, Allison Grazia, said that the cotton candy brought together adults and children alike.
“We try to go to a lot of kid-oriented and Halloween [events]. Anything that we could get our name out there,” Grazia said. “I mean, adults do get really excited about cotton candy as well.”
Even with the cold and damp weather, many of the attendants wore their choice of Halloween costume, including Batman and members of the PAW Patrol.
One returning attendant, Stephan Manchir, rocked a GhostBuster’s themed vehicle and he and his crew turned out in costume.
“We’ve actually been doing this for about ten years, even before it came to the lake,” Manchir said. “They had it in the downtown area with the local businesses, but it got too big. So they moved it to the lake.”
