GERING – Legacy of the Plains Museum is holding its 25th Annual Harvest Festival on Saturday, September 18th and Sunday, September 19th. The event starts at 9:00 am on Saturday and 10:00 am on Sunday and costs $5 per person over 12, with 12 and under free.
This year’s featured crop is dry edible beans, and the festival will feature many pieces of harvest equipment, including a 1946 John Deere Model A with a bean cutter. We will also be demonstrating an Allis Chalmers All-Crop combine, John Deere pull behind combine, a pedal powered bean sorter, and we will also have a horse drawn bean cutter, along with other historic pieces of equipment. We would like to thank WESTCO and Simplot for donating fertilizer and other products for our fields. We also would like to thank Thompson Seed for the seed potatoes and Kelley Bean for the bean seed.
The festival is a family friendly event with free wagon rides; horse, tractor, equipment parade; pedal cars; barrel trains; farm animals; live music; and a lot of other great activities outside. The event will also have potatoes for sale and food will also be available. New this year, the Snowy Bus will be at the event in the afternoon.
Inside the museum, the University of Nebraska Panhandle Research and Extension Center will be on hand to showcase their research, talk about bean diseases, and a cooking demonstration. A bake sale will also be highlighting many of the recipes in the Museum’s cookbook “Our Heritage through Food”. The exhibit hall will be open and free thanks to our generous exhibit sponsors, Inland Truck Parts, WNCC, B&C Steel, Simmons Olsen Law Firm, Gering Valley Plumbing, Kelley Bean, and Bill and Marsha Vaughan.
Bean producers and processors are invited on September 16th from 1:00 to 6:00 to a reception celebrating the beginnings of the bean industry. It will focus on Chester B. Brown, and the North Platte Valley and surrounding areas. There will be time to visit with producer and processor friends. Informal discussions will be held on the history of bean processing, field
production and the development of field equipment. The museum will be open for visiting the bean displays and other exhibits. If you have historic bean literature and photos, please bring them for scanning or donation to the agricultural archives of the museum.
For more information, visit our website at www.legacyoftheplains.org or call us at (308) 436-1989.