Our Town hosted public events throughout year
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The Inter-Mountain photo by Edgar Kelley
Our Town's Betsy Smith shows a Christmas Tree to Elkins resident Van Broughton as Marcia Lohr looks on Wednesday afternoon at the Old Henry Gs location on Third Street. The trees were decorated by local residents for the holidays and then put up for sale to fund other projects from Our Town.
ELKINS -- After COVID-19 forced the cancellation of most social events in 2020, Our Town, Inc. made a commitment to ensure residents of Elkins would be able to enjoy public events in 2021.
"I think we accomplished everything we wanted to and maybe, surprisingly, had more things happen on the positive side than we originally thought," Our Town volunteer Bobbi Trimboli told The Inter-Mountain this week. "We are already talking about plans for next year and maybe making a few twists and changes to what we've done in the past."
It all began back in the spring when Our Town hosted the Sprout into Spring event. Residents were given materials to paint flowers which were placed along the city streets. And the citizens of Elkins responded in a big way, designing more than 90 flowers to brighten the downtown area.
The organization then rode the momentum of the flowers' success and planned an entire schedule of celebrations for the summer, which included an 11-date concert series at the Rotary Amphitheater in Elkins Town Square. The concerts were presented in conjunction with the Mountain State Street Machines' Cruise-Ins and ran from May until September.
The summer celebration -- which was tabbed "Our Nation, Our People, Our Town" -- also featured 12 window displays reflective of the national holidays and are scattered throughout downtown. There was a parade and ribbon-cutting ceremony with Elkins Mayor Jerry Marco to kickoff the summer celebration.
"I think we want to continue looking into doing things downtown with the window decor," Trimboli said. "We want to keep those windows looking nice and it was great to have all the people we had help out with them this past summer."
Our Town was also set to cap off the summer festivities with a Labor Day celebration to honor local Rosie the Riveters from throughout the area. Unfortunately, the Labor Day celebration was a casualty of COVID-19 and had to be canceled.
Our Town did, however, host a special ceremony at the Elkins-Randolph County Public Library in which the remarkable women were honored and given Certificates of Special Congressional Recognition signed by Sen. Shelley Moore Capito.
"We couldn't do the Labor Day celebration because of COVID, but I was extremely happy that we did what we did at the library," Trimboli said. "We were glad to be able to do something for all of those ladies."
Then as fall rolled around, the ever-popular scarecrows returned to the downtown streets courtesy of Our Town, which decided to also distribute leaves for residents to paint and join the scarecrows as part of the fall celebration.
"The scarecrows were fun to do again this year and we had a tremendous turnout with the leaves," Trimboli said. "They really helped all of us celebrate the fall season on our downtown streets."
Our Town followed that up by bringing back the Evergreen Gnomes for the holiday season. As part of its holiday decoration project, materials were distributed for those wishing to take part in painting two-foot tall Christmas trees.
"The Christmas trees were something new and we were surprised with the number of people who were interested in doing them," Trimboli said. "We ended up giving out 69 of them and we actually could have given out more because more people inquired."
The Our Town organization, which currently has 16 members, was recently one of three winners locally for the Extra Mile Hero Awards that were presented by Marco.
Our Town is currently looking for any unwanted artificial Christmas Trees that are not prelit. The donated trees are for an upcoming project and can be dropped off on the porch at the Delmonte on the Railroad Avenue side.