ELKINS – Weather permitting, the Elkins Train Depot Welcome Center will offer a 20th anniversary celebration on Friday at its location in Elkins Town Square.

The event will celebrate the Welcome Center’s official opening in 2006, and will coincide with Our Town’s first Summer Concert Series performance of the year, which is paired with a Cruise-in hosted by the Mountain State Street Machines.

Cars participating in the cruise-in will line up in the area of the Delmonte Market and the Welcome Depot on Railroad Avenue beginning at 5 p.m. The concert, which will feature the Soda Pop Gypsies, and the Birthday Celebration will get underway at 7:30 p.m.

In the case of inclement weather, the concert will be moved to the Phil Gainer Community Center, and the anniversary celebration will be postponed until June 26, when Top Shelf plays the second show of the Summer Concert Series.

“We’ve been getting reports of it possibly raining on Friday and if that happens we are going to move some things around,” Elkins-Randolph County Tourism Convention and Visitors Bureau Executive Director Anne Beardslee told The Inter-Mountain. “If it rains the concert will move to the Phil Gainer Center and we won’t do our celebration until the next concert. Because it’s a celebration for the depot and we want to have it there.”

Beardslee said the CVB will be handing out 300 cupcakes during the celebration. She noted it’s hard for her to believe that it’s been 20 years since the Welcome Center opened its doors.

“It’s been a long time since we first opened and it took us a year to put it all together, so we have actually been at this for 21 1/2 years,” Beardslee said. “We have served over 603,000 people that we know of since then. And we serve a lot of people that we don’t know, who come in and out. So this is a celebration of keeping our doors open for as long as we have and how many people we have served. And we want to share that with the community, because they have been so supportive of the Welcome Center right from the beginning.”

Beardslee has been at the Welcome Center since its inception, and was part of the group that worked to get the facility off the ground.

“When we started out we only had a few thousand dollars a year and we ran completely on volunteers,” Beardslee said. “Now we have a staff of three full-time employees plus an AmeriCorps person. So we have come a long, long way. ”

For more information on the CVB, visit the Welcome Center’s Facebook page or call 304-635-7803.