Pucellville Parade Continues Centenial Celebration Saturday

This Saturday's Purcellville Centennial Coming Home Parade promises to be a spectacular affair as the town kicks off a series of spring events to celebrate the town's 100th birthday.

Purcellville is known for its enthusiastic and large parades and Centennial Committee Co-Chairmen John Chapman and Joan Lehr, along with Purcellville Council liaison C.J. Walker and town program specialist Cheryl Herman are hoping for a good turn out.

The parade will include antique cars, baseball and softball teams heralding the start of the season, trucks, floats, local fire and rescue vehicles and lots of individuals. Bringing up the rear will be Virginia Regional Transit's Old Time Trolley, offering a ride to the festivities at Loudoun Valley High School.

Also participating in the parade, and providing a free concert at the later at the high school, will be the Philadelphia All Star Mummers, a group of colorfully attired top musicians who will follow the ancient mumming tradition of poking fun at all around. The group's trip to Purcellville is sponsored by Inova Loudoun Hospital.

The parade will be notable for the number of youthful participants as it will include, for the first time, all the youth baseball and softball teams.

"There'll be a lot of kids," Lehr said.

The parade will begin lining up at 9:30 a.m. at Emerick Elementary School, ready for the 11 a.m. departure to Main Street, via Orchard, and thence to Maple Avenue and the high school. In addition to the free concert on the field outside the school, there will be an antique car show. Over at Fireman's Field, now owned by the town, there will be a baseball game.

For more information on the parade or to sign up, contact Herman at the town office: 540-751-2326 or e-mail her at cherman@purcellvilleva.gov.

Contestants Sought

Next on the schedule is the May 10 Miss Purcellville Centennial Pageant, to be held from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Franklin Park Performing and Visual Arts Center, during which aspirants to higher titles can display their skills. Organizer Joni Walker, wife of Councilman C.J. Walker, has the world to be running the event. A former beauty queen herself and last year's Mrs. Virginia America, she has been a Miss America preliminary pageant judge for the past 20 years.

The pageant is open to girls ages 2 to 19. Right now, Walker has about 15 entrants but is hoping for far more. "Thirty would be nice, but 50 would be great," she said.

The judging will be in two categories: formal wear and photogenic. Girls from 2 to 9 can wear either a short or a long dress. "We'd prefer long for ages 10 to 19," Walker said.

The cost to enter the competition is $25 for the formal category and $10 for the photogenic category, which is optional. To enter the contest or for more information, contact Walker at misspurcellvillepageant@gmail.com.

Heritage Day

One week later, May 17, the Purcellville Preservation Society will use its annual Heritage Day celebration to focus on the town's history, honoring places, people and events of the past.

Heritage Day Chairman Meredith Thomas and her committee have put together a day-long roster of events during an old-fashioned "Country Fair" at the north end of 21st Street, all dedicated to different aspects of its heritage.

Calling it a "jammed back day of great fun," Thomas said the amount of creative energy and ideas that have gone into this year's event has been inspiring. To stage the event, Thomas is calling for a bunch of volunteers, especially to help set up the different areas. Anyone interested in joining the fun is asked to contact Thomas at merthomas@hotmail.com.

To start the day, at 10 a.m. there will be a children's parade down West Main Street to celebrate the town's 100th birthday.

Many of the events are being sponsored by various Purcellville groups and civic organizations, which will mount various exhibits and displays reflecting the town's heritage, including its black history, the history of electricity in Loudoun, farming, trains, veterinary medicine and those who left town temporarily to serve their country during war. An art show will display art of today and yesterday.

The event includes historic walking tours conducted by former Loudoun Valley AP History teacher and now director of education for the Mosby Heritage Group Rich Gillespie, who will point out the town's significant structures, landscapes and streetscapes.

The nearby village of Lincoln also is celebrating its 100th birthday, although many of its structures are much older than a mere century. The Lincoln Preservation Group has organized a trolley tour from Purcellville to Lincoln and a tour of the Quaker House.

Other history highlights include viewings of two oral history films: The Stories Behind the Story of Purcellville drawn from the recollections of residents, and The Station: A Ticket to the Past, produced in 1991 by Gillespie and his students; and a talk by University of Mary Washington Prince B. Woodard Chair of Historic Preservation W. Brown Morton, Learn About Your Old House. Copies of the Centennial Anthology of Purcellville, specially commissioned by the town, will be available for sale. Early sign-up for limited space available for the walking tours, trolley excursion and talk is recommended.

Live music at the Town Gazebo on North 21st Street will include a wide variety: barbershop, choral signing, bluegrass and gospel, folk music and clogging.

For kids, in addition to joining in the parade, there's a slew of old-fashioned games, including sack races, old-time dress up, along with photos ops, silhouette art, a fun water balloon game, carnival games, farm and wildlife programs and a history scavenger hunt. Homemade lemonade, ice cream and "bottled water everywhere" will be available also.

To close off the day, the PPA is sponsoring an old-fashioned line dance organized by the Bluemont Concert Series along with the Centennial Banquet, a family dinner at the Purcellville Skating Rink, co-sponsored by the PPA and the Rotary club. For more information, check out the ppa-va.org Web site.

There also will be a separate Health and Safety Fair at the IGA shopping center, featuring exhibits by Inova Loudoun Hospital, Purcellville Police, and the town's fire and rescue companies, offering various demonstrations and displays. For kids, there'll be the delight of riding mechanical bull, according to Purcellville Police Chief Darryl Smith.

After all that hoopla is over, there'll be a lull in town celebrations until the annual July 4 celebration and parade, the Pride of Purcellville, spearheaded by Olympus Gym owner Magic Kayhan.

The pace will pick up again in the last quarter of the year, starting in September, and ending with the ceremonial placing of the Centennial Time Capsule in a specially designed brick wall in front of the Purcellville Train Station in December.

Putting all these events on has meant a ton of work by Chapman and Lehr's committee, the PPA, and town staff and Chief Smith's Police Department.

In addition to masterminding the multifaceted celebration-and finding the people to be responsible for each detail-Lehr and Chapman have reached out to the business community for its support, which has responded enthusiastically, they said.

The sale of colorful Purcellville Centennial flags is going well and Chapman and Lehr say they are more than half way to their "reach-for-the-stars" goal of 100 flags waving all over town by the time the year ends. It's not just the town's business community that's chipping in with enthusiasm, Lehr said-it's out of town-businesses, the media, civic organizations, professional individuals and associations, individuals and families.

Other promotions in support of the Centennial include sale of Hannah Janney's commemorative pottery, which can be ordered through www.purcellvilleva.gov linking to Centennial or Visit Pottery by Hand, and Centennial T-shirts.

Help From The Explorers

For the Purcellville Police Department, the rest of the year is "going to be busy," Chief Smith said last week. Providing crowd and traffic control for all those parades and associated street closings will keep the department on its toes.

But Smith has some valuable assistance available for the job. He is banking on the support of the Youth Explorer Post, a group whose creation he initiated two years ago. Smith and the police department have won awards for the department's outreach to and sponsorship of young people in town. The group was named the Rookie Post of the Year for the Washington, DC, Metro area in 2006, and received a community service award in 2007.

The 14 sworn post volunteers provide the police department with extra hands, Smith said, noted they are all trained in crowd control-which is "the biggest thing we do," Smith said.

Officer Jim Rust, who oversees the post, says it is composed of young people who have expressed interest in a future career in law enforcement.

The 14-strong group, aged from 14 to 20, provide "big support for us," Smith said, helping out with parades, community functions, managing the fingerprinting for young kids at various events. At year's end, organizers can breathe a sigh of relief that it's all over and look forward to a bit of down time while town residents will be able to look back on a year of rich and multi-layered birthday cake.