PrairieFest Moved To September Amid Pandemic

OSWEGO, IL — The Oswegoland Park District's annual PrairieFest will be celebrated at a later date this year amid the pandemic, the district announced in a Facebook video. Instead of Father's Day weekend, the event will be held during Labor Day weekend in September.

PrairieFest will run from Sept. 3-6 and the theme for this year will be "Happy Days Are Here Again." The change is for one year only, Superintendent of Events and Cultural Arts Kristi Vest said. The move to later in the year allows the park district and community to look towards a time when thing can get back to normal.

The festival was canceled last year due to the pandemic.

"We didn’t have much choice in our date. That was kind of unfortunate," Vest said.

The park district spoke with investors and explained that they wanted to wait until the park district could be assured that the time and resources necessary would go towards a festival that would have a good chance at happening.

"That put us at fall," she said.

Several other festivals in the state are moving towards the fall, Vest said.

"So that seemed safe to us, too," she said. "This is not our preferred date, which is why we will only be going with it for one year, but this is the date when we could bring in the carnival, which I think is a really big part of the festival."

While some entertainers scheduled for the 2020 festival have agreed to appear in 2021, including trampoline stunt group Flip Out and the Light Your Night Laser Show, the park district is trying to get other acts as well.

Vest said that a lineup of entertainers is expected to be announced this April, and that the park district is looking to highlight community acts, especially those hit hard by the pandemic.

"The community has a real need to look back on the people that need some help," she said. "There's a lot of people that locally were making their living entertaining, that were really hurt by the last year. We’re hoping we can feature them in our PrairieFest lineup to really celebrate them and that they made it through all this."

Community members looking to suggest a regional band can contact the park district through the official PrairieFest website.

"There are a lot of factors that are out there. There’s people that are very concerned about their health, the health of their community, and there’s people that aren’t ready to gather," Vest said. "We need a little time to put COVID behind us. We feel confident that fall will be that time, based on what we’re hearing from a lot of different experts."

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