By Bonita Wilborn
We are excited to announce that the Mountain Valley News Story Trail Program, which began on July 9 and concluded the first week in August was highlighted in the Alabama Press Associations monthly newsletter for August. The newsletter titled, AlaPressa, had a brief article about our Story Trail Program.
This article prompts me to give you a little more background information about how Story Trail came into being. During the month of June, my husband, my daughter, and I were on a family outing in a small town in Tennessee, and as chance would have it the day we were visiting the town was celebrating “Frontier Days”. The town square was blocked off to traffic to make way for food and craft venders to set up and sell their wares, there were various forms of entertainment scheduled throughout the weekend, and the stores on the square were having “Frontier Days” Sales.
My family chose to eat lunch in a restaurant called, Barrel House BBQ, located just off the square. It was a place that boasted local flare, as there was very few spots on the tables, walls, and even the ceiling that did not have some sort of writing scribbled on it. Some people had only written their names while others had left a pearl of wisdom in the form of a poem or verse.
After enjoying a scrumptious lunch of unique items, my family decided to make the journey around the square just to see what was there. As we walked, we saw lots of interesting things that a person could spend their money on and in various places throughout the square I saw little wooden stands that had “Story Trail #6” or “Story Trail #11” listed on them. Also on the stand was a page from a children’s book. No doubt it was an activity for the children, and I didn’t ask anyone about the details of their story trail event, but it gave me the idea to begin the Mountain Valley News Story Trail Program.
Again, as chance would have it, July is the month that the Rainsville Chamber of Commerce encourages folks to shop local, and at the beginning of the month of August the town of Fort Payne already had a special day of celebration planned to honor their native son whose Pete the Cat series of books have been sold all over the world. So, it worked out perfectly for us to host our program the next month.
It took a lot of quick planning and several hours of measuring, sawing, and gluing to get our Story Trail stands ready, but the children who participated in our inaugural year seemed to really enjoy going to the various business throughout the City of Rainsville to read the next pages of the week’s features book.
Again, I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to our Story Trail sponsors. We’re hoping next year will be bigger and better than this year was.