BUCKHANNON – The 2024 Strawberry Festival will feature a Mardi Gras theme.

West Virginia Strawberry Festival Board President Shane Jenkins attended the Sept. 7 Buckhannon City Council meeting to discuss the state of the festival and share some new information about the 2024 festival.

“I’m going to share some information which has never been very public — just to let you know how much of an impact you’ve made in the last three years – so I just want to let you know that when I became president, going on three-and-a-half years now, we had $9.76,” Jenkins said. “I’m crazy or something because I became the president right in the middle of COVID, but we still didn’t even really know what the festival was at that point, so we didn’t have any income at that point in time.”

The board and Jenkins feared they would be the next festival forced to close due to the pandemic.

“I feel like that’s a number I’ll never forget because, to me, it was a matter of becoming like a lot of other festivals and fairs in our area and closing the doors or putting the hard work in and going out and ensuring that it continues,” Jenkins said. “Our team reached into their own pockets and spent their own free time away from their full-time jobs and their family and dedicated a resuscitative effort to the West Virginia Strawberry Festival.”

“When others may have stepped away and closed the doors, this board, community and the people stepped up, and I can confidently say today that it definitely paid off,” he added.

Jenkins said the board and other volunteers built stages from scratch, utilizing the city’s street department garage and have also built constructed new floats for the various parades.

“With the exception of the last two years, if you’ve ridden on any of those floats in the past 10 years, I just want to say that I’m sorry, there were weak spots, and it was terrible and obviously, it was a safety issue,” Jenkins said. “We redesigned and remodeled entire floats from what we had; there was actually an old mobile home frame.”

Jenkins officially announced the next theme of Strawberry Festival – Mardi Gras – and the different aspects that will be utilized to illustrate that theme.

“There’s going to be a lot of different cool stuff involved; there will be a lot of green, purple and gold, so we’ve already started to incorporate that into some things and started to get some marketing and promotional material out there,” Jenkins said. “We have increased our total production budget by 75% higher than it was last year.”

“Specific increases include a 600% increase for our entertainment, so that includes bands, and we want to bring a lot of brass bands for the Mardi Gras theme,” he continued. “That also includes street entertainment, ground entertainment – stuff like that.”

The festival will also have a 25% increase in its budget for the Grand Feature Parade and a combined 60% increase in its budget for all the other parades.

“We have over 60 committees altogether, and we’re increasing, I think, 43 of them, so things will look pretty different this year in a good way,” Jenkins said. “We do plan to have a musical headliner this year, and along with that comes a pretty big stage production and just bigger investments.”

People can stay up-to-date with the Strawberry Festival by following them on Facebook.