Last Friday evening, a couple of our staff members were sitting in a local restaurant, chatting with the proprietor.
Business was good. The place was almost full.
“They’re already here,” the restaurant owner said. “They” are
Oregon Jamboree fans, hitting town early to experience more than just country music.
This was a week before the
Oregon Jamboree, and already Sweet Home was benefiting from the presence of a music festival that has become the signature of a small timber town that got royally burned by the spotted owl political fiasco.
Faced with massive job losses, closing mills and the resulting loss of local commerce – we have to shop at least 15 miles away in Lebanon and beyond for many of our necessities now, Sweet Home’s resilience manifested itself in a real “can-do” effort: a camping/country music festival intended to boost the local revenue pool by bringing people to town and raising money for further economic development.
After 20 years, people have come to realize that the Oregon Jamboree has developed into a clean, well-organized, friendly, relatively convenient three-day smorgasbord of front-line and up-and-coming country music artistry that any fan would love. They’ve apparently also learned what a lot of us already appreciate: What a great place Sweet Home is to visit, if not to live in.
And we’re really happy they’re here, sharing our beautiful mountains, lakes, forests, rivers and everything else that makes this a premium place to live.
“Premium?” some residents might ask. Yes, there are wrinkles, just as there are everywhere. We have too much poverty, unemployment and the problems that go hand-in-hand with that. Drugs. Drop-outs. Disease.
But anyone who has visited Sweet Home regularly over the past five years has also seen some serious improvements in our image. Two dozen buildings sporting fresh paint, facades, signs or logos, including more in the past few weeks. Planters overflowing with flowers. Bustling businesses. We’re a small town, but we’re not sleeping.
What many visitors – and even some residents – can’t yet see are the things that are happening below the surface:
n concerted, multi-agency efforts to create a recreational trail from Sweet Home to the Willamette National Forest east of Cascadia to create new, conservational economic uses for the severely overgrown national and state forestlands surrounding us that are a result of that spotted owl thing;
n a proposed 200-some-acre county park that would border the river and several ponds on former industrial land and would provide a huge multi-use recreational facility for the Jamboree and other events; plans to develop better camping and recreational facilities in the area – particularly in the Quartzville area around Green Peter Lake, and more.
Why should visitors care about this? Because they are the key to it, in many ways. That crazy idea, back in the early 1990s, to hold a camping/country music festival in Sweet Home has borne plenty of fruit, including – indirectly if not otherwise – nearly everything described above. Sure, there are other factors that have played into what’s happening, but Sweet Home’s will to persist in the face of adversity, to re-invent itself, to pull itself up by the bootstraps, has not gone unnoticed.
That’s why every visitor, every country music fan, every vendor is important to us because the money they spend on tickets goes directly to a non-profit organization whose mission is to slowly rebuild the once-booming Sweet Home economy that was shredded by those spotted owl decisions 30 years ago. When they buy water, when they take showers, when they eat at a restaurant or buy something, when they pay to park on somebody’s lawn – all that is cash flowing into our community – the school district, the grocery stores and other businesses, to individual residents.
For many of our visitors, the Oregon Jamboree may be just a chance to experience three great days of country music performances and other fun times. But it’s a lot more than that to Sweet Home.
Yes, there will be crowds, noise and some inconvenience to local residents. But we appreciate those who come a lot more than they may realize.