1 week Ago
CARTHAGE, Mo. — The oldest event at the annual Maple Leaf Festival and the newest both happened Saturday, a couple of hours after the 2-mile Maple Leaf Parade that is one of the highlights of the nine-day festival. The 58th annual Maple Leaf Band Festival brought 15 marching bands from high schools across the region.
The Carthage High School band doesn’t compete in the festival, but it performs an exhibition program at the end of the preliminary round. Ten bands advance to finals and perform a second time after the preliminary round. The best bands in the competition were: • No.
1: Truman High School in Kansas City. • No. 2: Carl Junction High School.
• No. 3: Lebanon High School. • No.
4: Parkview High School in Springfield. • No. 5: Rogers Heritage High School from Northeast Arkansas.
The band competition was the granddaddy of the Maple Leaf Festival, first held in 1965 in Carthage. In 1966, Carthage business leaders decided to put together a community fall festival around the competition and called it the Maple Leaf Festival. Carthage High School band director Jennifer Sager said for decades the Maple Leaf Festival and the band competition were numbered a year apart.
“This is the 58th Band Festival and 58th Maple Leaf Festival,” Sager said. “We used to be a year apart, but COVID canceled us one year, but the Maple Leaf Festival went on, just a little smaller." The band event was held at K.
E. Baker Stadium with a grass field until the completion of the new David Haffner Stadium with an artificial turf field in 2018. “We had many many Maple Leaf Band Festivals with bands marching in mud at the old stadium,” Sager said.
“Having a turf field is huge. The bleachers alone fill up to capacity with our spectators. We can show things like show titles on the jumbotron, show captions and awards up there.
It's a bigger campus here at the high school. Bands build a little community out there in the parking lot.” Sager said the festival is a major event for bands, which come from near and far to compete.
“This is a culmination of all the work these bands have done for the season because we’re one of the final marching band festivals of the season that many of these bands attend,” Sager said. “At the end of finals, we’ll honor our seniors. Some festivals will do a massing of the bands.
We’re doing a massing of the seniors, so all the seniors from the 10 finalists, they’ll come out on the field as we’re giving the awards and they get recognized. It’s a special thing for them.” Michael Blades, a volunteer and a Carthage graduate from the class of 2016, said he comes back to Carthage every year to help after four years of performing with the Carthage marching band.
He runs the festival’s audio system and records judges' oral comments for inclusion in a digital packet provided to every competing band after the event. Blades said his love for band and the music keep him coming back. “I loved band all through school,” Blades said.
“Ms. Sager was a great teacher, and we became friends after graduation. I love coming back and helping and seeing all the bands come back.
” The 2024 Maple Leaf Festival had events every day for nine days, and this year added a Renaissance festival Saturday, held at Faith Lutheran Church, 2134 Grand Ave. Pastor Dan McQuality said the event features some education about the history of the Protestant Reformation. The festival featured a representation of the door where Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses, a seminal moment in Christian history.
But the event was more than a church history lesson. “We have carnival games and all sorts of things for kids and adults,” McQuality said. “This was a huge undertaking because we’re not a big church at all.
We’re only 60 members, but we want to grow, so the biggest thing was just getting all the tents made and all the games made. Everything we’ve done we’ve done from scratch.”.
