People's Choice Comes Home to Boalsburg — With Music All Four Days
While downtown drowns happily in Arts Fest this weekend, drive eight minutes east and you'll find the summer's other homecoming. The People's Choice Festival returns to Boalsburg — to the sloping green grounds of the Pennsylvania Military Museum — Thursday, July 9 through Sunday, July 12, ending four years of exile at the Grange Fairgrounds in Centre Hall.
This matters more than a change of address. Ask the people who run it. "It was a place where people went to unite, reunite with friends and gather," co-director John Madison told StateCollege.com of the original Boalsburg site, describing "a homey feeling" that declining attendance in Centre Hall never quite replaced. Roughly 107 artists had already registered by spring, hauling in photography, blown and stained glass, pottery, fiber art, jewelry, and clothing. But the reason it earns space in a music column is simple, and it comes straight from Madison: "Music all four days."
The specific bands hadn't been announced as of this writing — marketing director Diana Stapleford confirmed the lineup is locked, just not yet public — so treat the schedule as. What isn't in doubt is the setting, which may be the single best festival backdrop in the county. The Pennsylvania Military Museum grounds give you shade trees, open lawn, the 28th Division Shrine standing sentinel over the whole affair, and Tussey Ridge filling the horizon. Spread a blanket, let a band you've never heard of do its work, and you've got the platonic ideal of a central-Pennsylvania summer afternoon.
There's a nice symmetry to this particular weekend, too. Boalsburg — which bills itself, with local conviction, as the birthplace of Memorial Day — spends the second week of July hosting two of the region's signature gatherings at once: People's Choice on the museum lawn Thursday through Sunday, and, up the road at Tussey Mountain, the Thursday-night WingFest machine cranking through its 25th season. You could, in theory, do art in the morning, wings and a Fleetwood Mac tribute in the evening, and never leave the 16827 zip code. I'm not saying you should. I'm saying you could.
Practical notes: parking runs about $10 per vehicle, so carpool if the crew is coming. Bring a chair or a blanket — this is a sit-on-the-grass event, not a stand-in-a-crowd one. And pace yourself, because the museum grounds invite the kind of all-day lingering that Arts Fest's downtown crush actively discourages. That's the trade. Downtown gives you density and energy; Boalsburg gives you room to breathe and a hillside to watch the sun drop behind.
For a festival that spent four years figuring out it was in the wrong place, "homecoming" is exactly the right word. The art is the draw and the crowd is the reunion, but the music — four days of it, free with the gate — is the soundtrack that ties a scattered summer town back together. Welcome home.
Sources: People's Choice Festival Returning to Boalsburg, StateCollege.com; People's Choice Festival announces move back to Boalsburg, WTAJ