Lawn signs from the 2019 Highlands Bluegrass Festival, an annual Sloatsburg event put on by the Friends of Harmony Hall. This year’s bluegrass fest was cancelled for obvious reasons. Better luck next year!
The temperature on Saturday morning felt like fall. Remember that this time last year Harmony Hall in Sloatsburg was preparing to throw open its doors and welcome people from across the Hudson Valley to the Great Lawn for an afternoon of bluegrass and Americana music.
The Highlands Bluegrass Festival is a homegrown big tent event that has helped kick off the fall season in Sloatsburg. Just around the corner will be leaf peeping, apple picking and the wide open days of October. This year Sunday won’t see colorful lawn chairs and tents assembled on the lawn, bluegrass music wafting ringing through the village center. But there will be many folks coming through for the surrounding parks and a slice of what Sloatsburg has to offer.
There will be a few decorative white tents on the Harmony Hall lawn on Sunday when Harmony Hall welcomes the participants from this year’s Sloatsburg Plein Air. The small invitational gathering will award this year’s winning painting.
The Friend’s of Harmony Hall collaborated with Rockland County Tourism (with local Sloatsburg Chamber of Commerce cooperation) and pulled off a cool village wide event in August that saw participants paint an assortment of locations across Sloatsburg. Plein Air welcomed artist to the village to paint, draw and dwell a moment on a bit of local history, still alive in present in many structures and features, such as the Sloatsburg Cemetery, Sloats Dam off Ballard Avenue, the Village Clock at Route 17, Seven Lakes Station and the Sloatsburg Library, Harmony Hall, and the Sloatsburg Cemetery.
The Friends of Harmony Hall will host Plein Air winners, led by event creators Peter Bush and Jessie Taylor, and thank the participants for such a lively village wide event. Hopefully, next year’s Plein Air will be neatly folded into the Highlands Bluegrass Festival. The music and art and history all blend together to create an authentic Sloatsburg event that should attract people to the corridor communities and resonate through the highlands.
An afternoon crowd from the 2019 Highlands Bluegrass Festival on the Great Lawn at Harmony Hall in Sloatsburg, NY. The festival was cancelled this year but, hopefully, will return again next. This year the Friends of Harmony Hall sponsored the Sloatsburg Plein Air, with this year’s winner being awarded on Sunday, September 13.
