Rhubarb Fest to transform Heritage Park

Looking at the Heritage Park grounds today, there is no indication of what they will look like on June 18, the date of the Shawano County Historical Society’s 14th annual Rhubarb Fest.

Preparations for the festival have been in the works for months, though, with organizers looking forward to filling the park with a multitude of activities for fest-goers to enjoy.

Lana Buelow, the festival chairwoman, is currently working a 40-hour week and more to put together all of the pieces that guarantee a perfect Rhubarb Fest. Her planning started at the end of the fest a year ago, when she started checking off what went well and what needed improvement.

“It’s a year-round thing,” she said, noting that she started out just as a volunteer for a couple of years before becoming a co-chair with Mary Crawford in 2019.

“Planning starts in January, when I start communicating with my committee chairs,” said Buelow. “We have 15 different committees. The repeat chairpersons of the committees have made planning easy for us.”

Committees include brat stand, marketing, bake sale, ice cream and raffle baskets, among other vital groups.

According to Buelow, there has been an evolution of the festival over the past 14 years. The event started as a small community event hosted by the historical society.

“It was meant to get the word out to the public that we have these wonderful museums to come to see, and it was a way to get the community involved in what we have there,” said Buelow. “From that beginning, it’s expanded and now we do focus more on fundraising. As we grew, we had more operating expenses, and we had to figure out a way to cover those.”

Buelow said that Crawford was instrumental in getting the marketing ramped up.

“One of the ways that it started growing was to start marketing it beyond Shawano,” she said. “We expanded the marketing to the Fox Cities magazine, for example, and onto area calendars. Those things start in the fall, and we had to get the information out then for those publications.”

More than 66 volunteers were involved in the 2021 event, many who have been involved for years. The volunteers do things such as working in the gift shop, being docents in the historical buildings or cooking the brats and hamburgers. Heritage Park is where Shawano was first settled, so the buildings will be open, with volunteer docents to highlight the historical pieces in each one.

“Festival guests can wander through the buildings. They can just enjoy walking through the museums,” Buelow said. “Outside of rhubarb, we want to have people come and have fun, yet recognize the history of Shawano County.”

Many people donate items to be sold at the festival, such as baked goods that highlight rhubarb as an ingredient. Rhubarb jams and rhubarb salsa are also donated for sale.

Sheila Dovorany and Janet Koller, from the Shawano Woman’s Club, are this year’s co-chairs of the plant sale. Club members donate a variety of plants for sale at the fest. Last year, the club raised about $1,000, with all proceeds going to the Historical Society. Club member Darlane Kroening, a master gardener, is on hand to help fest-goers choose plants; she also provides advice on the planting and care of them.

“Last year, Darlane dug up 45 rhubarb plants for the sale. We sold out of them,” Dovorany said. “This year, we got a committee together and went out and dug up rhubarb plants and have 75 plants for this year.”

The woman’s club staffs the plant sale with its members. Planning starts around March, and Dovorany and Koller asked members to sign up to work at the festival and/or to donate plants so that they could have an idea ahead of time how the sale would proceed.

The festival is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. June 18, with volunteers setting up and filling the grounds at Heritage Park at 7 a.m. A lot of the preparation work starts the day before, when volunteers start to deliver baked goods and other rhubarb edibles, and plants for the plant sale. Tents go up, tables are placed and the year-long planning to change the wide-open lawns of Heritage Park into a vibrant and unique festival culminates with the arrival of the first guests.