Hanover to host Pony Express Festival

Contributed to the Daily Sun

HANOVER, Kan. - A wide variety of historic demonstrations, a re-enactment of the Pony Express mochilla exchange and musical entertainment will highlight the 21st annual Pony Express Festival scheduled for 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 27, at the Hollenberg Station State Historic Site near Hanover.

New to this year's festivities will be a display of the recently recovered gold coin collection of Gerat Hollenberg, who operated a business from the long, narrow five-room building that has now become the historic museum. Hollenberg and his wife, Sophia, offered all of the necessary services, including food and shelter, to riders and horses on the Pony Express route, which traveled by the Hollenberg Station.

The Aug. 27 morning activities begin with a nondenominational church service at 11 a.m. with circuit-rider preacher, Dr. James Smart of Washington, Kan.

A catered noon meal will be served on the shaded grounds with tickets for adults and children available that day.

Period demonstrations will include corn shelling, 1800s bicycles, broom-making/typing, rope-making, flint knapping, arrowheads, Ukranian egg decorating, blacksmithing, candlemaking, ham radios, zither-playing, mountainman encampment, tomahawk and knife-throwing, cowboy mounted sharp-shooting demonstration, buckskinning, hands-on farm tools, wheelwright, soap-making, basket weaving, butter churning, spinning wheel, tatting, chuckwagon cooking and camp; hide tanning; 19th century women's clothing; bucket-making; colonial longhunter; mourning customs/clothing/jewelry; pineneedle baskets; chair caning; and an exhibit by Homestead National Monument of America. Songs and stories of the wild Kansas Frontier will also be featured.

Afternoon entertainment will include the Horseshoe Band; the Bluegrass band, Wild Fire; and Bluegrass and Country music by Fresh Green Grass.

The Pony Express re-ride and mochilla exchange will take place at 3 p.m., followed by the drawing for the festival quilt at 4 p.m.

The event is sponsored by Friends of Hollenberg Station and the Kansas State Historical Society. All proceeds from the event go to the promotion and preservation of the Hollenberg State Historic Site.

The site is located one-half mile north of Hanover on Kansas Highway 148 and one mile east on Kansas Highway 243. For more information, contact site administrator Duane Durst at 785-337-2635.