Prairie Places Festival next weekend

The Prairie Places Festival, a public celebration of the heritage resources of North Dakota, gets under way at 5:30 p.m. Friday, May 18, in Wishek, N.D., at the Wishek Civic Center. While celebrating all of North Dakota, the Prairie Places Festival will focus particularly on the heritage landscape of south-central North Dakota’s German-Russian Country — Emmons, Logan, and McIntosh counties.

Over three days, May 18-20, the festival will conduct heritage tours of German-Russian country, offer educational sessions on historic architecture and North Dakota heritage, and serve up generous portions of German-Russian food and music.

The Prairie Places festival is organized by Preservation North Dakota, the statewide citizens’ organization for historic preservation, and incorporates the 19th annual meeting of Preservation North Dakota. German-Russian Country was chosen as the locale for this statewide meeting and festival in order to support and benefit from the efforts of the Tri County Tourism Alliance, recently formed to cultivate heritage tourism in the German-Russian area of North Dakota.

Highlighting the festival are three plenary addresses featuring distinguished scholars and supported by a grant from the North Dakota Humanities Council. Each address is scheduled for a noteworthy venue: architectural historian Steve Martens will discuss historic New Deal architecture in the grand Wishek Civic Center; author Debra Marquart, a Napoleon native, will speak on memory and place in the Napoleon Livestock Auction sale barn, and oral historian Jessica Clark will address the landscape of memory in German-Russian Country at the historic Lehr Tabernacle.

“We have Victor Wald, the Accordion King of Napoleon; the region’s best scholars of history and architecture; the incomparable German-Russian landscape; and pumpkin blachinda. What more can you want?” asks conference organizer Suzzanne Kelley.

Additional funding for the Prairie Places Festival comes from the State Historical Society of North Dakota. Plenary sessions are free and open to the public, but conference registration is required for other events. For registration and conference details, go to prairieplaces.org, call Kelley at 701-799-3064, or email Kelley at kelley@kindredhouse.net.

Tags: local news, diversions, festival