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This year’s Montana Folk Festival reporting record numbers

Posted at 10:55 AM, Jul 16, 2019
and last updated 2019-07-16 12:42:37-04

BUTTE – All indications are that the weekend’s Montana Folk Festival in Butte was quite a humdinger.

“All the metrics are pointing to some really good numbers in terms of attendance, beer sales and buckets collected on the site,” said festival organizer George Everett.

Donations collected at the free three-day music festival are expected to beat last year’s event, which was the best year for donations in the festival’s 12 year run.

“On the site, it was something like, I think, $124,000 in buckets, which is pretty substantial,” Everett said.

Some business owners, like the operator of the Venus Rising Espresso House, said they received plenty of business from festival-goers.

“We get a lot of the people that head up the hill, especially to the Original, and they were so happy about the festival. Many people loved all the musicians. I’d ask, ‘who’s your favorite?’ and they couldn’t pick,” said Venus Rising manager Gretchen Miller.

While the cleanup continues from this year’s festival, organizers say they want more feedback from the public so they can find out how to make next year’s festival even better.

“By email or Facebook or anything that they’d like to let us know how to do differently. We try to respond to those and the more comments we receive the more direction we have to try to improve the festival each year,” said Everett.

Everett also told MTN News that there will be another festival in 2020.

-John Emeigh reporting for MTN News