Nederland Heritage Festival Collection

Nederland Heritage Festival Collection

Nederland's annual Heritage Festival is an outgrowth of the Diamond Jubilee celebrated in 1973, when our city was 75 years old.

In early 1972, Bob Henson, city manager, asked the mayor and Chamber of Commerce president to set a meeting to select a steering committee for the 1973 event. This group elected officers and formed committees for the various aspects of the celebration, such as entertainment, parade, carnival, art shows, fireworks displays, etc. We remember fondly the Old Timer's Dinner with Tex Ritter and many other former residents attending during the Diamond Jubilee.

Everyone and everything planned worked so well, an annual event was suggested since Nederland was the only city in Jefferson County without an annual celebration.

The first Heritage Festival was held in 1974 and each year since with the streets of Boston Avenue and 17th blocked off in front of Central Middle School to provide room for the Carnival and Craft and Collectible Market.

Events have included a jambalaya cookoff, chili cookoff, "Mock Miss America" pageant, music, and motorcycle show and much more. Art displays were a very important and enjoyable part of each Festival. These included the children's art month display at the City Office Building each year, exhibits of professional artists in Nederland Bank, the art shows and demonstrations. Some years there were fireworks displays and others special shows. New events were added and some not repeated. Today, carnival games and rides are a main attraction. The goal has always been to have something that appealed to each segment of the city and surrounding area and to grow better overall. The folks have come from all over the area, more than 100,000 each year. Proceeds from festival are used to fund non-profit organizations that benefit the majority of the citizens of Nederland.

A valuable asset in each celebration has been the foresight of the committee in beginning preparation for each year well in advance and continuing to plan month by month. This was learned early when Bob Henson, City Manager, the Mayor and Chamber of Commerce President began to plan for the celebration of the Diamond Jubilee. Many folks said as planning went along they were grateful that Bob had the foresight to realize how much time is needed to put on a celebration of this magnitude.

[Note: Information for the description of the Nederland Heritage Festival Collection was excerpted primarily from the 1980 and 1988 Festival programs.]

The Festival Programs

Each Festival has a different theme, had something special to remember and we hope this will continue for many years. Included in this collection are the programs from the various Festivals. They include photographs of the festival officers, committee members, and pageant entries, schedule of events, advertisements from supporters and local businesses, and occasionally recipes, historical photographs of Nederland or from previous festivals.

Programs are not available for 2020 and 2021 since the Festivals were cancelled due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

[Please note: Due to the availability of the programs, they were digitized in-house rather than chance them getting lost in shipping. Page curvature caused some images to have a wave effect or slight distortion. We will correct these issues when possible.]

Photographs

At this time no photographs of the Festivals are part of this collection. We hope to add some in the future.

In the meantime, check out the Nederland Historical Society Collection. It includes some photographs of Festival events.

Our Thanks

We'd like to thank the Nederland Heritage Festival for temporarily lending us copies of the Festival programs for digitization. We also greatly appreciate their granting us permission to digitize and load the Festival programs to the Nederland, Texas Digital Archives.

Can You Help?

The library does not have own copies of all of the Festival programs in the Archive Collection. If you have a copy that you would like to donate, please contact us at (409) 722-1255.

While we'll accept donations of any year, we are especially interested in the years we are missing:
1974, 1975
1980, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1989
1990, 1991, 1996
2003-2019

Thank you.