Before television and before our community calendar was filled with weekend-after-weekend of fundraising events, auctions and community parties, there was the Valley of the Moon Vintage Festival. As celebrations go, it is Sonoma’s oldest by far.
This month, on Friday, Sept. 26, through Sunday, Sept. 27, a hearty band of volunteers will have kept it alive for another year. (See valleyofthemoonvintagefestival.com for the schedule of events.)
A local soiree with roots that date back to 1897, the Valley of the Moon Vintage Festival began in a tree-lined natural amphitheater created by the eastern foothills of Sonoma Valley. There, a group of local families, many of them grape growers and winemakers, held an annual festival to celebrate the fall harvest of their wine grapes.
The Gundlachs, Bundschus and Dresels, who formed the Bacchus Club of Rhine Farm, organized these parties and filled them with pageantry and song. Costumed as goatherds, nymphs and various other characters of Greek mythology, the local celebrants frolicked and danced in the natural evening light that gave the Valley of the Moon its mystical quality.
The descendants of those original revelers, Jim and Jeff Bundschu and their families, still make wine at that location and are active members of our community.
From World War I through the Depression and World War II, the festival went dark, but it was revived again in the 1940s by civic and business leaders who wanted to make sure that local residents never forgot their town’s historic roots.
My first memories of those revived festivals in the 1940s and early ’50s are fuzzy. I recall my mother and father and grand-aunt Celie Murphy dressed up in old fashioned costumes gathered around the mission bell for a blessing of the grapes.
Our community was smaller then.What passed for entertainment was not as slickly packaged as it is today. Everybody in town got involved. Businesses decorated their windows.My Boy Scout troop got to “camp out” in the Plaza Friday and Saturday night to help our one-man town police patrol to keep an eye on the booths and their contents.
It was a time when the Vintage Festival Ball was an affair that everyone in town attended in costume, and the parade participants were mostly local folks dressed up like historical characters and kids who decorated their bicycles or dressed up their dogs.
There were game booths, food booths and lots of socializing among local townsfolk. It was truly a community party.
Today, the Valley of the Moon Vintage Festival survives as a charming anachronism, kept alive by a dedicated few. While many out-of-town visitors come to enjoy it, the festival remains a truly small-town event. Fortunately, no serious attempts have been made to compete with the Harvest Fair in Santa Rosa or to enlarge it to the scale of something like the Gilroy Garlic Festival.
For those of us who grew up here, it triggers many fond memories.For folks new to the community, it is a way to hear the faint echoes of a time when Sonoma really was a small town.
UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy: