Lexington Barbecue Festival
The Lexington Barbecue Festival is an annual festival in Lexington , North Carolina . With around 150,000 visitors a year, it is the largest barbecue festival in the state and, along with Memphis in May and the International Bar-BQ Festival in Kentucky, is one of the largest in the United States.
The festival takes place on one of the last two Sundays in October. However, throughout October (in Lexington, "Barbecue Month") there are barbecue-related events: the Tour de Pig, a bicycle race, a three-mile Hawg run, a beauty pageant, golf, tennis and softball competitions, and a cheerleading Barbecue-themed competition.
On Sunday the day begins with the Parade of Pigs , during which a parade floats and decorated artificial pigs lead through the city. A large inner city area is cordoned off for the festival itself, where around 400 traders spread and sell their goods. The program also includes music stages, an art exhibition, rides for children (in the Ferkelland ) and other major events. In addition to the barbeque cooked in the city's BBQ restaurants and privately, three tents on the venue sell £ 12,000 of barbecue annually. Since 2003, business people and others have been placing life-size decorated fiberglass pigs in front of their stores from May through the Lexington Barbecue Festival . The collected pigs will then be exhibited at the Barbecue Festival.
The festival was founded in 1984. It refers to "Everybody's-Day" events in Lexington that date back to the beginning of the 20th century. This was public barbeque cooking within a neighborhood that expanded into weeks within a few years. After Sid Weaver and George Ridenhour opened the city's first permanent barbecue restaurant in 1919, and other entrepreneurs soon followed suit, the custom of public barbecues waned and eventually disappeared altogether. In 1977, local journalist Jerry Bledsoe called for this custom to be revived and met with broad public support, but little practical implementation of this proposal. Only a merger of the city's larger BBQ restaurants was able to revive the tradition of public city-wide barbecues.
Lexington stands for one of North Carolina's two barbecue traditions. While whole pigs are seasoned with vinegar or mustard in the coastal area of the state, the Lexington style consists of pork shoulder with a vinegar and ketchup sauce. There are numerous smaller competitions along the coast, but barbecue festival life in the Piedmont area is centered around the Lexington Festival. Although the closing event of the coastal barbecue competitions took place in Lexington in 1995, the internal rivalry is great enough that North Carolina's House of Representatives only named Lexington the "Official Food Festival of the Piedmont" region in 2007, as an appointment to the state festival would have annoyed the east coast.
Remarks
- ↑ a b Garner p. 12
- ↑ a b c d Garner pp. 47-49
- ↑ Garner p. 137
- ↑ Brochure Pigs in the City 4 as PDF ( memento of the original from July 17, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ General Assembly of North Carolina: An Act to Adopt the Lexington Barbecue Festival aa the Official Food Festival of the North Carolina Piedmont Triad , Session Law 2007-533 as PDF
literature
- Bob Garner: North Carolina barbecue: flavored by time John F. Blair, Publisher, 1996 ISBN 0895871521
