ZELIENOPLE — The second annual Bantam Jeep Heritage Festival did not suffer a sophomore slump.

Instead, festival attendance was up 14 percent over last year, according to Jack Cohen, director of the Butler County Tourism and Convention Bureau, which organizes the festival. He spoke Thursday at the bureau’s board meeting.

The festival celebrates Butler as the birthplace of the Jeep, engineered and designed at the American Bantam Car Co.

A total of 1,085 Jeep owners registered in the festival’s Friday night Jeep Invasion of downtown Butler. A total of 1,481 Jeeps registered for the Aug. 10-12 event.

Cohen said Jeeps represented 25 states and three countries outside of the United States, with close to 30,000 people visiting activities in Butler and at the Big Butler Fairgrounds on Route 422 in Franklin Township.

A new event this year, the Saturday night pig roast at the fairgrounds, had more than 975 people sit down to a meal of fried chicken, barbecued pig and all the fixings, Cohen said.

He told the board that the tourism staff partnered with Northwest Savings Bank to handle all the money for the festival this year.

“Last year, I’m making deposits in brown paper bags and thinking, ‘What are we doing?’ But this year, we had Northwest people helping us the whole way through. We even bought our first safe,” Cohen said. “This year we ran things like a professional business.”

Cohen, who missed this year’s festival because of bureau commitments in other states, thanked the tourism staff and the more than 300 volunteers who helped keep the festival rolling this year.

“I’m just so proud of how everything went,” he said.

The dates for the 2013 Jeep festival have not yet been picked.