Keep on rolling
A couple of fan favorite events will make their return for the 10th anniversary of the Bantam Jeep Heritage Festival this weekend.
The ever-popular Jeep Parade and Jeep Invasion events will both be held for just the third time in festival history, and for the first time since 2015.
The Bantam Jeep Heritage Festival will run from Friday to Sunday.
“We save the parade for milestone events,” said festival director Patti Jo Lambert.
After setting a Guinness world record in 2011 and breaking it in 2015, the Jeep Parade during this summer's Bantam Jeep Heritage Festival will have a hard cap on the number of Jeeps allowed to participate.
A total of 1,106 Jeeps participated in the parade in 2011, the first of its kind, and that number ballooned to 2,420 in 2015. A total of 1,500 Jeeps will be permitted to register for the parade, and 1,000 will take part in the invasion of downtown Butler.
The limits were put in place to make it easier for the festival and assisting police departments — Penn Township, Butler Township and City of Butler — to manage.
The parade and invasion is scheduled on the first day, Friday.Lambert said the parade is a good way for the Jeep owners to establish a sense of community with one another and with the City of Butler.“It's the highlight of many people's weekend,” Lambert said. “Other events aren't downtown; this event is the only one within the community.”The parade will begin at the Pittsburgh-Butler Regional Airport and travel six miles north on Route 8 into downtown Butler. This is the first year the staging area will be held at the airport and not at BC3. Lambert said the popularity of the event required them to move to a larger staging area.With all the different makes, models and colors of Jeeps, Lambert said the parade is a sight to behold.“It's an amazing sight to see,” Lambert said. “It's like a rainbow because Jeeps come in so many different colors.”Once the parade arrives in downtown, the invasion begins and Jeeps will line the streets of Butler, making an impromptu car show/street festival.“There are DJs, food vendors and thousands of people admiring Jeeps,” Lambert said. “People customize their Jeeps so much that it's very rare that any two Jeeps are the same.”
Staging for the parade will begin at 2 p.m. for parade-only vehicles and 3 p.m. for parade and invasion participants at 473 Airport Road.Another change to this year's parade is that the staging area will almost be its own little party. The staging area will feature a scavenger hunt and various activity put on by local nonprofits, including ring toss, a photo booth, karaoke and more.Lambert said the idea for a Jeep parade was the first of its kind when the Bantam festival put it on in 2011.Lambert credited Butler County Tourism Bureau president Jack Cohen with coming up with the idea.“I had seen other groups do events where they line up cars, and I thought we could do a bigger one,” Cohen said. “We researched a little bit to find out there was no world record for the longest Jeep parade, so we figured this would be a good incentive to bring people out, and it did.”For both the 2011 and 2015 parades, Cohen said he made sure to see every single car, start to finish. His own Jeep was the last car, both times. After setting the record with 1,106 in 2011, they shattered their own record with 2,420 in 2015.Cohen said that first festival, a celebration of local history, was deeply important to the community.“The reason we did this, obviously was to celebrate the history, but that was a depressing time around town,” Cohen said. “Everyone was walking around with their head down and we thought it would make people perk up to talk about something we're proud of.”By Cohen's count, 36,000 people filled main street during that first festival. He said countless people came up to him to talk about how proud they were that someone in their family had worked at the Bantam factory making Jeeps, or had worked at a mill that produced the steel for the Jeeps.“It really made people proud of their history,” Cohen said. “It made people look at their community in a different way, it really did.”
