McConnells Mill hosts 32nd annual Heritage Festival
SLIPPERY ROCK TWP, Lawrence County — Crowds flocked to McConnells Mill State park over the weekend of Sept. 27 and 28 for the 32nd Annual McConnells Mill Heritage Festival, organized by the Rotary Club of Portersville-Prospect.
The park’s largest event of the year is a celebration of the late 19th century, the time when the park’s main attraction — the historic grist mill — was in active operation and a major part of the county’s industry.
Unlike last year, when a day of rain marred the Sunday of the Heritage Festival, this year’s second day was bright and sunny, causing the Rotary Club to dream big.
“It looks like we might break a record for attendance,” said Bill Shaw of the Rotary Club of Portersville-Prospect. “The year before (last year), we sent a park record 11,000 people through the mill in two days. So we're hoping to break that record this year.”
The attractions this year included live period music, hayrides, demonstrations from a Civil War reenactment group — which included live cannon fire, a petting zoo and plenty of artistic demonstrations, including blacksmithing.
Visitors also got the chance to experience the park’s centerpiece, the historic grist mill, which operated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries using the power of Slippery Rock Creek to grind grain into flour.
One attraction on Sunday afternoon was Abraham Lincoln impersonator Rick Miller, who walked around the park wearing a stovepipe hat with a Pittsburgh Steelers logo on it. Miller says he has attended the Heritage Festival for “maybe 15 years.”
“One of the things I like about being Abe Lincoln here is that I could talk a lot about his connection to Pittsburgh,” Miller said. “Abe Lincoln looked at Pittsburgh as the paradigm of the American experiment, because we are considered a melting pot here. In Pittsburgh ... you would work in a section where all your coworkers were your countrymen. They all maybe spoke Polish or Croatian or whatever, but your boss was bilingual.”
