Destination Azalea – 62nd Annual Azalea Festival

Teri Moss, contributing writer

Another year has rolled around and it’s Azalea time again. It is the time of year that every young boy and girl dreams of. Cotton candy, carnival rides, funnel cakes, pet show, prince and princess contest, the car show, tractor pulls, queen coronation, and the favorite of all ages, the Azalea parade. A full list of activities appears on pages 7-10 in this edition of the Democrat News.

Twenty-one members make up the Azalea committee this year.

“The board has worked extremely hard to try and make this year’s festival as safe as possible for everyone,” Azalea Board President  Jim Thompson, said. “We hope everyone has a fun weekend.”

A new event added this year is a Tug-of-War contest for kids 5-9 years, youth 10-14 years, and teens/adults ages 15+. This activity takes place at the former truck pulling track at 6:30 p.m., Friday night. Another event which has come back to the festival this year is the Azalea Golf Tournament. Registration will be at 7 a.m., Saturday, at Beaver Valley Golf Club. A Corn Hole Tournament is also new this year and will begin at 9 a.m. in front of The Old Mine House on the Court Square.

Destination Azalea – Passport to Fun is the theme for the 62nd annual Azalea Festival. The first festival in 1962 consisted only of a parade with five floats. Heavy rain lasted all day on Saturday that year and caused the other activities to be canceled.

The Azalea Festival idea was born one night in the early 1960s during a Rotary Club meeting after an expert on Azaleas came to speak. This speaker commented on how the community should take advantage of the natural beauty of the azaleas. Members began planning and the Azalea Festival was born. W. L. “Pat” Patterson, local businessman, served as the first chairman of the committee formed to plan the event. The hope of the committee was also to cheer up the town as the National Lead Mining Company had just closed leaving several people without jobs.

Fredericktown’s Rotary Club continues to be active in the Azalea Festival after all these years with its annual pancake breakfast held at the United Methodist Church on South Main Street on Saturday of the festival.

In the early years of the Azalea Festival, the event began on Friday night with a musical pageant at the Spiva Azalea Park located on Hwy 72 about seven miles east of Fredericktown near Castor River. This park was dedicated in June 1960. George A. Spiva donated the 7.5-acre park in honor of his father, George N. Spiva, a well-known businessman in Joplin, MO who had been born in Fredericktown. The park was one of the few areas in the state of Missouri that had an abundance of wild azaleas. Since that time, most of the wild azaleas have died out at the former location of Spiva Azalea Park but some of the beautiful pink blooms can still be spotted in wooded areas nearby.

George N. Spiva was born in Fredericktown in 1873, the son of John Craddock Spiva and Mary Josephine Anthony. The family moved to the southwest mining district of Missouri when George was a baby.  At the age of eleven, George’s family moved back to Fredericktown. He finished his schooling at Millcreek School and got his first job at a brickyard in Fredericktown at the age of sixteen. He left Fredericktown again in 1894 at the age of twenty-one to return to the rich galena mining fields in Southwest Missouri.   

Spiva is said to have been a millionaire, having gone from mining and various other business ventures to owning and running a successful powder manufacturing company which dealt in explosives. After selling this company to its competitor, DuPont, Spiva went into banking.

His obituary claimed that every year during ‘honeysuckle time’ in the spring, Mr. Spiva would return to his native homeplace in Fredericktown where there was an abundance of the fragrant flowering shrubs of which he was quite fascinated. Spiva made his last trip to Fredericktown a couple of years before he passed away in 1950.

The Spiva family was friends with Governor Warren E. Hearnes who attended the Azalea Festival in 1967 after receiving an invitation from Azalea Board Chairman, Sam Najim. Governor Hearnes was in the parade on that Sunday and later addressed the crowd and presented awards to float winners. A reception was held in his honor following the awards ceremony.

62 years have passed since the very first Azalea Festival. Spiva Azalea Park is gone, and the festivities now begin on Thursday night with the Prince and Princess contest. The Azalea Festival program is now in color rather than black and white. Other events have changed with the festival and with the landscape in and around Fredericktown. However, one thing has not changed and that is the sense of community felt when the people of Fredericktown, past and present, gather to visit with old friends, enjoy the festival and celebrate Azalea time in May.