A Town That Throws a Festival for a Woman's Hats
On Saturday, October 10, Altamont will close Cumberland Street for a woman who liked hats.
Her name was Fannie Moffitt. She had money and strong opinions about fashion, and the town remembers her for what she wore on her head. Altamont has thrown her a festival for more than ten years. There is a hat parade. There is a quilt show, a car show, and about eighty vendor booths. More than 1,500 people come up the mountain for it, and the whole thing is run by the community.
Altamont is the county seat of Grundy County, a small town on top of the Cumberland Plateau. It could have picked anything to celebrate. It picked Fannie.
Why a town needs its own party
I sell rural property and I grew up in a rural county, so I think about this a lot. Folks in small communities don't always like change. I understand that. Some days I'm one of them.
People are moving to Tennessee anyway, and a lot of them are moving to the country. They buy a few acres on a gravel road because they like what the place already is. Nobody hands you a town's history at closing, though. You get a deed and a set of keys.
A festival does that work. It tells a newcomer what the town cares about, who it remembers, and what it thinks is funny. It reminds the families who have been there four generations of the same things. The more new neighbors a place gets, the more that matters.
It also brings money. Fifteen hundred visitors buy lunch, fill up the tank, and go home with a quilt or a jar of something. A vendor booth costs thirty dollars. For a town the size of Altamont, one good Saturday counts.
Tennessee is a long state
Tennessee Magazine puts it at 550 miles from Memphis to Mountain City, the county seat in the far northeast corner. Mountain City is closer to Washington, D.C. than it is to Memphis.
That is a lot of ground, and it doesn't all look or sound alike. River bottoms around Memphis. The Highland Rim. The plateau. The Smokies. Different accents, different crops, different ideas about barbecue.
So when somebody tells me they want to move to Tennessee, my first question is which one.
What a Realtor is for
Showing houses is part of my job. Helping people find where they fit is the bigger part, and that takes knowing the places. The best way I know to learn a place is to show up when it is being itself.
That's why we go to local events. We meet people. We find out who makes the quilts and who restores the cars. Then when I drive a client around Tennessee, I can show them a town along with a floor plan.
You're invited
I have a house for sale in Altamont at 226 1st St, and I'm opening it the afternoon before the festival: Friday, October 9, from 3:00 to 4:00 PM.
It has three bedrooms and two baths on one level, stone fireplaces in the living room and the primary bedroom, and a covered porch that runs the length of the house. Come walk through it. Then come back Saturday and see the town it belongs to.
A house is easier to find than a place. Altamont goes to the trouble of telling you what kind of place it is. It does it once a year, on Cumberland Street, in a hat.
