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Ocmulgee National Monument, Macon County, Georgia
Go to Ocmulgee main page
Update: 2001 9 April
Editors:
The Ocmulgee National Monument - ONM has successfully held an annual fall festival for years. The Ocmulgee Indian Celebration has a built-in international draw and appeal. Please visit www.Macon-Bibb.com/ONM for a full-color poster for this upcoming event.
When you look at a map of GA, if anything is printed beside the location of Macon, it is these words - Ocmulgee National Monument.
ONM literally "puts Macon on the map" for many travel brochures and information packets. Otherwise a place called Macon might not even be listed.
Yet the ONM continues to be the red-headed-step-child to the "powers that be" in Macon. The Chamber of Commerce and the Macon Telegraph continue to endorse the intrusion of a road (Eisenhower Parkway Extension into the swamps) and unsafe/worthless (* do the research for the reporters) lighting (along I-16) within the ONM. Testimony has shown this lighting would be damaging to the interpretive resources at the park. This damage would last for our generation and for generations to come.
As president of the ONM Association, I have met numerous visiting National Park Service personnel. They have told me that in all the parks they have visited, none experiences less local support than does our ONM. Macon is literally killing the "goose that laid the golden egg".
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Some relevant history:
ONM friends and staff spoke strongly against routing I-16 though the ONM in the 1960s. They were threatened personally, and professionally. Some Macon "leaders" even threatened to have Congress to "decommission" the entire ONM. In the 1970s the construction of i-16 forever severed the Indian Mounds from the Ocmulgee River.
Thus began a curse on Macon. Or was it simply bad engineering and even worse leadership?
The location of i-16 is directly related to the failure of the Macon Levee in 1994 and the loss of safe water twice in the past 10 years:
In 1992 the Macon water treatment plant flooded during the Cherry Blossom Festival and contaminated our drinking water for 3 days. In 1994 the water plant flooded again and was disabled. For 3 weeks Macon struggled without tap water. Some businesses closed their doors forever.
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Even the current leaders who want to extend Eisenhower in to the swam now admit this: The Location of i-16 (at the ONM) was a "TERRIBLE MISTAKE". Yet what have they really Learned? Any foresight?
This is not only a shame. It is an international disgrace. The rest of Georgia, the US and the World watch Macon's missteps with a combination of pity, horror, anger and disgust. Why should Macon's short-sighted leaders be allowed to waste tax monies to destroy an international resource which is more valuable to the rest of the world than even our entire city?
Macon Telegraph editors write : "Planned Macon fall festival faces formidable challenges ", and yet they did not mention once the greatest asset to a fall festival - the ONM and its Ocmulgee Indian Celebration! Look in the mirror, editors. The "formidable challenge" in this area is that your vision here is less than zero. You have done far more harm than good.
You recently had a series about focus points that Macon-Bibb needed to work on. One glaring omission was this: Correct the problems within the Macon Telegraph! Then a greater vision for the Fall Festival might succeed.
- Lindsay Doc Holliday
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http://www.macontelegraph.com/content/macon/2001/04/06/ed_op/FALLFESTEDIT.htm
Planned Macon fall festival faces formidable challenges
Hope springs eternal in a civic booster's breast. Again, hopeful plans for a fall festival to complement Macon's successful Cherry Blossom event have sprung forth. We would love to prophesy success.
But since the 1980s, a succession of fall events have sprung up, then dried up. Some music festivals on shoestring budgets were held in conjunction with the Georgia Jubilee street parties that petered out in 1997.
A Peach State Jazz Festival in 1998 didn't draw flies despite heavy publicity and world-class performers --- some said because of its narrow focus. Venues for major events were 60 to 80 percent empty. (In the snakebit category, Hurricane Georges caused perhaps the biggest-name performer to cancel out.)
In 1999, a rethought event unhappily named Sweet Georgia Jam offered genres from classical to rap. But the 10-day succession of 30-plus events attracted only a few thousand people in all. For instance, six bands on two stages downtown on a Saturday attracted 40 people.
Planning hadn't started until April, too late; professional knowhow was lacking. (Snakebit again: when Hurricane Floyd emptied Savannah, many of the evacuees clogged highways around Macon.)
Tourism consultants insist the city needs a fall festival building on the musical roots that brought the Georgia Music Hall of Fame here. But as one discouraged festival organizer asked, is a fall music festival something the people of Macon want --- or something civic leaders and planners want them to want? Is Macon really Music City?
Mayor Jack Ellis is working for a positive answer. Last September, one year after the Sweet Georgia Jam debacle, he announced an early start on a two-to-three day event to be planned by the Karen Spellman firm of Washington, which would be responsible also for financing the festival through corporate sponsorships.
This week, Ellis announced the Macon Music and Heritage Festival set for Sept. 28-30 this fall would aim for an attendance of 50,00 people enticed by free events supported by sponsorships.
It's a great idea --- as always --- but:
Apparently only a few corporate sponsorships have been nailed down and it's very late to get on the crowded calendars of world-class performers.
Setting the bar at 50,000 for a brand-new three-day event could ensure that relative success tastes like failure. Janice Marshall, executive director of the Macon-Bibb County Convention and Visitors Bureau, said in 1998 it was unrealistic to expect thousands of people to show up for a first-time event like that year's jazz festival. If the first Cherry Blossom Festival, in 1982, had been judged by its attendance, it would have been a disappointment, she said.
College football is a Middle Georgia obsession. Georgia and Georgia Tech both have home games Saturday, Sept. 30, and the annual Savannah State-Albany State contest sponsored annually by the 100 Black Men of Macon, a major fund-raiser, will be here at Henderson Stadium that day. Did anybody check?
So the Macon Music and Heritage Festival has challenges aplenty. We hope history doesn't repeat itself.
- Ed Corson/For the editorial board
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