The third annual Essex County Arts and Crafts Festivals will be held at the Essex County Fairgrounds in Westport on Friday, July 5th at the start of Westport’s July 4th weekend celebrations and on Saturday, August 3, a weekend at the height of the summer resident and tourist season. Dozens of fine artists and craft artists from across Essex County and the neighboring region will display and offer their hand-made works of beauty and use to what we expect will be a large number of viewers.

The first two Essex County Arts & Crafts Festivals events proved to be significant successes for the vendors who participated and to the many hundreds of people fortunate to have attended. In 2018 some 47 artists presented their creations. 40 of them were Essex County artists–residents of the towns of Elba/Lake Placid; Elizabethtown; Jay; Keene; Lewis; Moriah Center and Port Henry; Schroon; Ticonderoga; Westport; Willsboro; and Wilmington. Their works were seen by over 1,000 attendees who came from far and wide, registering nearly 200 different zip codes for their home residences.

The Arts & Crafts Festivals in both 2017 and 2018 garnered significant media attention, with interviews and articles about them on Mountain Lake Journal, North Country Public Radio, two local television stations, and journals and newspapers across the region, as well as on the web. This year we anticipate a much more extensive promotion campaign to and response from the broadcast and print media as well as on-line sites. The Festival has established a website www.essexartsandcrafts.org that will present images of each artist’s or crafter’s work, brief artist’s statements, contact information, and links to their websites.