Welcome to Episode 65 of From the Front Porch, a collection of conversations on books, small business, and life in the South.

I'm Chris Jensen, a PhD student at Florida State University, and a bookseller at The Bookshelf.

And I'm Annie Jones, owner of the Bookshelf, an independent bookstore in beautiful downtown Thomasville, Georgia.

Today we're joined by Sarah Turner,

the events manager for Thomasville's Main Street and Tourism Office. We'll be chatting Rose

Festival, small town events, and what makes downtown so vital to the growth of Thomasville.

Hi, Sarah. Hi, Annie. Thanks for having me. Yes, welcome to the podcast. Welcome to my home.

It's beautiful. I love it. Um, so we are pretty excited to have you on the podcast today

because neither Chris nor I are native Thomasville. No, we are not. Okay, well, I'm not either,

so we're in the same boat. Okay, so we have lots of questions about Rose Festival. I've lived in Thomasville for almost three years, and I know about Rose Festival. I know about Rose Show, but I don't really fully get it. So why don't you first tell me, tell us what you do for Downtown Thomasville, and then tell us a little bit about the Rose Show. Sure. For downtown Thomasville, I'm the events manager, and what that means is I help plan events like the Rose Show, Victorian Christmas, July 4th, and First Fridays. So it's a lot of events all year, but the community really demands it. They love coming to events, so it's really exciting, and it's nice to live in a community that comes out and supports what we do. We never have to worry if people show up, we just have to worry about the weather. So that's a good thing. As far as Roe Show goes, it's in its 95th year, so it's a huge tradition here. It started in the 1920s and it was a really small startup with a little bit of cash that some local women won for some vegetables that they grew.

Oh, cool. Yeah. And then they thought it'd be really great to do a flower show. So they started

in Neal's department store, which was downtown. And then it kind of grew and grew and grew and got

bigger and bigger to what it is today, which is a huge white tent in the middle of Remington and Broad

Street with hundreds and hundreds of entries of flowers.

But it's a lot more than flowers.

There's several flower shows.

There's family activities, parades.

It's a whole exciting community event.

So it's great.

It is pretty fun.

I do remember, so like I said, I don't fully understand it all the time, but what I do understand is that the town kind of shuts down for it, which I think is really fun.

Yeah.

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