Festival

GOLDEN SWEET POTATO FESTIVAL-Held during the fourth week in October each year, the Sweet Potato Festival in Golden, Texas had its humble beginning in 1982. Monty Montgomery, a local radio station owner, came up with the idea of a community-wide get together once a year to raise money for the repair and upkeep of the Golden Community Center. The festival began with two events--a cooking contest and an auction of boxes of sweet potatoes grown by local farmers. Two flatbed trailers were joined together to form a "makeshift" stage for the sweet potato and food auction.

What began as a "community event" and fund raiser has since become a huge celebration- one of the largest events in Wood County, Texas! It's a time for family and class reunions, but most of all, especially for the farmers, it's a time for celebrating the sweet potato harvest.

Today, the festival is an arm extended into the community which distributes charitable funds through-out the area to five volunteer fire departments, Meals on Wheels, local scholarships, and the Special Kids' Farm and Ranch Day, just to name a few. If you were to visit the festival, you would still see the sweet potato auction. But you would also see and experience more! Who could have predicted what an important role a variety of sweet potato called the Beauregard would become to a little farming town in Texas!