Tupelo Festival draws crowd to Wewahitchka
Lake Alice Park welcomed thousands of visitors on Saturday afternoon for Wewahitchka’s Tupelo Festival, an annual tradition that celebrates one of the town’s most enduring industries.
Vendors, food trucks, local organizations and beekeepers set up booths for visitors to peruse at their leisure, and a light breeze kept temperatures down enough to ensure crowds were large.
The festival takes place on the third Saturday of May every year, right after the tupelo blooming season along the Apalachicola river. This year’s festival date was a little extra special, as it also fell on International Bee Day.
Local beekeepers work long hours in the weeks leading up to the event to ensure they have enough fresh honey in supply.
Wewahitchka has been a hub for Tupelo Honey production since the nineteenth century. The festival brings in thousands of dollars for local vendors, businesses and organizations every year.
“Under the great mossy oaks of Lake Alice, people come from all over the world to the small community of Wewahitchka, Florida each spring to taste and take home this locally grown rare, delicious delicacy,” reads the event’s website.
Organizers hope to see the festival, one of the community’s largest annual events, continue to grow in the coming years.
Meet the Editor
David Adlerstein, The Apalachicola Times’ digital editor, started with the news outlet in January 2002 as a reporter.
Prior to then, David Adlerstein began as a newspaperman with a small Boston weekly, after graduating magna cum laude from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He later edited the weekly Bellville Times, and as business reporter for the daily Marion Star, both not far from his hometown of Columbus, Ohio.
In 1995, he moved to South Florida, and worked as a business reporter and editor of Medical Business newspaper. In Jan. 2002, he began with the Apalachicola Times, first as reporter and later as editor, and in Oct. 2020, also began editing the Port St. Joe Star.