EVERY YEAR IT SEEMS, Rome, Georgia, has more to offer than it did the year before. Such things as fairs, festivals, concerts, parades, car shows, sporting events, and theatrical productions are filling up the calendar’s weekends, giving folks from the surrounding communities (and beyond) a growing list of reasons to come to town. This fall, local entrepreneur Tiffany Ballinger added yet one more reason to this list by spearheading Christmas on the Coosa, an arts and crafts festival and antique car show at Heritage Park on the weekend of November 6th and 7th.
Commerce on wheels
The idea of establishing a festival was a new one to Ballinger (a surprise, really, even to her), but it was a natural outgrowth of her upbringing. “I grew up in Silver Creek,” Ballinger says, “on the Lazy J Ranch, where I worked with my dad and my grandfather in the meathouse, making sausage and processing deer.” The experience of raising her own food, combined with a farmer’s work ethic, gave her a desire to launch out on a new venture of her own. “I always wanted to start a business that had something to do with a restaurant, with food,” she says.
When she learned last spring that someone was selling a used food truck, she jumped at the chance to buy it. Ballinger and her brother, Nick Ballinger, refitted the food truck for their own needs, rechristened it the Shuck Shack, and began selling roasted corn and BBQ pork at festivals, fairs, and other event around the area. The food truck’s menu varied according to the particular event’s needs; some customers wanted hamburgers and hotdogs, so that’s what the brother/sister team provided.
Looking to create more opportunity for the Shuck Shack, Ballinger decided to float the idea of starting an arts and crafts festival in the spring of 2021. For years, she had enjoyed attending such events as Ellijay’s Georgia Apple Festival and the Cave Spring Art Festival, so it seemed like a natural pursuit for her. “I put the opportunity out there of having a festival on Calhoun Highway. I expected maybe twenty or twenty-five vendors, but I wound up with forty-eight. That became the Dirt Road Festival we did in April, and it went really well.”
After that, some of the vendors from the Dirt Road Festival started asking Ballinger to host another event in the fall. She knew that Rome already had the Chiaha Harvest Fair in October, and she didn’t want to compete with that. “Chiaha focused more on Halloween and Thanksgiving,” Ballinger says, “so I decided we would do something more geared toward Christmas.” Searching for a venue, she considered Ridge Ferry Park on the Oostanaula River, but the space proved too large. “We only had forty vendors to start with,” Ballinger says, “so Heritage Park turned out to be the perfect location.”