The first Tontitown Grape Festival occurred as a Thanksgiving celebration at the turn of the twentieth century. Just two months ago, it celebrated its 126th anniversary.
For generations, people have come together in Tontitown, Arkansas, to listen to music, play games, eat spaghetti, and spend time with each other—family, friends, and strangers alike. It’s a place where culture comes to life, legacy lasts, and memories are made.
Good memories have a way of finding us, even when we don’t try to hold onto them. The moments that stick are the ones that matter most, and in remembering them, they become even more lasting. These memories reveal truths about the world that only we can see, and about parts of ourselves only we can know.
And while each of us carries our own memories, we are never alone in them. Our lives are woven together with the experiences of others—shaped by the past, shared in the present, and passed forward for the future.
When people come together in Tontitown—sharing a moment side-by-side and creating experiences that turn into memories—something remarkable happens. We call this kind of connection community.
And as a community endures over time, something deeper emerges. It binds the people together and, at the same time, becomes their shared responsibility to protect and pass on. We call this tradition.
So as we reflect on the meaning embedded in this particular tradition, we would do well to think about the meaning of tradition itself, as well as the kind of community it takes to keep tradition alive for more than a century.
“Led by a saintly Priest, the settlers came
To these green sloping plains to make their home;
Far from the mother land where they were born,
On fertile soil of Venice, Malo, Rome” - “Sempre Padre,” Rosa Marinoni
Between the founding of the University of Arkansas in 1871 and the Roaring Twenties, more than four million Italians left their homeland to seek a new life in the United States. This movement was driven in large part by high taxes, poverty, overcrowding, food shortages, and political unrest in Italy. But amidst fears of leaving all they had ever known, hope survived in the freedom they wished to find in America.
The story of those who would find their way to Tontitown, Arkansas, begins with a banker in New York by the name of Austin Corbin. At the time, Corbin owned a plantation in south Arkansas called Sunnyside, and he arranged to divide the Sunnyside plantation at interest among a group of 98 Italian families. These families boarded a New Orleans-bound steamship in Genoa, Italy, on November 8, 1895.
It wasn’t long after the Italians arrived on the plantation in December that problems arose. Communication suffered between the plantation managers and the immigrants, as the managers did not speak Italian and the immigrants did not speak English. Additionally, the Italians were not familiar with plantation agriculture.
In January of the following year, a priest by the name of Father Pietro Bandini was assigned as chaplain to Sunnyside. Bandini had a history of challenging authority, speaking his mind, and using his scholarship to accommodate the needs of others. His studies in philosophy and theology as well as his travels from Italy to Montana, Montana to New York, and finally New York to Arkansas, served his ability to traverse difficult terrain and stand out as a leader.
But after nearly two years, the situation only got worse for the Italians. Dying crops, disease, and miscommunication plagued their efforts to make Sunnyside home. To make matters even more complicated, Austin Corbin died in June 1896, and Corbin’s heirs expressed little interest in continuing the Sunnyside project.
So Bandini proposed a plan.
In November of 1897, Bandini traveled northwest to Springdale, Arkansas. He was looking for a new settlement: a promised land.
Just west of Springdale were rolling hills of untamed soil, tough from the winter months and covered in fallen limbs and broken briar. Not the most likely of locations, yet Bandini saw opportunity where others might not. Here, future generations of Italians would delight in the green plains and oak shades, and Bandini intended to make it a home for his people.
Three months later, Father Bandini led some 40 families on an exodus from Sunnyside to a place they would call Tontitown. It was named in honor of Henri de Tonti, an Italian-born French military officer who helped explore the Mississippi River and founded the Arkansas Post.
The transition was not easy at first. They lived in abandoned farmhouses, had little to eat, and faced hostility from local residents. Over time, however, the grit and perseverance of the Italians earned them respect among the surrounding communities.
As the Italians bought the necessary equipment for farming on credit—finding jobs on railroads, in mines, and as carpenters to support their efforts—they experimented with crops and eventually found success unlike they had experienced since coming to America. Of all the crops they planted, their grapes became the most popular.
At some point, likely without warning (and for some more quickly than others), Tontitown became home.
To celebrate both their arrival and the arduous journey that had taken them from Italy to Sunnyside, and then Sunnyside to Tontitown, they held a Thanksgiving feast every summer. These gatherings were accompanied by national attention as Tontitown became recognized as a successful immigration story, one that connected different parts of the world and country in its trajectory. These gatherings were also the first of what we know today as the Tontitown Grape Festival.
Throughout the following years, new traditions were picked up as others remained the same. In 1932 the first official spaghetti dinner and Queen Concordia pageant took place. In the mid-twentieth century, carnival games began filling out lots and attracting crowds as they do now.
Meanwhile, traditions such as Thanksgiving picnics, church services, singing and dancing, homemade meals, and (what was it?) grapes! have remained deeply entrenched in Tontitown tradition ever since those first celebrations.
Ultimately, the Tontitown Grape Festival represents a place where communities, cultures, and people converge across location and time. With an atmosphere of whimsical congeniality and lighthearted fun, the countryside complements the carnival charm, the community focuses on the moment at hand, and tradition roots its observers in the not-so-distant past.
By the time you walk away with a grape ice cream cone melting in your hand and stomped grapes between your toes, you realize that what it takes to keep meaningful tradition is a community of shared memories—those too enduring to be forgotten—carried forward by those who remember, for the sake of whomever comes next.
If you want to learn more about this and other historical events in Tontitown, please visit their website at htthttps://www.tontitown.com/tontitown/museum/
“Led by a saintly Priest, the settlers came
To these green sloping plains to make their home;
Far from the mother land where they were born,
On fertile soil of Venice, Malo, Rome”
Just west of Springdale were rolling hills of untamed soil, tough from the winter months and covered in fallen limbs and broken briar. If not the most expected of places, where there was promise Bandini saw it.