Retrospective 1970-2000

In 1924, the North Carolina piedmont town of Union Grove held a fiddle competition to raise money for its school. Six bands competed. The organizer of this modest festival, H.P. Van Hoy, a teacher at the school, saw his fiddling competition grow over the following decades to become a perennial celebration of old time music.

In 1968, with the competition drawing increasingly unwieldy crowds, the Union Grove School decided that Van Hoy and his sons, Pierce and Harper, would have to find another venue for their event. This site tells the story of the emergence of Harper Van Hoy's Fiddler's Grove, and the continuing of a tradition.