08/27/2026
Dear Fiddle Family — I made a post after the Fiddlers Picnic that I’ve since taken down, and I want to clear up a few things.
First and most importantly:
The Fiddlers Picnic was an absolute success.
By nearly every measure, this year exceeded what we hoped for. We believe we roughly doubled last year’s attendance. The Fire Company set a food-sales record for any event they’ve ever held. T-shirt and beer sales were incredible. The music was incredible. And judging by everything I’ve heard since Saturday, the experience for the people who came was exactly what we wanted it to be.
What didn’t work was our gate.
We had far more people arrive than our small team was prepared to process, and for part of the day our system simply broke down. We had ourselves a little bit of a Woodstock situation. Based on everything we can piece together afterward, we estimate that several hundred people entered without paying.
When I finally sat down and looked at the numbers, I saw the financial loss before I saw everything else we had accomplished. I was exhausted, frustrated, and emotional, and I let that moment get the better of me when I wrote my original post.
I regret that.
Because after having a few days to reflect and meeting with our team, what I keep coming back to is what went right.
Saturday was exactly the kind of event I dreamed this could become.
I watched old friends reconnect after years — sometimes decades. I watched musicians from completely different generations sitting together and jamming. I saw families, musicians, neighbors and people who had traveled from well outside our community all sharing the same space.
At times it felt more like a family reunion than a festival.
We celebrated the music. We celebrated our community. And we celebrated each other.
I am incredibly proud of what this little group of people pulled off.
So let me make one thing very clear:
There WILL be a Fiddlers Picnic in 2027. 🎻
But Saturday also showed us that this event has officially outgrown the little backyard-party organization behind it.
For the last two years, an enormous amount of this festival has been carried by me, my family, a handful of volunteers, and employees from my company who stepped in to fill the gaps.
We cannot grow the festival without also growing the organization behind it.
Our goal for 2027 is 50 volunteers.
Not 50 people working all day. We need enough people that we can divide the work into reasonable shifts, properly staff the gates, parking, shuttles, hospitality, setup, cleanup and everything else it takes to welcome what could be an even larger crowd next year.
And we need people involved before festival day.
Our planning meetings are beginning now, and we’re working toward meeting every other month. Our next fundraiser is only about six months away, and because we didn’t break even this year, that fundraiser is going to be more important than ever.
The financial situation wasn’t the catastrophe I made it sound like in that first emotional post. We took a loss, and it hurt, but we also learned exactly where the holes are and how to fix them.
What I don’t want is for this event to depend on one person, one family, or one small group putting their necks out every year.
If this is truly our community’s Fiddlers Picnic, then it’s time to build the community organization that can sustain it.
So if you loved what happened Saturday — if you loved the music, the jamming, the friendships, the atmosphere, or simply the idea of something like this happening right here in Seven Valleys — we need you.
Send us a message with your name, email address and phone number and tell us you’d like to volunteer.
There is a place for everybody. You don’t have to be a musician. You don’t have to know anything about running a festival. You just have to want to be part of it.
We’ve spent two years proving that this idea works.
Now it’s time to build something that can last.
Thank you to everyone who came, volunteered, performed, sponsored, bought a shirt, bought food, rode the shuttle, sat in a jam, brought their family, or simply helped create the incredible feeling we had in Seven Valleys on Saturday.
I wouldn’t trade that day for anything.
See you in 2027. 🎻
— Matt Baldwin
