90,000 attend Folk Festival, donate $132,000, organizers say

Enough people attended the American Folk Festival on the Bangor Waterfront and donated enough money to keep the festival going for another year, according to organizers.

The estimated attendance over the three days of the festival was 90,000 individual festival-goers making 120,000 total visits, according to a press release sent out by Executive Director Heather McCarthy.

Those who attended contributed a total of $131,912 into the AFF’s donation buckets, the second-highest bucket total in the festival’s history. The highest donation year ever was 2010, when attendees donated $170,673, and the highest attendance year was 2006, when an estimated 160,000 came through the festival gates.

Over the festival weekend, organizers and more than 700 volunteers presented 17 performing groups, plus a children’s village, folklife area and dozens of food and crafts vendors. This year’s new thursday concerts provided additional opportunities for festival artists to perform in Downtown Bangor.

“We had good weather, great music, and a very large, spirited group of people attending who couldn’t get enough of the American Folk Festival atmosphere on the Bangor Waterfront,” McCarthy said in the release. “It was a good year.”

It will still be weeks before the festival processes all the expenses and revenues of the 2012 festival, according to the release.

For information, visit americanfolkfestival.com.

Emily Burnham

About Emily Burnham

Emily Burnham is a Maine native, UMaine graduate, proud Bangorian and a writer for the Bangor Daily News, where she's worked since 2004. She reports on everything from local bands to local food to all the cool things going on in the Greater Bangor area. In her quest for stories, she's seen countless concerts and plays, been lobster fishing, interviewed celebrities, hung out with water buffalo and played in a ukulele orchestra. She's interested in everything that happens in Maine.