Click here and join me as I explore The American Village and Festival of Tulips!
Today I’ll be exploring The American Village and Tulip Festival in Montevallo, Alabama.
The American Village and Tulip Festival in Montevallo and Tulip Festival is held once a year.
Here is the history of The Village according to https://www.americanvillage.org/history/
When the American Village opened the Board of Trustees publicly cited “The American Village is possible only because of the extraordinary vision, leadership, and perseverance of Tom Walker.” A few years later it awarded him its highest honor for his visionary leadership and persistence in founding of the American Village. He conceived of the idea of a place to engage young people in the stories of liberty – as a foundation for their becoming good citizens and leaders. In 1993 he began publicly speaking and advocating for the creation of such a place. He worked with citizens and officials. In 1995 the Citizenship Trust was officially chartered by legislative act sponsored by the late Rep. Al Knight and then Sen. Frank C. Ellis, Jr. as a 501(c)(3) non-profit educational institution, and in 1998, then State Representative Johnny Curry authored the first public funding support, and on November 30, 1999, the American Village campus opened.
Beginning in 1994 American Village Founder and President Emeritus Tom Walker collaborated with Mike Hamrick, an extraordinarily gifted architect of Eufaula, Alabama. Their collaboration focused on shaping and creating a vision of both the campus as a whole and of its individual components. Walker and Hamrick, and more recently new American Village President and CEO Alan B. Miller, with support of the Board of Trustees, and other stakeholders, have sought to create a campus that is emblematic of America’s heritage of liberty and self-government. This village “set upon a hill” is emerging more and more as a nationally-distinctive campus.
Today the American Village is sustained by broad support: by citizens and leaders in all walks of life who believe that it is important to teach youth the vital lessons of liberty, to remember the price of liberty, and to prepare new generations of Americans for their roles as stewards of our Constitution and other charters of freedom. We invite Americans to join in this work to answer Benjamin Franklin’s challenge: “…it’s a Republic, if you can keep it.”