WQXE NEWS

The 2023 Cecilia Days festival will take place this Friday and Saturday.

“This is our fifty-third year for this event,” said Cecilia Ruritan Club President Mike Wimp. “It started back in 1970 by some local civic leaders. We’re pretty excited about it.”

Wimp says because Cecilia is unincorporated and therefore does now draw taxes Cecilia Days is the main fundraiser for the community.

“We fund the street lights in Cecilia, we fund and keep the upkeep on the South Hardin Baseball Park which is used by a lot of county residents,” Wimp said. “We actually own and furnish the facilities for the Cecilia post office, and there’s a lot of scholarships that we do throughout the year.”

Cecilia Days also serves as a homecoming celebration.

“A lot of people plan their vacations around this time,” Wimp said. “It’s always the second weekend in August, so we have a lot of people that will come back home and take the opportunity to see family and friends that they see no other time.”

Friday will feature the fish plate dinner and baby contest beginning at 6 p.m., followed by the Little Miss/Master, Princess, Jr. Miss, and Miss Cecilia contests.

Saturday kicks off with breakfast at 7 a.m. at the Cecilia Baptist Church, followed by the parade at 10 a.m. and leading into events and activities that continue until 10 p.m. For more information and a full schedule, find the Cecilia Ruritan Club Facebook page.

The Elizabethtown Police Department responded to the area of Baptist Health Hardin shortly after 4 p.m. Monday due to a male subject reportedly threatening to harm himself or others.

According to the EPD, hospital staff implemented lockdown procedures out of an abundance of caution. Officers quickly located the subject in question and determined him to be unarmed.

The EPD says at no point did the man present a threat to staff or patients. The man was determined to be of diminished capacity and was evaluated and stabilized.

Several Elizabethtown businesses are forming an association to promote growth and support in the downtown area.

According to a release, the mission of the Historic Downtown Elizabethtown Business Association “is to foster success of businesses in the downtown area through local programming and marketing in effort to promote tourism and support the merchants in operation of their business.”

Association PResident Dana Garrett says downtown businesses are looking to pick up where the former Heritage Council left off when it dissolved during the COVID pandemic, but organizers want to extend efforts further.

“We realized with the growth that we’re seeing that if we really wanted to kind of bring it to the next level that we would need to have more of a formal organization,” Pyles said, “so over the last several months we’ve met to kind of see what that looks like, and then officially got the framework together to launch that this past month, and we’re ready to get other businesses on board and move forward to exciting things that I think will come from it.”

Garrett says she and other business owners frequently get asked by visitors about what is going on downtown, which is a motivating factor for the association’s initial actions.

“At first one of our main goals is to get the website that the Heritage Council started updated, create a map whether it whether you can access it online or have printable copies, so that way anyone who is downtown will know what all we offer, and then also continue on some events we’ve already started to help make them bigger and better and give people another reason to come downtown,” Garrett said.

The association will be open to all businesses located within the boundaries of the Hub. Any interested business owners are encouraged to attend the association’s official kickoff meeting Tuesday, August 15 at 7 p.m. at Waters Edge Winery.