Photo / Maureen Milliken
A photo of the Kennebec River Whatever Race in 1980, showing the East Side Boat Landing in Augusta, and taken from Memorial Bridge. The race began in the mid-70s to celebrate the river cleanup.
Updated: October 16, 2019
Kennebec Valley Chamber's Whatever Family Festival gives way to new initiatives
Courtesy / Kennebec Valley Chamber of Commerce
A scene from Kennebec River Day at Mill Park in Augusta in 2018. The day was part of the three-week Whatever Family Festival, which the chamber is ending.
By Maureen Milliken
The 40-year-long celebration of the Kennebec River that started with a wacky river "race" in the 1970s and evolved into a three-week, 60-event Whatever Family Festival is being discontinued by the Kennebec Valley Chamber of Commerce to make way for more focused initiatives.
The chamber said last week it will no longer host the Whatever Family Festival, which this year spanned three weeks in communities along the river and throughout Kennebec County, culminating in Augusta's Fourth of July celebration. Many of its events will continue, just not as the festival.
The chamber is focusing on new endeavors, including today's 7th Up Biz Tour and its growing Kennebec River Craft Brew Fest.
The 7th UP Biz Tour, in which seventh-graders from Cony Middle School in Augusta take a day-long tour of a variety of businesses, is taking place today. The chamber expects next year to expand the program, designed to spark an interest in local career opportunities.
Kennebec Valley Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Katie Doherty told Mainebiz Wednesday it was a hard decision to end the festival.
"When we started the Whatever Festival there were no other organizations and the event was focused on the river," she said. "Once the race got done we kept trying to change things up and make it fresh, but it was never the success that it used to be."
Now, other organizations, like the Augusta Downtown Alliance, have stepped up that are filling the void.
A new focus
She said the chamber is excited about wider-ranging events, like today's 7th Up event.
"We brought 180 students from Cony today on business tours to help showcase what our region has for jobs that are available right here, so no one has to go away for school or work," she said. "We are trying to keep our kids here in the region and help grow our future workforce."
She said the chamber "wants to help share events that are going on all year long in the region and not just during the three-week Whatever Festival."
Declining interest in Kennebec River Day, which the Whatever Race had evolved into, is the only Whatever Festival KV chamber event that's ending. "We have enjoyed converting the Whatever Race to Kids in Capitol Park then to Kennebec River Day but over the years attendance, and partner participation has been continually declining."
Other major events that came under the Whatever Festival umbrella, including the Greater Gardiner River Festival, Blistered Fingers Bluegrass Festival in Litchfield, the city of Augusta’s 4th of July celebration and the Kennebec River Brewfest - will continue to be held.
"We are just not promoting it all as the Whatever Festival," she said.
Besides events like the 7th Up Biz Tour, the release also said the growing Kennebec River Brewfest will be a continuing focus of the chamber. The brewfest, part of the Whatever Family Festival, will be in its third year in 2020. This year, on June 29, it attracted more than two dozen breweries and distilleries, and hundreds of visitors.
The city of Augusta is also encouraging businesses and organizations that participated in the Whatever Family Festival events to contact city officials for information about participating in the Fourth of July parade.
A history of community celebration
The Whatever Family Festival began as the Whatever Race in the mid-1970s. A celebration of the newly clean river after the end of the log drives and passage of the Clean Water Act of 1972, area residents built "boats" out of whatever they could find — think Volkswagens on oil drums and bathtubs on blocks of Styrofoam — and "raced" the six miles from Augusta to Gardiner. The only rule was that the boats couldn't have a motor.
The racers were “the whackiest, most colorful fleet to be seen anywhere,” according to the 1989 Kennebec Valley Chamber’s Capital Area Guide.
The Whatever Race ended in 1990s, mostly because of concerns about liability, drinking and more. It eventually became Whatever Week, with more than 60 events celebrating community spirit, and particularly Kennebec River Day, a kid-friendly event.
Whatever Week expanded to the Whatever Family Festival, which this year ran from June 12 to July 4, with events that ranged from art shows, trail hikes, craft fairs, parades and concerts in a dozen communities, to the Kennebec Valley Chamber's Kennebec River Day and the Kennebec River Brewfest.
Many of the events — for instance the Monmouth Fair and the Blistered Fingers Blues Festival in Litchfield — were already established and rolled into the Whatever Family Festival schedule.
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