The story
Pennsylvania State Laurel Festival in Wellsboro
Pennsylvania State Laurel Festival stretches across nine days in June, timed to the wild mountain laurel blooming across the ridges of the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon near Wellsboro. The week builds around a juried arts and crafts fair, the crowning of the Laurel Queen, and a parade of floats and marching bands down the town's gas-lit main street. Now in its 84th consecutive year, it remains a major undertaking for a borough of roughly 3,500 people.
June arrives in Wellsboro and the hillsides around the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon are already flushed pink — mountain laurel doing what it has done every summer for centuries, climbing the ridges and spilling into the hollows.