Ashburn ready to celebrate fire ants

Published 11:16 am Wednesday, December 7, 2005





flo.rankin@gaflnews.com



ASHBURN – And you thought the fire ant mounds in your yard were bad.

Ashburn, already the home of the world’s largest artificial peanut, will feature the world’s largest fire ant mound this weekend during the seventh annual Fire Ant Festival.

The festival at Heritage Park will actually have two mounds – a big pile of sand and a permanent maze built of industrial exhaust stacks and fiberglass. A nine-foot ant sculpture commissioned from Valdosta artist Wilby Coleman will loom over the maze exit.

“It’s awesome-looking,” said Ashburn-Turner County Chamber of Commerce President Shelley Zorn of the maze. “You’d really have to see it to appreciate it.”

Doug Barbee said he spent 50 or 60 hours constructing the 17-foot maze, which is designed for children to play in. “It’s just something different,” he said. “The idea popped into my head, and I just kept on going with it until I had something I liked and I knew children would have fun in it.”

Zorn said the festival expects to attract between 15,000 and 20,000 people from all over South Georgia. This year’s theme is “Seven-Year Itch.”

The festival will have a corporate sponsor for the first time – Gardentech’s “Over and Out” fire ant repellent. The high school drama club plans a production of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” with the evil queen being killed with Over and Out.

Zorn said the chamber is fielding calls about the festival from as far as away as Great Britain.

“I’ve been involved in this festival from the beginning, and I really have to hand it to Ben Baker, who came up with the name,” she said. “I wanted something more arty, but this name really draws a lot of attention.

Zorn said that for two years, community members tried to come up with a name for the festival but every suggestion was already being used by another festival. Finally, Baker came up with the idea of a festival for fire ants and the first festival was planned.

“Now we say it’s because we’re like fire ants in Ashburn – we’re small, we’re industrious and you can’t kill us,” Zorn said. “But it’s really because we couldn’t find another name that hadn’t been taken first.”

The weekend’s festivities will begin Friday night with a pageant sponsored by the Ashburn Women’s Club, free fireworks and a drive-in movie.

Saturday’s events include 1K and 5K fun runs, arts and crafts, a street dance, the Hendricks Family Circus, an animal show and a classic car and bike show.

For more information, call 567-9696 or 567-3655. To get to the festival grounds, take I-75 to Exit 82 and turn west onto Highway 112/West Washington Avenue. The festival will be one block north of Washington Avenue on East College Avenue.



To contact city editor Florence Rankin, call 382-4321, ext. 209.



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