The 58th annual Children’s Festival will bring good old-fashioned fun to Jacksonville, not to mention the young and young-at-heart.

Nestled across the Britt Gardens and pavilion with a plethora of kid-centered activities, arts and crafts and other hands-on stations, the longstanding festival runs three days in July, with this year’s theme being “Read, Rejoice and Remember.”

The Children’s Festival is set from 4:30 to 8:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, July 13-14, and from 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Monday, July 15, at the Britt Festival Gardens in Jacksonville, located at 350 S. First St.

Admission to the festival is $4 per person with all activities being free to participate in. Food and refreshments at the Dragon Deli will be available for purchase. The festival is organized by the Storytelling Guild, a nonprofit and volunteer-run organization that collaborates with Jackson County Library Services and other youth programs in the region.

For more details, visit storytellingguild.org/childrens-festival.

The festival includes multiple draws, from 30-plus activity booths to talking, trash- and recycling-eating dragons Rosabelle and Pebbles, as well as live performances on the Britt stage throughout the event.

“We have arts and crafts for the young and old and a whole section for younger kids,” said Julie Hagstrom, co-director of the Children’s Festival.

Those arts and crafts stations include face painting, clay, woodworking, gold panning and more.

Organizers are expecting thousands to attend the Children’s Festival throughout the three-day event. Around 8,000 people attended the event in 2023.

“We also have the stage where there will be performances from youth acts for most part with dance companies, karate companies, fiddlers, jugglers, local authors and others,” Hagstrom said.

Each year the event has a festival queen. This year’s royal highness is Laura Horton of Medford. The queen will grant the title of princess, prince and other monikers for any of the attendees.

To fulfill kids with all kinds of needs, the event will have a calm corner designated for kids with sensory issues as well as other features to be inclusive to all participants.

This year’s Children’s Festival is dedicated to the late Pat Blair, an artist, educator and librarian with the Jackson County Library District who helped organize the festival for 52 years and was also the illustrator and creator of dragons Rosabelle and Pebbles.

“We deeply appreciate her love of imagination and books and kids; this is her legacy of how we can honor her, and a lot of her work will be displayed throughout festival and we’re just excited and honored to continue to honor her love of all things literature,” said Heather Hoefling, co-director of the festival.

Beyond displaying Blair’s artwork throughout the Britt Gardens, a booth will be dedicated to one of her favorite art forms: watercolor. Blair is among the “founding mothers” of the festival and served as director, festival queen and volunteer for many years, Hagstrom said.

“We do sell t-shirts, each year is different and has the theme of the year on it, and this year is a classic Pat Blair design of a dragon reading a book with a fairy on its shoulder,” Hoefling said of this year’s lime green festival shirts.A signature part of the three-day event are dragons Rosabelle and Pebbles. The trash-eating creatures even “speak” to the kids as they feed the dragons fresh trash and recyclables, with a volunteer making fun and friendly remarks to the kids while mic’d up inside the statue.

“Ever since the dragons were introduced to the hill, we’ve had no problems with trash,” Hoefling said, laughing. “The founding mothers found that in the beginning kids would leave trash, and they came up with plans for two trash-eating dragons on the hill and the kids pull the tongue open and drop their trash.”

Both Hoefling and Hagstrom are running the festival as co-directors for the first time, a key to the event’s long-term success has been a high level of organization and work from prior leaders.

“They really thought through the longevity and sustainability, and it can be repeated over and over, and really thought through what can we do that will last,” Hoefling said.

“We have these giant binders from years past that pretty much lays it all out,” Hagstrom said.

Another major contributor to the Children’s Festival’s success is the hundreds of volunteers who run it each year.

“It is completely volunteer run; as of the last time checking, we have 246 volunteers signed up and typically have close to 300-plus people,” Hoefling said. Other groups such as the Medford Rogue Rotary Club, local Scouts troops and Jackson County Library Services aid with putting the festival on.

To volunteer or learn more about the Children’s Festival and the Storytelling Guild, visit storytellingguild.org.