On April 25 and 26th at Historic Washington State Park, the Fourth Annual James Black Bowie Heritage Festival will be held, with guests like Doug Marcaida, with knifemakers testing their blades in competition, on site knife-forging, knife shows, crafts, food and music.
At Monday’s Hope Lions meeting, organizers Mona Still and Catherine Rowe spoke about the upcoming two-day event. Still announced that Marcaida of the History Channel’s Forged in Fire would be appearing at the festival again this year. J. Neilson, who also appeared on Forged is expected, too, as well as Anthony De Longis, who is whip master, sword master and action choreographer for film, television, plays and operas.
Among those with whom De Longis has worked are Harrison Ford, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jet Li, Tom Cruise, Brendan Fraser, Christian Kane, Anjelica Huston, Bo Derek, Placido Domingo, Yuen Woo Ping, Tim Burton, Ron Howard, David Carradine, Patrick Swayze, Angelica Huston, Placido Domingo, Charlton Heston and Richard Chamberlain. “We'll do some demonstrations, and he’ll do some talks with and about the whip,” Still said.
Also coming is J.W. Wiseman, who is practiced with the throwing of bladed weapons and has been a stuntman for several movies and television shows.
Still stated that each day of events will run from about 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. “We are having a grand opening both days in front of the WPA gym. We have 30 knife makers coming that will be set up in the gym. Five of them are instructors at the James Black school. Three of them live in Nashville, one's in Hatfield, and the other one is in El Dorado so they're local guys,” she said.
Looking at the schedule of events for the two days, Still said “we tried not to overlap a lot of things, because we want people to be able to flow from one side of the city of Washington to the other side of city of Washington to get to all the events and have time to eat, have time to look around.”
Catharine Rowe said the event is not just about knives as weapons but about the art that goes into their design. “They're tools, as years and years ago, when James black made the knife for Jim Bowie, it was a tool as much as a weapon, but James Black was an artist as are these folks being at our festival.”
Mona Still elaborated on the fact that the festival has wide appeal beyond those shopping for knives. “We've got reenactors again coming this year. The Early Reenactor Association group comes in to Washington for a lot of different events. So they'll have their encampment set up. We're going to do the play about the beginning of the Bowie Knife. They'll be down at the Blacksmith Shop.
“[Arkansas] Game & Fish is bringing their archery set Saturday only. They're ready to do that. So that's going to be there. So the kids can do some hands on. The kids can get a [wooden] Bowie knife, then they can go and have it signed, because our headliners will be available and the instructors will be available to have that signed.”
There will be no ticket prices charged for entrance, but parking nearby is $5. The schedule of events can be found below.
