We bid a fond farewell to the Johnny Appleseed Festival in Sheffield.

The three-day festival has taken place for the past 17 years, often featuring competitions between professional lumberjacks and lumberjills as well as food, entertainment, a corn hole tournament, horse and tractor pull, pie baking contest and a wine trail.

But, as time went on, there were fewer volunteers and fewer resources to put on a festival that organizers could be proud to host. It was a tough decision, we’re sure, to decide the festival won’t continue.

Thumbs up to the volunteers who put so much time and effort into planning the Johnny Appleseed Festival for nearly two decades. Planning festivals is often a thankless job involving long hours, more phone calls than one can count and a near-constant barrage of problems and issues that have to be resolved.

They also deserve credit for capitalizing on a story that we all know and creating something unique in our area. Johnny Appleseed, born John Chapman, introduced apple trees to large parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and present-day Ontario, as well as the northern counties of present-day West Virginia. While Sheffield wasn’t the only place to hold a Johnny Appleseed Festival, there wasn’t anything like it anywhere in the area.

All good things eventually come to an end, and so it is with the Johnny Appleseed Festival. It was a heck of a ride while it lasted.