About 4,000 people turned out Saturday for Chandler’s CityFest, an allday event celebrating 50 years of incorporation, city administrator Jim Moffeit said.

“I think we would have done better if the weather would have cooperated,” he said. “I think that took our crowd down during the evening, and it made some of our vendors leave early. But overall, it was steady all day, with a nice crowd that evening.”

Tony Douglas and The Shrimpers performed, along with Rick Daily.

“They were good,” Moffeit said. “They put on a great show, and we want to thank everyone who donated fans and other items.”

The 13-hour event also featured a fireworks presentation, balloon launch, antique car show, and a disc golf tournament.

“The fireworks show was great, and it was a whole lot more than what I expected.”

Money raised during CityFest will probably be donated to Friends of the Library, Moffeit said, to finance the creation of a city museum, the contents of which are housed at the Chandler Public Library.

Originally housed in a bookmobile, the Chandler branch was moved to Broad Street in 1983 and relocated again 13 years later to its current building at 900 State Highway 31. It is expected to become a city department by Chandler’s next fiscal year, but Henderson County commissioners have told the city it would continue to allocate $18,000 a year for the Chandler branch.

Chandler contributes over $8,000 a year to its branch. As a branch library, it is unable to receive state funding, grants and access to databases, Librarian Nancy Bertholf has said.

Chandler’s history dates to 1880 when the Texas and St. Louis Railway established a station on land donated about 31 years earlier by Alphonso Chandler, for which the town was renamed.

It was originally called Stillwater.

Officials haven’t decided whether to expand the library or move the historical collection, which includes Sen. Ralph Yarborough, Jackie Kennedy, and other collections and memorabilia.

The late Yarborough, Democratic senator, was born in Chandler in 1903. He taught school in Henderson County, practiced law in El Paso and Austin, was a Texas judge and assistant attorney general, World War II veteran in the U.S. Army, and an author.

Yarborough was in Kennedy’s motorcade during the president’s assassination in 1963 in Dallas.


Photos by Shirley Parmer