Lyon combines homecoming, Scottish Festival
BATESVILLE — The Arkansas Scottish Festival is typically chockfull of men in kilts tossing cabers the size of telephone poles; young ladies dancing in the tradition of the Highlands; the aroma of meat pies, kettle corn and other concessions; and, of course, the sound of bagpipes permeating the campus of Lyon College.
For Kenton Adler and Nancy Love, they could picture no better place to get married.
The festival will go on this year, but Lyon College will combine the games with homecoming for one weekend-long event. The newly dubbed ScotsFest will start Oct. 8 and continue through Oct. 10.
Kenton Adler, director of advancement services and research at Lyon, said that at one time, homecoming and the Highland games took place the same weekend.
“It used to be homecoming and Family Weekend in the ’80s,” Adler said. “They added some Scottish games for entertainment, and [the Scottish Festival] kind of grew out of that.”
The Scottish Festival began as a small fair on the campus’ intramural field as a part of homecoming celebrations, said Jimmy Bell, director of the Scottish Heritage Program. It was a way to pay homage to the Scottish heritage of the College’s Presbyterian founders. The event featured student vendors, athletics, pipe bands, clans, dancing and more.
Bell said he has looked in old Arkansas College yearbooks, and there are pictures of people playing bagpipes from the ’20s and ’30s. “[Bagpiping] became institutionalized in the ’80s. This is kind of getting back to our roots, as far as homecoming. In the past, many alumni who couldn’t make it to both events were sort of forced to pick between either homecoming in the fall or the Scottish Festival in the spring.”
Adler, who has been playing with the Lyon College Pipe Band for 20 years, said the tartans and pageantry add to the festival, which he said has “a little something for everyone,” with Highland dancing, piping, bagpiping, meat pies and other concessions, vendors, children’s games, a British car show and the ever-popular sheepdog demonstrations.
“That’s something people really enjoy,” Adler said. “There’s the Ceilidh (pronounced KAYlee) on Saturday night. Everyone has a great time at that, and then there’s the genealogical aspect [of the festival]. Almost everybody in this part of the country has some sort of Scottish element in their background. … There are quite a number of clans that will be represented.”
There will also be Wee Highland Games, where children are invited to the Duct Tape Armory, where they can design and create their own Scottish shield. Other events will include a sheaf toss, where competitors will throw a bag of
straw (also known as a “sheaf ”) over a high bar with a snow shovel; a caber toss, a smaller version of the telephone-pole-sized tree trunks to be thrown; and the welly throw, which is inspired by the hammer toss, but instead of hammers, participants will throw old wellies (rain boots).
Adler said he was a pipe major for the Ozark Highlanders in Fayetteville in the late 1990s.
“We kept coming over here to compete. I liked the campus and the college; we always had a great time,” he said.
In 1998, he wrote to the then-director of the Scottish Heritage Program at Lyon, basically asking for a job at the college.
“He let me know of a job opening in Information Services; I’d been working in Computing Services at Fayetteville.”
Adler came to Lyon and joined the pipe band, noting that he took a three-year hiatus to play with a band in Oklahoma, but when Jimmy Bell came to the college, Adler rejoined the Lyon group.
It was through piping that he met his wife, Nancy Love. The two met at a piping competition in another state in 2003, then reconnected in 2004 at a different competition.
“I invited her to play tenor drum as we were getting ready to compete at the world championship in Glasgow in 2006,” Adler said.
As Love drove to Batesville from Louisiana once a month to practice with the Lyon College Pipe Band, she and Adler became romantically involved. Then in 2007, Adler proposed to Love at a competition in Colorado, and she said yes, and the two could not think of a better place to tie the knot than the Scottish Festival.
“We thought it would be fun to get married in Couch Garden at the festival. John Chiarmonte, a Celtic Orthodox priest, performed a handfasting ceremony in which he wrapped our wrists together in a traditional ceremony[in 2008].”
Adler said his friend Bell actually wrote a bagpipe march titled “The Dragonfly Wedding March,” to be played while Love walked down the aisle.
Director of Alumni Engagement Cindy Barber said she looks forward to the college hosting alumni and other visitors for ScotsFest.
“We are so excited for the entire Lyon community to gather on campus and experience the things they love about the Arkansas Scottish Festival, along with the excitement of the annual homecoming events, all in one fun-filled weekend,” she said.
And Barber said relatives have been discovered among the clan tents — even in her own family.
“When my husband and I were first married, we would go every year, and there was a Clan Creech that had a tent there,” Barber said. “[Creech] was his mother’s maiden name. We started talking to the people in the tent and fairly quickly discovered they were second cousins from Missouri who had separated from the family when they moved west and had not stayed in touch. We were friends with them for several years. They had a son that looked just like my husband.”
Meanwhile, alumnus Adam Robertson, who lives in Alabama, said he missed coming to the Arkansas Scottish Festival last year with his cousin Charles Barnett, wearing the red, blue, orange and green tartan of Clan Robertson.
Attending the festival was something they have done every April for years, but because of COVID-19, the festival had to be canceled, and Robertson said he felt left out.
Robertson said he attended Lyon back when it was Arkansas College, and his wife, Ginni, also an alum, served on the board when the college first started the Scottish Festival. Robertson said he would come to Batesville while his wife attended meetings and would float the Buffalo River with his cousin Charles Barnett.
But it wasn’t long until the festival became a bigger draw for him than a float trip.
“They have people who dress up in Scottish garb and march in with banners during the church service, the Kirkin’ of the Tartans, and post them at the front,” Robertson said. “The bagpipers play, and in the past, they have had good-sized parades. There are a lot of vendors who drive in from out of town that have Scottish ties. They bring swords and various Scottish regalia to sell in the booths, so it’s quite an event, and I’ve enjoyed going to it.”
Not only did Robertson meet his wife at Arkansas College, but his father, two uncles and two aunts all attended the school in the 1910s, ’20s and ’30s, and a great-uncle of his actually served as president of the college in the 1910s, “so we have quite a connection,” he said.
“This year, I’m glad they’re going to [have the festival]” he said. “There’s a group of us from the classes of ’59 and ‘’60, and we meet at other times. Several of the wives sang in the Lassies when the Lassies were singing — it’s like a choir reunion, a guys reunion and a reunion of Scottish Festival [patrons],” Robertson said.
One of the activities Robertson said he looks forward to is the Ceilidh, a Scottish party with dancing and Gaelic folk music.
“It’s a little bit different every year,” Robertson said, but he enjoys the gathering, as well as the Scottish festival in general, he said.
“It’s a method of continuing the connection to the school,” said Robertson, who went on to attend medical school and become a physician after graduating from Arkansas College. “It was a very small school, but a very good school. I never felt left behind — I’m very proud to be a part of it.”