Take a drive down Sunflower Trail
GILLIAM, La. — The 22nd annual Sunflower Trail and Festival showcases the countryside charm and sunflower scenery of Caddo Parish this Saturday.
The festival itself is held at the Red River Crossroads Museum in Gilliam from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. with live entertainment, arts and crafts vendors, food vendors, activities for children and more. There’s no admission charge.
Also free is driving along the trail, which runs along Louisiana Highway 3049 where sunflowers bloom in the fields.
The event is sponsored by the Red River Crossroads Historical Association, a group of volunteers from communities along the Red River, explained festival organizer Karen Logan of the historical association.
“Last year, the Sunflower Trail and Festival took its first hiatus in over two decades,” Logan said in a statement about the event. “I’m happy to
bring brighter days to our community this year with our traditional festivities and a 20-mile trail of sunflowers throughout the countryside of Caddo Parish. Welcoming folks from everywhere to eat, explore, and experience my hometown in summer glory just feels right.”
The festival and trail origins started with one farmer growing the towering flowers.
“It started with a local farmer planting sunflowers in a field. Everybody loved them and came up, wanted to take pictures. He had artist friends who wanted to paint the sunflowers, so it grew from that beginning,” Logan said in an interview. “The trail is actually an old highway, 3049 from Shreveport up to Gilliam.”
It’s a chance to spend the day in the country, seeing the sunflowers and other sights along the road, which runs parallel to U.S. Highway 71 and Interstate 49, Logan said.
“Highway 3049 was the original highway from Shreveport north up to Texarkana,” she said. Now, as a two-lane roadway, it’s an easy drive for people to meander along without a lot of traffic.
“They can stop and get out on the side of the road. They can cut the sunflowers. Last year during COVID we didn’t have the festival,” Logan said. “We still had the sunflowers and people still loved driving up. For some reason sunflowers get the imagination going.”
Couples even get engaged along the sunflower trail, she said. Artists set up their easels alongside the road near the sunflower fields and paint amidst the sunflowers.
“A lot of bicycle groups bicycle along it,” she said, noting visitors hail from Texarkana, Baton Rouge, East Texas and elsewhere.
Logan said nearly 60 vendors will participate this year at the family-friendly festival in the little town of Gilliam. “We try to screen the vendors so that we have arts and crafts and not just a lot of stuff,” Logan said. There are food vendors and restaurants nearby.
“It’s just a hometown festival,” she said. The historical association also sponsors a fall tour when the cotton is white and being harvested, she added.
As to the sunflowers themselves, expect their full brilliance on display for the festive occasion.
“The sunflowers are great. They’re going to be in full bloom. They’re just now opening up. That means that in another week-and-a-half they’ll really be full bloom,” Logan said last week.
According to the Shreveport-Bossier Convention and Tourist Bureau, sunflowers are expected to survive through early July. The drive includes historic sites, a sunflower maze, wildflower fields and zinnias.
The bureau suggests several stops along the sunflower route: Old Church House and Big Mama’s Antiques and Restorations in Hosston, Designs by Carol Quilt Shop in Ida, Dixie Lavender Farm in Shreveport, Farmers’ Market in Gilliam, Lynn Plantation Commissary and Veterans Memorial in Belcher and both the Northrose Plantation and Ryan Farms Produce in Dixie. (More info: Facebook.
com/SunflowerTrail or Redrivercrossroadshistorical.org.)