The Vermont Fairy Tale Festival began with a deceptively simple idea: what if libraries could step out from behind their shelves and become living storybooks for a day?
The festival was launched in 2017 by the Sherburne Memorial Library in Killington as a way to celebrate Vermont’s public libraries while creating a free, family-centered community event rooted in imagination and storytelling. From the beginning, participating libraries each adopted a fairy tale or fantasy story and transformed it into an interactive booth filled with crafts, puppetry, games, music, and costumed characters.
The very first festival already had the flavor of something delightfully unusual. According to coverage from Seven Days, around twenty libraries participated in the inaugural event, bringing tales like Jack and the Beanstalk and The Musicians of Bremen to life. Viking reenactors, storytellers, artists, and fairy-house trails helped turn the grounds into something halfway between a county fair and a portal accidentally left open by a wandering wizard.
By 2019, the festival had expanded significantly, drawing libraries from multiple Vermont counties. Visitors wandered from booth to booth with “passports” stamped at each story world, collecting crafts and experiences like literary frequent-flyer miles. One library built a Wizard of Oz scene complete with an animatronic Wicked Witch, while contests invited children to turn their parents into knights using aluminum foil.
Over the years, the festival evolved from a charming local experiment into one of the region’s best-known fall family events. Annual attendance reportedly grew into the 900 to 1,200 range, with more than a dozen libraries and many vendors participating. The event remained intentionally free, asking attendees instead to bring donations for local food shelves or humane societies.
The festival’s atmosphere also broadened beyond classic fairy tales. Themes eventually included fantasy worlds like Winnie the Pooh, Eragon, Labyrinth, goblins, woodland creatures, dragons, and Viking encampments. Live steel sword-fighting demonstrations, scavenger hunts for dragon eggs, enchanted forests, and “Trinkets & Treasures” shops using whimsical play currency called “daisy dollars” became recurring features.
One of the festival’s defining characteristics has been its community-built spirit. Volunteers, senior groups, local artists, libraries, vendors, musicians, and families all help create the event each year. Organizers have repeatedly emphasized that the festival exists not merely as entertainment, but as a showcase for what libraries contribute to Vermont communities: creativity, gathering spaces, literacy, imagination, and intergenerational connection.
Today, the Festival has become a kind of autumn storybook village in the mountains, where libraries temporarily transform into castles, forests, dragon lairs, and crooked little folklore crossroads. For one September day each year, the border between literature and real life gets delightfully thin.