Though the music festival has been held for more than 20 years, in many ways 2024 was the first FloydFest of a new era.
The late-July event moved from its longtime home off the Blue Ridge Parkway in Patrick County this year, relocating to a 210-acre site in the Check community of Floyd County. So, finally, the fest is officially in Floyd.
“Floyd” was more a state of mind than a physical location for the country-meets-counterculture gathering, anyway.
“We had a unique opportunity,” says Brian Swenk, media director for Across-The-Way Productions Inc., which puts on FloydFest. “Most new festivals have to start from scratch, but we had a 20-year trial run [at the old site]. Now, we get to do things like we always wanted to.”
On a golf-cart tour of the site, Swenk zipped from the vast new parking area off U.S. 221 — all parking and camping are on site now — and headed down a long, inclined gravel road past a wooded area filled with tents.
He passed a tram that hauled patrons back and forth between the main site and parking on a regular schedule, another new addition to the site. No more shuttle bus trips from far-flung fields, as in years past.
At the bottom of the road — the view opening up to reveal the wide bowl of a valley that was once a cattle farm — was Festival Park.
Swenk ascended a steep hill to the Higher Ground Stage, an enormous wooden viewing deck that overlooks the festival.
Directly opposite, on the valley’s opposite side — past the festival grounds teeming with patrons, vendors and staff — was the towering main stage. “It’s only temporary,” Swenk noted of the structure, somewhat bland compared to the funkiness of the rest of the park. “We’re building a permanent one next year.”
About 100 performers, from national touring acts to local favorites, graced the multiple stages July 24-28, with headliners including country-and-western crooner Charley Crockett, Americana sensation Sierra Ferrell, a Grateful Dead cover band, roots rockers The Record Company and soul band The Black Pumas.
The main stage is pretty far from the crowd, separated by a stream and metal barricades. It’s a different feel from the intimacy of the old stage, where front-row fans were only a few feet from the performers. Some artists, like Ferrell, commented from the stage about their distance from the audience.
That could be why Eric Burton of The Black Pumas leapt from the stage, crossed the “moat” and joined the crowd during the band’s set — thrilling fans and likely giving security a collective ulcer.
FloydFest organizers were only able to bring one stage over from the original site, Swenk said: the Oasis Stage, affectionately known as “The Potato Chip.”
Everything else in the park was brand new for this year’s festival, including a total of seven stages, the viewing deck, camping facilities and parking, bridges and trails, access roads, and The Depot, a combination of a camp store, coffee shop and brew pub near the entrance.
The Higher Ground Stage boasted a spectacular view from the deck, an outdoor bar for socializing, and a hillside stage at the back that hosted performances from smaller acts. As FloydFest once touted years ago, it features “the best music you’ve never heard of.”
The stage hosted standout sets from energetic roots rock band Happy Landing, Americana artists Jade Jackson and S.G. Goodman, UK rockers The Heavy Heavy, and psychedelic soul from guitar-shredding Isaac Hadden and his band.
Down at the Workshop Porch Stage, sponsored by the Floyd Country Store, the stage was primarily devoted to Americana artists. The venue, with its amphitheater seating, incorporated part of an old barn that was originally on the property.
On the Friday afternoon of Floyd Fest, Hogslop String Band tore through a raucous set of Appalachian fiddle tunes and Cajun rave-ups. The stage also hosted sets ranging from local favorites like Justin Golden & Devil’s Coattails, to singer-songwriter Shawn Mullins, famous for his ’90s indie rock hit “Rockabye.”
On the festival’s final day, under a blistering sun, the main stage featured a crowd-pleasing set by Crockett and his band, one of the most “traditional” country artists you’ll find on the scene today, with a voice and style that could come from 1954 as easily as 2024.
But not all the action was on stage — stilt-walkers and performance artists wandered the crowd dressed as flowers; a man in gray dreadlocks painted a surfboard in psychedelic colors while a little girl wearing a rainbow jumper and fairy wings watched, fascinated; vendors offered aura photos and spirit animal tarot card readings.
Festival Park was a different experience than the original site, to be sure, but the festival’s signature vibe — welcoming, safe, inclusive — was still very much present. 
Planning pays off
Partway through the multiday festival, Swenk said everything was going smoothly, despite the complexity of the logistics involved. He was especially happy that there had been no issues with traffic backing up as vehicles entered the site off 221.
FloydFest expected attendance of between 7,000 and 7,500 on the busiest day — roughly seven times the population of the Check community — and a total of 10,000 across its five days. That’s fewer than the maximum attendance of up to 15,000 at the old site, but organizers intentionally kept the number of tickets sold lower until they work out how many people the new property can handle.
“Overall, things went very well,” Floyd County Sheriff Brian Craig said. “I was very pleased with how the festival was run.”
He said there were a couple of minor traffic backups, but “they were resolved quickly, and two arrests for drunk in public.
The weather cooperated, for the most part. After a soggy opening night, the only precipitation on Friday evening was a flurry of soap bubbles drifting lazily through the main stage crowd.
A week after the festival’s end, Sam Calhoun, FloydFest’s chief operating officer, says he was relieved — and a bit amazed — about how well the first year of FloydFest 2.0 went, given the challenges Across-The-Way Productions faced in the run-up to the event.
“It surpassed our collective expectations — and we set the bar high for ourselves,” Calhoun says. “Yes, there are tweaks and improvements to be made, but we are energized for that challenge.”
One of the biggest challenges was in preparing the site. Across-The-Way bought the property in May 2022 for $2.25 million, and has invested millions of dollars, though it has declined to provide an exact figure.
Crews labored through the winter of 2022 and the following spring to build roads and bridges on the site, but work was stopped in March 2023 after the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality expressed concerns about FloydFest’s lack of a plan to address the wetlands on the property, and the state Center for Biological Diversity cautioned that the project could endanger the habitats of endangered bog turtles and butterflies. The delay forced the cancellation of last year’s event.
In August 2023, the DEQ approved FloydFest’s new plans for stormwater management, which include pedestrian bridges that safely cross the numerous streams that are home to wildlife, and work resumed. 
A lot to prove
Calhoun expressed pride in the festival’s staff and volunteers, as well as its community and government partners. “We proved who we are, demonstrated what we have learned from the past, and showed that we continue to learn, absorb and advance.”
FloydFest had a lot to prove this year, both to itself and to the new community that it became a part of.
Some of FestivalPark’s neighbors in Check campaigned to keep FloydFest out of Floyd County. One neighbor put up signs saying “No FloydFest Here” and “Don’t Wreck Check.” Their concerns included increased traffic, noise and the possibility of patrons straying onto their property.
Craig, the sheriff, said his office received “a few complaints from neighbors” during the festival, but he didn’t respond to a request for more details about those complaints.
Several neighbors who had been vocal critics of the new site did not respond to messages seeking comment for this story.
FloydFest CEO John McBroom, who owns FestivalPark, said last year that the festival sent out 100 letters to neighbors, along with free tickets to the 2024 event.
According to Calhoun, many of them took up the offer.
He cited one interaction with neighbors that made him emotional. “One group from a neighboring property trepidatiously entered on Thursday, were met with staff who took great care in explaining the maps and must-see programming, and they ended up coming back, as a family, for the next three days,” he said. “That was special. And, there are many, many similar stories like that. I get chills — good chills — just thinking back on it.”
Calhoun and McBroom have said the festival wants to be a good neighbor and good stewards of the land. According to a Virginia Tech study, FloydFest stands to bring more than $4 million to Floyd County and the surrounding area, including annual meals and lodging tax revenue of more than $10,000.
Future Plans
Across-The-Way Productions is already planning next year’s event and will apply what it learned at its inaugural Festival Park experience.
“Our new site is much larger than our last site and, although we absolutely nailed our patron load-in and load-out plans, as well as our overall traffic and transportation plan, we saw that we need to build on our onsite FloydFest Express shuttle plan for 2025,” Calhoun said.
There were waits for the tram, but no lines as long as those for shuttle buses at the old site.
Another plan involves what to do with Festival Park the rest of the year.
Across-The-Way Productions is considering the possibility of public recreation on the site, McBroom indicated last year.
“Floyd does not have a park system,” he said at a 2023 public meeting. “Other than the Blue Ridge Parkway, there is no place to walk or ride your bike.”
Recreational uses could include hiking on the property’s 3 miles of trails, and perhaps disc golf or camping. McBroom indicated that there had been preliminary talks with Floyd County about possibilities.
“The hope is in the future that we can have this as a community resource, beyond just music,” Calhoun told a gathering hosted by the Floyd County Chamber of Commerce in June. “It’s a park … it is incredibly, incredibly beautiful.”
“It’s too wonderful of a commodity, of an asset, not to share,” McBroom added.
