Big Blue River Days, Marysville's largest annual event, attracts thousands to small Northern Kansas city

MARYSVILLE, Kan. - Thousands of people migrated through Marysville in Northern Kansas this weekend for the latest installment of Big Blue River Days, the Marshall County city's largest annual event.

"Big Blue River Days activates downtown Marysville, to get people to experience our town in really exciting ways," said Wayne Kruse, executive director of OneMarysville, the event's sponsoring organization. "I love when you’ve got people hanging out on Broadway, you’ve got music playing, and then you just have people congregating everywhere, talking, interacting. When you talk about activating spaces and getting people to connect, that’s at the heart of what our organization is about. So then when you see that happening, that’s when it gets really exciting."

This Friday and Saturday, the cobblestone streets of Marysville's Broadway were blocked off for another edition of Big Blue River Days, featuring food trucks galore, games, inflatables, and stalls for local vendors. The event's big ticket items? A barbecue contest that attracts contestants - and tasters - from all across the country, and an assortment of 169 vehicles of all vintages and colors, stretching for blocks and blocks of the cobblestone street, in the 34th annual Marysville Autofest, the longest-running event on the schedule.

A Marysville native who's now in his second year as the director of a coalition of local agencies that work to promote and support the town, Kruse said the event's goal is to help support Marysville's many local businesses while also showing off the small city to the many non-locals who come by to participate.

"Our customer is our community, that’s who we work for," he said. "And at the same time, if everyone loves living in Marysville, people are going to want to travel to Marysville. So that’s always a conversation we have: what are we doing for our locals, and then in the reverse, are we getting others to come in?"

Kruse said this year's event included more activities geared towards women and young kids, as they try to increase both the number of people that come through Marysville for the event, and how long they stay. 4,500 people participated in Big Blue River Days last year, and this year Marysville's crew of 125 volunteers was expecting at least 6,000 over the course of the weekend.

"We want you to see what we see every day and what we feel," Kruse said. "When you look in our beautiful downtown, we don’t have a lot of missing teeth: when you think about our buildings as you look down Broadway, a lot of the original buildings are here. You don’t see building/hole/building/hole, you see a downtown that’s still thriving and still active. And so that’s great when outsiders come in, they get to see the beauty of our town."

Up next for Marysville: an "old-fashioned Fourth of July" celebration in the City Park, diving into the origins of the Black Squirrel City moniker, which was established in the early 1900s.