Tipp City Holds 4th of July Celebration
Tipp City’s 4th of July Celebration
STAFF REPORT
Tipp City’s annual July 4 celebration returned to Kyle Park on July 4, featuring food trucks and fireworks. The festivities kicked off at 7 p.m. with food trucks at the park. The fireworks were scheduled to begin at 10 p.m.
Also held downtown on the corner of Main and Second Streets was the Tipp Community Night 1st Friday Music Series for July. This concurrence of events evoked a nostalgic feeling of yesteryear when band concerts and fireworks on the 4th were a commonplace celebration in communities all across America. The evening of free music featured guitarist/vocalist Eli, followed by the Kim Kelly Orchestra and vocalist Felita LaRock.
Hometown talent “Eli” will open the evening with his extensive repertoire of easy listening music.
Kim Kelly Orchestra is a July first Friday tradition. They have been a crowd favorite returning year after year, providing polished material in a variety of styles from the Big Band era of “swing” to classic and contemporary rock. The band also features vocalist Felita LaRock, former lead singer with the USAF Band of Flight at WPAFB and the US Band of the Pacific-Japan.
Why is July 4 celebrated with fireworks?
As it turns out, setting off mini-explosions of all shapes and colors (but particularly red, white and blue) on July 4 goes back almost as far as American independence itself.
John Adams Predicts Celebrations
On July 1, delegates of the Continental Congress were in Philadelphia, debating over whether the 13 original colonies should declare their independence from Britain’s Parliament as well as King George III himself.
That night, news arrived that British ships had sailed into New York Harbor, posing an immediate threat to the Continental troops under the command of George Washington. On July 2, delegates from 12 colonies voted in favor of independence (New York would follow suit on July 9), and the motion carried. On July 3, even as Congress revised a draft of the declaration composed by Thomas Jefferson, an excited John Adams took up his pen to write to his wife, Abigail.
“The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America,” Adams wrote. “I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival…It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”
Adams was off by a couple of days
First Organized Celebration Held on July 4, 1777
On July 4, after making a total of 86 changes to Jefferson’s draft, Congress officially adopted the Declaration of Independence, though most of the delegates didn’t even sign the document until August 2. Some impromptu celebrations greeted the declaration’s first public readings on July 8, in front of local militia troops in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, but the first organized celebration of Independence Day would take place in Philadelphia on July 4, 1777.
After each ship’s cannon fired a 13-gun salute (in honor of the 13 colonies), the festivities continued, including an elegant dinner, a military demonstration, and a performance by a Hessian band. “The evening was closed with the ringing of bells,” the Evening Post reported, “and at night there was a grand exhibition of fireworks (which began and concluded with thirteen rockets) on the Commons, and the city was beautifully illuminated.”
Adams’s hometown of Boston saw its own fireworks display that July 4th, as Colonel Thomas Crafts of the Sons of Liberty took the opportunity to set off fireworks and shells over Boston Common. In the years to come, various cities continued the tradition of celebrating independence, holding picnics, parades, speeches, and fireworks displays for the occasion, though Boston was the first to designate July 4 an official holiday (in 1783).
War of 1812 Inspires Broader Celebrations With Fireworks
By the time Independence Day celebrations gained momentum after the War of 1812, fireworks were even more widely available. They would become an increasingly important part of the festivities in the years to come, as public safety concerns led to the gradual phasing out of cannon and gunfire from celebrations.
In 1870, Congress established Independence Day as an official holiday. By 1898, a reporter would note that “the American Fourth of July is the greatest event the maker of firecrackers knows,” historian James Heintze recorded in The Fourth of July Encyclopedia.
Americans spend somewhere around $1 billion on fireworks each July 4, allowing for a nationwide celebration of independence that John Adams would surely have appreciated.
(Photos by Tommy Enslen)
