Happy Heron
Over the past three decades, what started as a little outdoor concert venue in Chautauqua County has become something much grander: The Heron Farm and Event Center, a multi-faceted property combining arts, recreation and agriculture.
The evolution of The Heron comes directly from the passion and ingenuity of owners Julie and Steve Rockcastle. It started with a passion for music in 1992, when Julie helped to found the annual Great Blue Heron Music Festival. The homegrown festival began with a handful of bands and a few hundred attendees. Today, it attracts thousands of people and books up-and-coming national acts. Two acts that have gone on to much greater success after getting what the Rockcastles call the “Heron Bump” are the Avett Brothers and Lake Street Dive.
More recently, Steve’s green thumb and a bit of ingenuity have been instrumental to the development of the property’s Green Heron Growers, as a producer of premium organic chickens, grass-fed beef and shiitake mushrooms.
Yes, shiitake mushrooms. While they may have had their heyday back in the ’90s, the now-humble fungi have played a big role in what The Heron has become. At one edition of the Great Blue Heron festival several years back, Steve’s son was home from school at Cornell University, where he had joined the Cornell Mushroom Club. He and a friend were walking around the festival grounds when they stumbled upon the ideal spot for growing shiitakes.
“They walked into this evergreen forest area, and my son stopped in his tracks and said, ‘Oh! This spot would be awesome for growing shiitake mushrooms,’” Steve says. “That was an area we weren’t using for camping and whatnot, so I said, ‘Why not?’
“We found that shiitake mushrooms really opened up the markets for us,” he adds. “We were calling farmers’ markets up in Buffalo and the first thing we heard was that we needed to go through a long application process and someone needed to come down to check out our farm. Then, they asked what we were offering and we told them shiitake mushrooms. There was a little pause, and then they said, ‘Can you start next week?’”
Before Julie's parents bought the property in the '70s, The Heron had been a working farm, then a campground. It would host campers during the Great Blue Heron festivals but it had never truly returned to being a full-on camping destination. That changed during the Covid-19 pandemic. The festival was shut down by Covid mandates in 2020. During that time, many of us looked at camping as a way to unwind while remaining socially distanced.
Seeing this development and with the festival canceled, Steve and Julie decided to pivot and convert The Heron into a campground.
“We didn’t really promote the campsite because we were mostly focused on staging events,” Julie says.
“So, we went around the grounds and figured out how many sites we could set up for camping, based on the sites people had been using for years,” Steve adds. “We came up with between 60 and 70 campsites.”
Those campsites are still available today, along with a yurt and rustic cabin available through Airbnb. While the sites don’t have running water, the Rockcastles are currently crowdfunding an eco-friendly public bathhouse that will feature toilets, showers and a laundry room.
The new and planned amenities aren’t just for festivalgoers and weekend campers these days. With society opening up as the pandemic evolves, The Heron has increasingly been hosting a wide range of holistic events. During the warm-weather months, there are Nature & Wellness Weekends, which are family-friendly events meant to promote health and reconnect people with nature. In July, the Great Rhythm Revival featured music and arts workshops over an entire weekend. There are also regular foraging and mindfulness events.
For people around Buffalo to experience a taste of The Heron, there’s no need to head to Chautauqua County. Green Heron Growers can be found weekly at the farmers’ markets in Williamsville and Fredonia. On one of my recent trips to see Julie and Steve in Williamsville, I picked up some shiitakes that I used to make a classic mushroom tapenade. The mushrooms packed a deep, earthy umami flavor that elevated my tapenade to something fresh, natural and decadent. It was the quality of these mushrooms that compelled that me to look deeper. While The Heron is mostly known for hosting live music, based on my experience, it should increasingly be appreciated for producing delicious food.
With a legit agricultural operation and a cornucopia of arts and wellness programming, The Heron has become so much more than a music festival destination. So, has The Heron become a 24-7-365 grind for Julie and Steve?
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Julie says with a laugh when asked.
“We like our winters off,” Steve adds.
