Kittrell, TN – The SPECIAL COLLECTIONS SECTION at Middle Tennessee State University’s James E. Walker Library is preserving memorabilia covering the 57-year history of the Kittrell 4-H Dancers, Rutherford County Square Dancers and Cripple Creek Cloggers. They have served as goodwill ambassadors locally as well as around the world.
Students and staff from the library have been gathering 57-years of memorabilia from his home as well as storage facilities throughout the area.
Steve Cates, the group’s founder and forever mentor, explained that this past Friday (7/6/2024) the university did its third major haul from a storage building at his home.
“It includes all paperwork, flags, plaques, plates, proclamations, banners, pins, trophies, pictures, VHS tapes, 45 rpm records, 33 rpm records, and mementos of all kinds from our travels and Folkfests—it all will be preserved.”
Cates said, “It all started back in 1967 as a way to keep the kids entertained at 4-H Camp Woodlee in Warren County. The seventh grade through high school students had been studying folk games and folk dancing, and already enjoyed that. That 4-H group became our first square dance troupe with their mothers actually sewing the costumes.”
Eleven years later, those Appalachian style dancers performed their first International Festival in San Juan, Puerto Rico. From that point, the next forty-seven years has seen the Cripple Creek Cloggers spreading Middle Tennessee’s goodwill to Canada, Mexico, Belize, Curacao, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Taiwan, Thailand and most countries in Western, Central and Eastern Europe, as well as places that no longer exist, like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Imagine the memorabilia that has been collected from these places.
MTSU’s James E. Walker Library will house and preserve items that make-up the tangible parts of the group’s worldwide legacy, along with videos of performances throughout the world. In addition to the memorabilia taken from the organization’s storage buildings, collections at both the Rutherford County Archives as well as the Gore Research Center have been taken to the MTSU library.
Cates was glowing as he noted, “I cannot express how elated I feel about this. Susan Martin, with Special Collections, says this is the single biggest collection of all they have. I am especially glad I have lived to see it done.”
It is obvious that Steve Cates passion continues to be this community and the Cripple Creek Cloggers. He concluded with news that the International Folkfest will take place here June 8-15, 2024.
The 83-year-old community leader concluded, “Our troupe just returned from representing the U.S. in folkloric festivals in the Czech Republic. This is the first major trip without me and it was managed beautifully! What a feeling of freedom and pride I have!”
