Walk the courthouse square in Jasper on a Saturday afternoon in late October and you'll see the same setup that's been going up around Betsy Pack Drive for a decade now: folding tables, a petting zoo pen, a stage for whoever's playing that year, and enough small kids in costume to make the sidewalk hard to navigate by dusk. Ask most of them what the event is called and they'll say the Jamboree, or maybe the pumpkin thing. Ask the town's Facebook page or the flyer taped to the library door and you'll get the full name: the Joshua J. Jennings Jack-O-Lantern Jamboree.
Most people who've moved to Jasper in the last few years have never heard of Joshua Jennings. That's not an oversight. It's the whole point of how the town decided to remember him.
A Name Added Later, on Purpose
The Jamboree didn't start as a memorial. The Jasper Lions Club and the town government created it in 2016 as a straightforward community event, a place for trick-or-treating and games that didn't require driving to Chattanooga. Jennings, a Jasper alderman at the time, helped build it alongside the Lions Club.
He died in 2019. Rather than let the event quietly keep its generic name, the town and the Lions Club renamed it after him, and they've kept doing something more deliberate than hanging a plaque: they keep saying, in public, that they're trying to live up to what he started. The Marion Tribune quotes the Town of Jasper's own description of the event on its Facebook page: "Every year we strive to make Josh's dream come true. We hope he would be so proud of how much this event continues to grow."
That's an unusual thing for a small-town Halloween party to carry. Most civic memorials are static, a street sign, a bench, a bronze marker that people walk past without reading. Jasper picked the opposite model. The tribute to Jennings isn't a fixed object. It's an annual obligation that has to be re-earned every October, with volunteers, booth applications, and a petting zoo that has to be booked again each year. If the town ever let the Jamboree get smaller or stopped showing up for it, the memorial itself would shrink. Continuing to grow it is the point.
The Square That Holds All of It
The reason the Jamboree happens where it happens isn't incidental either. Jasper's courthouse square, where U.S. 72 and TN-150 meet, has been the county's civic center since 1819, and the current courthouse building dates to 1925, rebuilt after a fire in 1922 destroyed the previous one along with decades of county records. It was remodeled again in 1986 after a second fire. A block or so away, the Olive Branch Masonic Lodge, built in 1857, is the oldest fraternal hall in the county and still serves its original purpose on the same downtown streetscape.
The Sequatchie Valley National Scenic Byway runs directly through this stretch of downtown, which means the square that hosts trick-or-treating every October is also the same corridor that draws visitors driving the byway for the valley views. It's a working square, not a preserved one. That distinction matters for how the Jamboree functions: it isn't staged in a park set aside for events. It happens in the actual center of town, on the same ground as the courthouse.
Four Dates on Jasper’s Civic Calendar
The Jamboree isn't a standalone tradition. It's one of four fixed points on Jasper's civic calendar:
- The Easter Egg Extravaganza, held in early spring
- The Fourth of July Big Boom at Jasper City Park
- The Jack-O-Lantern Jamboree on the courthouse square in October
- Christmas in a Small Town, which pairs the town's Christmas parade with a lighted downtown and the seasonal Polar Paradise ice rink in December
The Marion County Fair used to be a fifth anchor, drawing from every community in the valley to the fairgrounds behind the Dairy Queen. It's no longer held. What's left is a tighter, more concentrated rhythm: four events a year, all tied to Jasper's civic spaces, each one requiring the town to show up again rather than simply maintain something already built. The Jamboree fits that pattern exactly. It isn't an outlier tradition invented for Halloween. It's how Jasper does civic memory generally, in recurring effort rather than permanent fixtures.
What Saturday Looks Like This Year
This year's Jamboree falls on Saturday, October 24, 2026. In recent years the event has run from 4 to 8 p.m. around the downtown square, with trick-or-treating, a petting zoo, games, food vendors, and a costume contest with prizes for the best entries. It's free to attend, and only the food is sold.
The same weekend typically includes the Jack-O-Lantern Jamboree 5K, a run/walk that's been timed by the Chattanooga Track Club since at least 2023, giving the day a second draw for anyone who'd rather start the morning on Betsy Pack Drive with a race bib instead of a costume.
If you want booth space or have questions about this year's event, the Town of Jasper has kept the same contact info posted in past years: 423-942-3810, or by email to maryallenadams.jaspertn.gov. It's a small enough operation that the town clerk's office is still the first call, not a marketing department or an events contractor. That's consistent with everything else about how the Jamboree runs: a Lions Club project, a town government that answers its own phone, and a community that keeps showing up for its annual gatherings, wherever they take place, for longer than most of the people setting up tables this year have lived in Jasper.
The name on the banner isn't there to be read once and forgotten. It's there because the town decided the way to keep Josh Jennings' work alive was to keep doing the work itself, every October, on the same ground as the courthouse.
If you're spending more time in Jasper this fall and want a closer look at what makes this stretch of the Sequatchie Valley tick beyond the courthouse square, Garrett Cox knows the town's rhythms as well as its real estate, and he's always glad to talk through what makes a specific street or a specific season here worth knowing.
