Committee Co-Chair Larry Flannery won’t know until the last bill has been paid if Hog Days 2025 was another record setting festival, but it’s looking good, he said.

“I deposited $94,000 into the bank. Last year, it was $84,000,” he said.

Of course, approximately $15,000 of that can be attributed to raising sandwich prices by a dollar, he said, a move the committee felt was necessary since the cost of several items like the meat, charcoal and paper products, had gone up.

But even with the sandwich price increase, Flannery said the check they received this year from CDAC Amusements was to the penny the same amount they received in 2024, a truly record setting Hog Days. And Flannery is betting that had the rain stayed away on Friday evening, the amount would have beaten last year’s carnival sales.

It was the mild weather that Flannery is crediting for the crowds that came out to celebrate that weekend. For the most part the weekend was sunny with temperatures in the 70s.

“The weather was so perfect,” he said.

Flannery said that sort of weather was more reminiscent of Hog Days when he was a child when the Labor Day weekend was the demarcation between summer and fall.

“I noticed this year, the festival reminded me of when I was a little kid,” adding that right after the weekend, the temperatures used to drop and being outdoors required a coat.

Flannery said the mood of festival goers was also good, and while people still registered some complaints they were far fewer than other years, and even the Kewanee Police Department, he said, reported that there were a smaller number of calls to field over the weekend.

“There were not a lot of complaints, and no major complaints,” said Flannery.

Success, Flannery said, will be measured by how much money is in the bank after all of the bills have been paid. Those bills are still rolling in. But still, Flannery counts this Hog Days as one for the books.

“Obviously, it went quite well,” he said.