Party In The Park Music - at the Pavillion

 About 10 years ago, our Mayor John Donnellon and some friends came up with the idea of let’s try and have music in our own park like other neighboring communities were doing on their city streets and Parks. With some of us having experience with previous background of being involved with bars and booking bands, n we figured we can get some bands to come play and see what happens. So, in May of 2016 we had our first band, "String Theory" that played under our upper shelter and it took off.  A great, great experience we started selling hotdogs, hamburgers, brats, metts, and some concessions, hoping to make a couple dollars for the park and that has happened for over the past almost 10 years. We’ve been able to have music in their park for free to residents and visitors from around.  Going forward each year.  We were shooting to at least break even and there was a few times that we did not make enough to break even but we kept at it. No matter what we thought this is a great service for our community. Eventually, we were able to start getting better bands and being able to buy more food and drinks and beverages and pay for that stuff out of the event we made so we were happy as a group of volunteers.

 We’ve tried to do about 8 a year and the idea has taken off and we are having so much fun that thousands of people have come to enjoy music in our park.  Even during Covid, we were able to offer people a night out, place to sit and socially distance and enjoy free music. We only had one event canceled during Covid. It would’ve been the weekend that we would have held our annual festival that we had to cancel. We were going to try and do back to back Friday and Saturday bands with Remains and Cassette junkies and that just didn’t happen. 

 However, moving forward, we have been able to offer a wide diverse of bands from country rock, jazz, and all the wild having a space for people to chill get together meet their neighbors get to meet strangers. People have traveled for hours to get here from Springboro, Ohio. Dry Ridge down in Kentucky even from Columbus, Indiana, just to enjoy our free concerts in the park.

We’ve kept us a family friendly atmosphere where we bring your own chairs and allowed you to grab a picnic table and even bring the dogs and blankets and we are continuing that tradition. About four years ago we looked into idea of what can we do to make it better, we were outgrowing the shelter and started thinking Could we build a music pavilion stage. We also had contributed the fact we spend a lot on a stage each year for our annual festival.  Well we are thankfully lucky to have a wonderful city administrator Dr. William Jetter who had a study conducted to what could improve Chamberlin Park and he found us a couple grants and we are proud that in 2025 to have a beautiful facility in the middle of our park to host our music and other events going forward making Deer Park a really great place to live play and work.