Cromwell township

The Festival That Came to Agape Farm

For most of forty years a field in Cromwell township filled up every June with tens of thousands of people and a stage. Creation began in 1979, and not here: the festival's own history opens with “1979, what a year to start a festival in Lancaster, PA,” remembering a fuel crisis so bad that only a fifth of Pennsylvania's filling stations had petrol that weekend. It came to this county five years later. Creation '84, held on 21, 22 and 23 June, was in the organisers' words “the first Creation Festival to be held at the Agape Campground” — the Board of Jesus Ministries had heard the festival needed a larger site and offered the rental of Agape Farm.

It did leave once. After a year at Hersheypark in 1996 the campers said on their surveys that they wanted to go home to Agape, “so, it was back to Shirleysburg we went.”

The festival's website advertised Creation Festival 2023, and then stopped. Snapshots after August 2023 return nothing, and by 2025 the address was serving a hosting placeholder. That is what the record shows; it is not the same as a published announcement, and this page does not claim one.

What the fact check changed. Every quoted phrase is from the festival's own history page as archived in November 2012. The venue was placed by coordinates rather than by the postal town: the Agape buildings sit at 40.280, -77.922, which the Census geocoder returns as Huntingdon County, Cromwell township, unincorporated — near Shirleysburg, not in the borough. ⚠ The end of the festival is deliberately left as what the archive shows rather than stated as a fact: a website going quiet is evidence about a website.

Sources

Checked 2026-09-01 · Archived primary source

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