Winstock, the first major music festival of the summer, happens in Winsted in early June each year. Dubbed Minnesota’s best country music camping vacation, the Winstock Grounds, located near the Winsted Airport, become a small community of its own for several days to kick off the summer.

Many national country music artists perform at Winstock each year, along with up-and-coming national and regional country music groups who are featured on a separate emerging artists’ stage in between acts on Winstock’s main stage.

The 19th annual Winstock Country Music Festival will take place Friday and Saturday, June 8-9, 2012 at the Winstock grounds. This year’s Winstock features headliners Martina McBride and Blake Shelton, along with American icon Willie Nelson, Gary Allan, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Uncle Kracker, among others.

Around 15,000 people attend the festival each day. Campsites surround the festival area and accommodate the large number of music lovers.

Since the first year Winstock was started in 1994, the festival has continued to grow in both the number of fans and the quality of the artists.

Winstock is a fundraising event for Holy Trinity Catholic School in Winsted and is staffed by hundreds of volunteers from the school and the community.

In 1993, Dick Langenfeld and Tom Ollig, two of the original Winstock Committee members, decided after a Holy Trinity School budget meeting, that a country music festival might be able to bring in additional funds to help support the Catholic school.

The first Winstock Country Music Festival was June 24 and 25, 1994, at the Winsted Airport. It drew a crowd of 1,200 people, and there were 97 campsites.

Ollig, chairman of the first Winstock committee, said in a Winsted-Lester Prairie Journal interview in June 1994, that “starting a music festival was a lot more work than the committee had imagined.”

Ollig outlined things like permitting and licensing required by the Winsted Airport Commission, the City of Winsted, and McLeod County before the event could even take place.

Nineteen years later, entertainers now seem to welcome the chance to perform at Winstock because of the hospitality provided by the committee.

“According to our booking agent, Gary Marx, we are getting to be quite well-known down in Nashville,” Winstock committee member Judy Langenfeld said, “because of the way we treat the entertainers when they are up here, which is making his job easier.”

Some of the entertainers who have returned have told the committee that they cannot wait for the homemade soup or homemade pickles provided by the caterers.

In the last few years, the Winstock stage has seen the likes of Jason Aldean, Alan Jackson, Dierks Bentley, Brooks and Dunn, Lady Antebellum, LeAnn Rimes, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Charlie Daniels, Reba McEntire, Trace Adkins, Terri Clark, Martina McBride, George Jones, Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, and Miranda Lambert, just to name a few.

Tickets and more information about the festival are available by calling 888-946-7865, or at Winstock’s web site at www.winstockfestival.com.