From Earlville 🌿
Family Gathering
Country
Earlville is family gathering country. That is most of what we do here — reunions, anniversaries, milestone birthdays, baptism lunches, the kind of Saturday where thirty relatives turn up and somebody has been quietly worrying about chairs for a month.
It is about eleven miles from our lot, sixteen minutes door to door. We bring one trailer with 100 folding chairs, 20 six-foot tables and chair dollies. $250 if you come get it, $350 if we deliver it and pick it back up when you are done.
The math in a town this size is simple. Earlville has around 716 people. Borrowing tables from three neighbors and a church basement is the traditional solution, and it costs you a full day of driving on the front end plus the awkward job of returning everything on the back end. One trailer replaces all of it and nobody owes anybody a favor.
Earlville is also where the Maquoketa Valley elementary building sits, so the gatherings here skew a little younger — first communions, kids' birthdays, end-of-season team parties, and open houses for families whose older kids are up the road in Delhi. Conrad Park, Plum Creek Park, the Ruth Suckow Pool Park, a machine shed, a driveway: it does not change what we bring or what it costs.
The Fourth of July is Earlville's weekend. The car cruise, the Fireworks 5K, the car show, the tournaments that run all day. We have not been part of it yet and we would like to be. If you are hosting people around the Fourth and you need seating for a crowd, that is exactly the call we want.
Eleven miles of good road also means same-day problems are solvable. If your headcount jumps on Thursday because four more cousins decided to drive in, call us. We would rather make a second trip out than have you seating people on a tailgate.
