The Best Seats
In The House

Late last year we were contacted by an agricultural society out of the western United States. Having worked with a number of agricultural societies across North America, they had seen our work and reached out to our team to consult on a grandstand they had that was no longer code compliant. 

Known as the Sublimity Harvest Festival, this annual event takes place in beautiful Sublimity, Oregon which lies just southeast of the state’s capital city of Salem. Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, organizers were in search of the right seating solution to help local residents celebrate the festival safely.

Our team met with key stakeholders from the agricultural society and listened intently as they voiced both their wants and concerns about the prospective new seating. In addition to making an increase to overall capacity, they wanted to ensure that the new grandstand would be completely barrier free.

This, of course, pertains to not only the sight-lines afforded to spectators in the bleachers, but also to accommodating those with special needs or disabilities. In an effort to construct the best seating structure for spectators from all walks of life, ensuring everyone had access was extremely important.

They were looking to seat roughly 1,300 spectators in the new grandstand which would serve as the new home for festival goers to take in events such as tractor and truck pulls, as well as the main event of monster trucks. Our designers quickly got to work designing a beautiful 15-row, 140’ long grandstand bleacher that we believed would look amazing on the ground in Sublimity.

We were on a tight timeline as the seating was needed to be in place for the 2023 edition of the Harvest Festival which took place on September 8, 9 and 10th. Given that the preparations were kicking off in the summer, we set out to have the grandstands installed by July of 2023.

Working closely with our partners at Vibetech Specialties in Oregon, the bleacher was manufactured at our plant and shipped to Sublimity without delay. There our partners worked closely with the agricultural society to ensure that everything was correctly installed on schedule.

The installation process went off without any issues and the new grandstand was ready to roll well ahead of this year’s festival. In addition to seating for 1,270 spectators, the grandstand also featured 14 barrier-free seating spaces. Despite the bleacher being installed on a slope, our engineering team was able to dedicate that much more attention to the design process, ensuring that the bleacher was going to be a permanent fixture at the festival for the next few decades.

We’d like to thank our partners and everyone at the Sublimity Harvest Festival for the opportunity to work on this project.