The Maryland Renaissance Festival was a gamble. 50 years later, it’s a family legacy.

Jules Smith Sr. was enjoying a drink at an Irvine, California, bar when he met the man who’d help launch his family’s legacy.

More than half a century ago, Smith Sr. and developer Jim Rouse were in town for a conference about planned communities but they turned to another topic: renaissance festivals.

After co-founding a renaissance festival in Minnesota, Smith wanted to replicate its success elsewhere, but didn’t have the expansive space it would need. Intrigued, Rouse offered his nascent planned community in Howard County, envisioning an eye-catching attraction for Baltimore and Washington, D.C., commuters.

Smith’s son Jules Smith Jr. recalled Rouse’s pitch: “If you bring it to Columbia, I’ll give you the land ’til I need it.”

“So that’s how we ended up next to Merriweather Post Pavilion for eight years,” Smith Jr. said of the Maryland Renaissance Festival.

Fast forward to 2026 and the annual celebration of mead, meat and merriment is now the second-most attended renaissance fair in the country — thanks in large part to the Smiths, the Maryland family revered in industry circles because of their hands-on involvement and care.

But long before it became one of America’s most popular Renn Fests, Maryland’s fair was a soggy mess. Its debut season in 1977 was “extremely wet and challenging,” Smith Jr. said, with audiences sometimes unable to get from the parking lot to the flooded site.

His father, who died in 2018, took a positive attitude. “‘Well, I’ve lost too much money to quit,’” he’d say.

That’s far from an issue today. Now held in Annapolis, the Maryland Renaissance Festival has become a must-see event for thousands of Marylanders and visitors from around the region, with roughly 368,000 attendees expected this year “if the weather’s good,” Smith Jr. said. The event, which opens for its 50th season Saturday and runs each weekend through Oct. 25, is second only to Texas’ in terms of attendance, Smith Jr. said.

Each year, Smith and his family transform the 27-acre village into Revel Grove, a fictional playground brought to life by hundreds of spirited performers, craft vendors and smoked turkey legs the size of your head. It’s an immediate trip in a time machine: Performers and visitors alike speak with Shakespearean flair as they cheer on a knighting ceremony and archery demonstrations.

After scouting properties in Montgomery and Howard counties, the festival relocated to Annapolis in 1985 as Rouse needed the Columbia land for more development.

“One day a bulldozer came through, and we realized that was our notice,” Smith said.

Landowners, in search of a use for their sprawling Anne Arundel County property, enjoyed a visit to the Renn Fest. Soon after, the Smiths chose their site just south of Crownsville for the festival’s new home.

In the years since, the event has become such a hot ticket that its online ordering system became overwhelmed and a new one was implemented in 2026.

Others have noticed the success. Smith Jr. said the family has rebuffed offers to sell the business, which he and his five siblings own and operate. Of the dozen full-time staff, seven are members of the Smith clan — including his son, daughter, nephew and niece.

Rhonni DuBose, a renaissance festival consultant who’s worked with events across the country, including Maryland’s, said the Smith family is known within the industry as “some of the hardest-working people you’ll ever meet.”

Other festival owners often run operations and delegate tasks from an air-conditioned office, she said. But not the Smiths.

“They were always in tool belts,” DuBose said.

The family embodies sweat equity, those who work for them said.

“It’s literally everything — from painting the banisters to chopping down tree branches,” said actress Holly Gibbs, who plays Anne of Cleves.

“We all get out there and bend nails and mow and do whatever it takes to keep it going,” Smith Jr. said.

The plan, he said, is to pass the business down to the next generation.

Over the decades, the Maryland Renaissance Festival’s popularity has grown from word of mouth to a huge cult-like following.

After bringing 17,000 visitors to its inaugural season, according to “Renaissance Festivals: Merrying the Past and Present,” Maryland Renn Fest continued to grow, adding more weekends, and subsequent foot traffic, Smith Jr. said. Attendance peaked in the early 2000s, he said, before the advent of social media.

After the COVID-19 pandemic, interest in renaissance festivals in general spiked, DuBose said. That included Maryland, according to Smith Jr.

“Everyone was looking for stuff to do outside,” he said. “There’s just an influx of new people that fell in love with the place.”

The pandemic led the Maryland Renaissance Festival to reduce attendance capacity by 20%. They ended up liking the imposed limit, and its affect on a visitor’s experience, so it remains in place — which may cause the sellouts more than anything, Smith Jr. said.

Dedicated attendees like Kevin Granger often buy tickets for multiple weekends in advance. Since 2015, he’s gone at least three times per season.

The 35-year-old from Idlewylde loves the sociable scene: People lean into silly accents, dress in ornate medieval costumes and coordinate meetups on social media with friends and strangers alike.

“There’s definitely a huge community for people to randomly meet up and bond over this thing that they both love,” said Granger.

Smith believes the appeal of the festival is that it offers a 16th-century break from modern life.

“A lot of people, they miss human contact,” Smith Jr. said. “You can’t look at a screen all the time. You can’t work in a cubicle all the time.”

Each season, the Maryland Renaissance Festival tells a story centered on Henry VIII, former king of England. This year’s narrative focuses on 1540 and his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves.

Gibbs, an actor who’s performed with the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company and Spotlighters Theatre, was a Renn Fest novice when she joined Maryland’s cast in 2022.

But the Baltimore-via-New York actress quickly fell in love with the village camaraderie and the performers’ commitment to their characters. She was impressed by the attention to detail, like the pages of character notes and period history the actors received weeks in advance to better understand their roles.

“We can just sort of relax, be the character and know that we’ve done the work,” she said.

At a time when shopping is a one-click activity on our phones, Renn Fests around the country seem to care less than ever about selling crafts, said DuBose, who’s also a vendor at the Texas Renaissance Festival.

But Maryland’s event continues to offer high-quality shopping, DuBose said, along with the opportunity for consumers to meet the makers on-site and ask questions about their products.

“Every artist in the country wishes they did that show,” DuBose said of Maryland.

For the past three decades, Patti Lindquist has sold her beaded jewelry at renaissance fairs across America. Industry workers, she said, view Maryland as the pinnacle — a dream destination because of its popularity, along with the care and support vendors receive from the Smith family.

“It has the reputation of having the best crafts nationwide,” said Lindquist, who lives in the San Antonio area.

Vendors own their shops and regularly return year after year, Smith Jr. said. Spaces rarely become available, aside from occasional retirements, so the festival started a guest program for new vendors to get their foot in the door.

“The famous saying is that to be in Maryland, someone has to either die or retire,” Lindquist said.

Nikki Toro, whose family sells corn on the cob, milkshakes and other food items on site, has known the Smiths since she was a kid. Justin Smith, Jules’ brother, helps Toro with a forklift each week to store products in a large, hard-to-reach freezer.

“They’re the most genuine, caring people,” said Toro, 38. “I’ve never met a family that wants you to succeed as much as they want themselves to succeed.”

Granger said the festival can’t fully be experienced in a single visit — so the 35-year-old goes three or four times a season. “I can’t imagine cramming everything into one day,” he said.

He and his wife organize trips with friends and plan their elaborate costumes months in advance. Walking the grounds with a mug full of mead is an ideal fall day, he said.

“I just love getting a drink and then wandering around and taking it all in,” Granger said. “You can get so immersed in that place so quickly.”

Smith Jr. said when everything at the festival is clicking — from the weather and food to the commitment of performers and the joy of attendees — there’s a magic in the air that’s infectious. It’s why he’s confident in the renaissance fair’s future.

“In a lot of ways, we’re institutionalized. People come here over and over,” Smith Jr. said. “Now it’s generations within families that have come here. The grandparents are bringing grandkids.”