Sometimes the rain can really be a wet blanket.

Wind gusts of up to 40 miles per hour and scattered rain sent vendors and visitors scurrying for cover during Saturday’s Black River Fall Fest.

The festival, billed as a celebration of the incoming fall weather, was booked solid with more than 100 tents of vendors, and an antique car show was held from 10 a.m. until around 1 p.m. on Public Square and Court Street.

“The downtown Business Association is going to have everybody’s deposits for this year’s show,” said the fest’s event’s coordinator Dale L. Clark. “We’ll be giving them credit for next year’s show. That’s not what most shows do.”

He said the event was rain and shine, but he understood why there were far fewer than last year’s thousands of visitors at the event.

“Mother Nature happened to get the worst of us,” he said.

Warnings of severe thunderstorms capable of producing hail or tornadoes popped up on www.weather.com. Buffalo National Weather Service Meteorologist Jim A. Mitchell said there was not much rain measured at nearby Watertown International Airport. By 3 p.m., only 0.18 inches had been measured. The wind, however, created some damage through the area. Reports of fallen trees and power lines in Watertown and Croghan made it all the way to Buffalo.

“We had no tornadoes,” Mr. Mitchell said. “We just moved a warning out of Lewis County.”

Because the Lowville Cream Cheese Festival is next week, the fall festival cannot be rescheduled. He said many of the vendors for his event, some from as far away as Albany and Rochester, will not be available in the next few weeks.

One of these vendors, Adirondack Fudge, was still braving the wind gusts around 11:30 a.m. She said she had gotten decent business up until then and was planning to stay as long as possible.

“It’s not a washout yet,” Mary A. Whitman, North Creek, said. “I figured we’d give it a shot. It took us four hours to get here.”

Maria M. Kenp, Watertown, came to the fest with her friends just for something to do for the day. After battling the rain for 45 minutes, she was ready to leave.

“It was still nice when we got here,” she said. “Everything looks like it was closing up.”

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