News Photo by Temi Fadayomi WXTF-LP 97.9 Tuesday morning DJ Anne Sperry, works in the studio last week. The Harrisville-based radio station recently moved into a permanent home in downtown Harrisville.

HARRISVILLE — The Harrisville-based radio station WXTF-LP 97.9 now has a permanent home in Harrisville where it hopes to continue providing Alcona County residents with local music.

When it comes to the music that sees play on the station, Doug Cheek, chairman of the Alcona Music Project board of directors, describes it as “eclectic”, with nearly 15 different DJs given free rein to play the music genres that interest them.

“Each DJ gets to curate their own music in their own time slot,” Cheek said. “We want to leave it up to the people that are doing the work at the desk.

You’re talking about people sitting here right now that are great at curating different shows, with all kinds of different music, so there’s no one genre here.”

The station was founded in 2014 by Dave Morey, a retired DJ at KFOG in San Francisco, who was able to obtain a license for the station through the Harris Hill Cultural Institute. The station was run out of a studio in Morey’s Harrisville home.

Eventually, Morey moved back to California and the remaining affiliates found that the connection with the Harris Hill Cultural Institute wasn’t a good fit for the station, so they decided to form their own nonprofit corporation, the Alcona Music Project.

“We decided that it would be best to form our own non-profit corporation,” Alcona Music Project Secretary Pat Bushey said. “We were founded on cultural music and cultural things.”

The station moved around a few more additional times before members of the Alcona Music Project were eventually able to acquire a building in downtown Harrisville.

While the building was the right size, there were a few additional renovations that needed to be made so while those renovations were being taken care of, the station was run out of a makeshift studio in the back room of the building.

“It was a great effort by everybody,” Cheeks said about the transition process to the new building. “Everyone understood that this project was going to take time.”

The building was first purchased in March 2022. Last July, the station moved in some of its equipment and started resuming operations from the back room, and this May the renovations were completed and the studio moved into the main room.

Above everything else, the station and all of its members are grateful for the support they received from Harrisville residents and the greater Alcona community — from the people who first housed the station when it was just getting started to the donors and business owners who helped keep the station funded and helped with the acquisition and purchase of their current residence, to the people who tune in every day to listen to their music.

“I can’t stress enough how grateful we are,” Bushey said. “We thank those members of the community profusely. They make this happen.”

The station recently held a live music fundraiser on July 29 that hosted local musicians and will be a participant in the upcoming PorchFest, which takes place in Harrisville on Sept. 2.