It’s Harvest Festival 1980 at the Greene County Historical Society Museum and the reenactment being demonstrated here is apple pressing, the good old-fashioned way. The press is an antique with two barrels – one for grinding and one for pressing, and these folks have been at it all day, swatting yellow jackets and bees, filling jugs with cider from the apples they’ve gathered and selling it for fifty cents a cup with a homemade ginger snap thrown in for good measure. They are my friends and neighbors who pooled their money to buy the press to make cider from the trees they planted and from the old orchards they found on their farms after moving here in the early 1970s.
I’ve always loved this photo my friend Wendy Saul developed at home in her darkroom on Moonlight Drive, New Freeport. It captures a great moment we all shared, set against the backdrop of the Harvest Festival on a beautiful shirtsleeve October afternoon.
That’s Wendy on the left, pregnant with second son Sam, “So it has to be 1980!” she exclaims as we look through stacks of albums, the kind that sandwiches memories between sticky sheets of paper and cellophane. I’m not in the picture – I’m set up over by old Waynie in the open door of the barn, selling my hand screened W&W Railroad shirts to guys in overalls who have the old engine with fire in its belly throwing great gobs of sooty steam high in the air with every puff. To my dismay soot falls on the shirts but that doesn’t bother those guys – they buy them all.
Of course there’s reenactors fighting battles and firing the hand built cannon that is the heart and soul of Knap’s Battery. My memory is fuzzy when it comes to who was battling whom that day, but my neighbor Mary Childs has it memorized. She was there in the beginning when “they gave me $200 to put on a festival. Everything was inside.” It featured dulcimer playing, wool spinning and every room was furnished with donated family heirlooms and artifacts, she tells me on the phone when I reach her at her home on Grinnage Run. As assistant curator, “I had so much to learn. But I was from Lancaster County and we really relish our history. I took classes and learned that every display should tell a story.” After that first festival, board member Joe Cook suggested having Civil War skirmishes and Knap‘s Battery became part of the act.
The year the festival added Civil War skirmishes, “There was not a place left to park.”
Once outside the museum walls, the festival grew by leaps and historic bounds, with mock battles, historic encampments of Joe Cook’s Cresap’s Rifle Company and Knap’s Battery, Terry Cole’s family making apple butter and his mom bringing homemade bread. Artisans as educators with their looms, foot pedal lathes and potters wheels were joined by blacksmiths, corn grinders and apple pressers and the smell of gunpowder in the air was there to stay.
Mary remembers where the log cabins behind the museum came from – one was donated from the Jesse Morris farm on Norman Hollow Road, Center Twp. by Mrs. Ealy and the other was from West Virginia, donated by Dr. Grover Phillippi in honor of his son. Dr. Phillippi also paid for the cabins’ reconstruction and at Mary’s suggestion a porch between them was added to give reenactors some elbow room. Terry Cole remembers the cabins were already erected when he came to build the fireplace scavenged from a cabin “in a hollow outside of Waynesburg on Apple Hill Road. Tom Headlee picked up the stones.”
Tom Headlee tells me that he and his dad loaded the chimney stones and hauled the cabins too. It was neighbors helping neighbors get the job done in time for the Bicentennial and Joe Cook was doing his part in more ways than one.
As a teacher at Central Greene High School, he and his students were busy hooking up classrooms with the early electronics that would lead to the digital age. Using big first generation video cameras he and his students were able to go into the field – and overgrown hollows – to document log cabins around the county, along with researching their land deeds in the courthouse and writing reports on them. When Terry Cole gave Joe a slice of a white oak that dated back to 1640, his students counted the rings and marked the growth years when the Declaration of Independence, the War of 1812 and other historic events happened. The school also published “Backroads” in 1977, a collection of stories that students wrote after interviewing county notables like John O’Hara and old timers who remembered everything from the first freight train to Harry McNeeley’s last team of horses, along with how to spin rope, split rail fences, press apples and hunt squirrels.
(I’m not giving Joe back his copy until I’ve read every story. They’re fabulous!)
Thanks to all this prep work for the Bicentennial, local history across America was documented, reenacted, recovered and remembered. And in Greene County, the Harvest Festival is the place to go if you want to see this history come alive.