By Colleen Nelson
This photograph, saved from the September 15, 1995 edition of the Observer Reporter shows longtime Aleppo Grange member Joe McCracken and neighbor Sarah Morris “makin’ butter” in a copper kettle over an open fire. When done, the apple butter was jarred up and taken to Ryerson Station State Park for the second annual Arts in the Park Heritage Festival. Grangers were there before dawn on September 23, to light another fire and have a second batch bubbling before the crowds arrived to watch, schmooze and do some stirring themselves. By lunchtime every jar was sold, it’s that good. (I guess I can tell you now – our secret ingredient was a bag of red-hot cinnamon candy!) The straw hat and sunbonnet Joe and Sarah are wearing are a nod to the past for this 1995 photograph, but this is really how apple butter has been made since pioneer days – gallons of peeled and chopped apples, hours of stirring, the smell of wood smoke, the glow of Autumn all around.
When I became a VISTA volunteer in 1990, I joined Aleppo Grange to have a better connection with the community and its historic roots. My neighbors were members and I was intrigued by its history of helping farmers survive changing times. When I moved here in the 1970s and started entering my art in the Greene County Fair, it was Helen Dinsmore of Harveys Grange who signed me in. You should join the grange, she told me and I took that as an open invitation.
Having a heritage festival at our state park was a community builder that worked, thanks to Community Action, the grange, nearby churches, local artists, reenactors, musicians, nature loving neighbors and new park manager Jeff Anna who threw himself into the park’s fall festival that continues to this day under manager Alan Johnson.
Aleppo Grange has its own rich heritage – it organized in the 1950s and meetings were held upstairs in a school turned store turned garage in McCracken. It then moved to another old store in Ryerson Station in the 1960s and when I joined, old timers like Joe McCracken, Josephine Bristor, Margaret Moninger and Margaret Jacobs were still around to tell stories that I was able to share through newspaper articles and save as happy memories. Grangers love their living heritage – members still remembered the recipe for the chicken salad sandwiches that Aleppo Grange once served to rave reviews at the Jacktown Fair. It begins: “Go to Ohio and buy a crate of chickens…”
I still have the recipe for ammonia cookies that I got from Margaret Jacobs, then 90 some years old, who got it from her grandmother who came to the county in a covered wagon. When we decided to make and sell them at the Greene County Historical Society Harvest Festival one year, I was delighted to find that McCrackens Pharmacy still carried lemon oil and ammonia and would even crush the crystals for me. (Note to the uninitiated – they’re delicious!)
Rooting through my own stash of personal history, I found this photo and the last Subordinate Lecturer’s Scrapbook that I helped make in 2010, the year Aleppo Grange joined up with Harveys Grange to become Harveys-Aleppo Grange. Ryerson Station was about to be undermined by CONSOL Energy and we were taking our settlement money and members to Graysville to join forces with another bunch of neighbors willing to work for the common good, with “faith, hope, charity and fidelity.”
It was sweet going through the scrapbook, remembering sorting a gazillion bags of clothes for our Food Pantry Day Quarter Store with Mae Richardson, cleaning the fire blackened copper kettle, using pounds of salt, with Walter McDowell, making cabbage and noodles for how many festivals with Bill Hewitt, Lorraine Keenan, Tom and Cherry Ellsworth, Nellie Tustin….
Our last order of business as Aleppo Grange was to help get the Friends of Ryerson group started to give neighbors a way to fundraise and volunteer for special events and improvements at the park. Then we headed for Graysville and joined forces with Harveys Grange.
I remember when I told Helen Dinsmore that I’d taken her advice and joined the grange. She kind of sniffed and said “You joined the wrong one!”
I have a feeling she’d be pretty pleased with the way things turned out.