Family

Apple Butter Festival

The family tradition returns after 2-year hiatus

One of the largest and longest running fall festivals in West Virginia, the 47th annual Apple Butter Festival in historic Berkeley Springs will return on Oct. 8 and 9.

After being cancelled for two years due to the pandemic, festival organizers are excited to bring the festival back.

A nostalgic hometown parade with the theme All Together Now kicks off the festivities on Saturday morning at 9 a.m. followed by two days of familyfriendly games and contests, music, country food, arcade games, fine arts and local crafts. The undisputed star of the festival remains the spicy apple butter being stirred in giant copper kettles in the Square, and Greenwood Community Center is taking center stage in this crucial effort that creates lifelong memories for so many festivalgoers. Folks can take a stir at the kettles, experience the mouthwatering aroma and carry off fresh-made apple butter.

Grand marshal for the 2022 parade is powerhouse Empire Cheer. In five years, this local group has gone from one team practicing in a church to five teams with over 60 first place banners and 18 national titles in their own practice facility. They will perform in the parade and also at the Berkeley Springs State Park bandstand Saturday afternoon.

The Craft Beer Garden will offer samples from local breweries and distributors, while acoustic bluegrass outfit All Grassed Up performs there both days. Axe Hole axe throwing will be held in the beer garden this year.

The Festival Food Court will offer barbecue, funnel cakes, corn dogs and fried Oreos, as well as trucks serving tacos, crab cakes and Greek foods.

Saturday’s music opens with Devil In The Hills Band, a groovy gumbo of country, swing, blues, rock and swamp boogie with Mary Hott & Billy Thompson. Saturday afternoon features the Carpenter Ants with their old-time rhythm and blues, gospel and country funk sound. The Ants are one of West Virginia’s longest lasting bands, fine musicians and frequent performers on the internationally renowned Mountain Stage radio show. Bluegrass group Marv Ashby and High Octane will perform on Sunday.

Family-friendly games draw crowds to watch gentlemen strut their faces as their beards are judged for length, softness and style; amateurs calling hogs; rubber ducks racing down the town’s natural springs; and pairs of contestants tossing raw eggs.

The event also has an apple bake contest, which will be judged by Netflix “Is it Cake?” and “Halloween Wars” Food Network star Steven Weiss, associate dean of culinary arts and hospitality at Blue Ridge Community and Technical College.

West Virginia wines are featured vendors, along with local produce, honey, home preserves and apple butter. More than 100 artists and craftspeople will display and sell their work in the streets, local shops and at the Ice House.

There is no admission fee. Free parking at the outskirts of town with a trolley shuttle is available, along with modestly priced parking lots downtown run by civic groups.

For more information, call 304-2583738, or visit berkeleyspringschamber. com/apple-butter-festival.

Courtesy photo

Stir some apple butter at the festival this year.

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(MUSEUM from 8) mebers, only about 5% of it is currently on display to the public due to a lack of exhibition space.

Castle said that renovating the existing museum space and employing new exhibition technologies will make it possible to display a larger portion of the garment collection in the relative near-term. But in order to realize the goal of displaying all the archived artifacts, including its textiles, the museum will need to consider expanding beyond its current location, a step that Castle says is far in the future.

Meanwhile, during the early stages of White’s historical garment care plan, she and Castle are enjoying exploring the collection and contemplating what the individual pieces reveal about Brunswick’s history.

Castle feels particularly drawn to the collection’s baseball uniforms because of his personal family connection to the town’s athletic history. He said the sport became more than a mere pastime for the town. Brunswick served as the main train yard of the B&O Railroad from 1890 through the 1960s, and the railroad saw baseball as a vital component of their operations.

“It was the most popular sport of the time, and the railroad wanted to keep their workers out of trouble and also physically fit, so they sponsored adult baseball leagues,” he said. “The railroad actually provided land and a stadium for multiple baseball fields.”

White’s favorites in the collection are the everyday clothes worn by townspeople of the late-Victorian and early Edwardian period. Because most of the town was built during this time and has changed little since then, White feels especially connected to the town’s history when looking at the clothes from that time.

“I have a particular love of mourning dresses, the wedding dresses, things that sort of tell their own story,” she mused. “There were very specific customs for how you wore them and how you were not supposed to wear them.”

Castle and White both emphasized that the collection encapsulates the story of the slow American shift from wearing custom handmade garments meant to last a lifetime to regularly buying new clothes to keep up with the latest fashions.

White said the earlier pieces of the collection reveal a high level of quality, “because it had to last.” But as Brunswick became firmly connected by rail to big costal cities like Baltimore and New York, the town became increasingly fashionconscious, Castle added, and soon hosted several retailers who sold off-therack fashions.

“The main place you shopped was a place called Kaplon’s Department store. And Fanny Kaplon, many times a year, would actually travel to New York City to see what the latest fashions were,” Castle said. “A favorite story of a lot of our locals is that during Christmas, the Kaplons would decorate the store windows with everything you needed for the holiday season, and then all of the townspeople would gather in front of the window, and [the store] would do a big reveal welcoming in the holiday season.”

One of the museum’s mandates is to serve as a repository for those types of community stories, and displaying clothing artifacts can often spark those still-living memories in local visitors.

“It is really rewarding to be in the museum when we have things on display and people come in and recognize an artifact that belonged to their relative,” he said. “People come in and say, ‘That was my great-grandfather or that was my uncle or great-uncle,’ and it’s kind of rewarding to be there when they make that connection at that moment.”

Volunteer curator Kelly White displays details on a historical black wedding dress at the Brunswick Heritage Museum on Monday. The museum received a grant for the care and inventory of historical garments.

Staff photo by Katina Zentz

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