LUCAS – Cannonfire shook the grounds of Malabar Farm, rustling the autumn leaves. Reenactors shot muskets, wove yarn and cooked ham and beans in a coal black pot hanging over the fire.
The annual Heritage Days Festival is a celebration of past innovations and the way of life in rural America.
The two-day event features an 18th century living history camp, educational displays and crafts, Civil War demonstrations and wagon rides.
Don and Jackie Gardner traveled from their home in Grafton, Ohio to sell their homemade dulcimers and vintage stringed instruments. The two have been coming to Heritage Days since the 1980s – nearly as long as they’ve been crafting Appalachian dulcimers by hand.
“Dulcimers originated in Virginia in the early 1800s,” Jackie said. “After the Civil War, people started moving around and they started making them in Kentucky and West Virginia.”
Dulcimers are most commonly used in old-time music, which originated in the Appalachian Mountains from the folk songs and ballads brought westward by British and Irish immigrants.
The display of vintage music makers is a natural conversation starter for the Gardners and curious passersby.
“We like to educate the people about the way things were in the past, back in the mountains, when life was simpler,” Jackie said.
Don agreed.
“After we do a festival, on the way home, we say ‘OK, who made our weekend worthwhile?’” he said. “It isn’t the person who spent the most money. Sometimes they’ll just be somebody who we talked to and introduced them to the instrument and to the music.
“It’s always more about the people than it is the sale.”
Exhibitors Isaac Singrey and Alan Meadows were among the more modern displays.
Alan Meadows, a painter from Fredericktown, brought tables of vintage engines and generators from the early 1900s.
Meadows showed a young boy how to wind the crank of a generator not much bigger than his hand. He believes it dates to about 1917.
The hand crank originally powered a telephone, but Meadows has since connected it to a small light bulb.
The light flickers. The generator still works.
The Fredericktown man has been collecting for nearly three decades. He saw one at Heritage Days and has been hooked ever since.
“I came up here one time and seen one and I wanted one,” he said.
Singrey grew up coming to the Heritage Days Festival. He spent the weekend showing off a family collection of Economy hit-and-miss engines.
The stationary, internal combustion engines had saw blades on the end – a pre-electric power tool.
“Before they had electric motors, this is what farmers used to run cream separators, washing machines, a lot of different things,” explained Luke Anderson, a fellow collector.
Singrey brought three engines and a Jim Dandy tractor. One engine dates to 1916, another to 1925.
“I think it’s always important to remember the roots and stay true to that,” the Mansfield resident said. “A lot of the practices we have today, it all stems from this.”
