1st festival weekend draws friendly crowds BY JAMES JACENICH • STAFF WRITER
MONTEREY -Mike Puffenbarger's Southernmost Maple sugar camp near Bolar was booming on the first day of Maple Festival last weekend. His parking lot was full throughout the day and lines in and out of the store and in front of the barbecue shack were 10-20 people long at times.
Children rode in a miniature horse buggy pulled by Moon or Rex, owned and operated by Bonnie Zampogna.
Zampogna and her husband, Bob, live on a farm near Fincastle. Selling buggy rides is a way to defray the costs of keeping miniature horses. Bob says the area around Fincastle is being developed into subdivisions for commuters from Richmond who want to live in the country. Bob says an acre of land goes for $10,000 near Fincastle. "Just wait 10 years," he says. "The price of land in Highland County will be up that high, too."
Truman Collins came with his parents, Josephine and Scott Collins of Roanoke. He took a quick ride in the buggy. He couldn't have been more than four years old and was wearing a sock hat and a warm jacket. He smiled as his mother took a picture of him in the buggy. Josephine grew up in a little coastal town in Maine similar in size to Monterey. She came to Highland for the festival and in search of a rural setting that reminded her of childhood.
Eddie Ailstock is standing by the evaporator cooking down syrup. He's married to Puffenbarger's daughter, Melissa.
"It's a pretty good day I think," says Puffenbarger. He wants to tap a sugar maple he planted with his grandfather 30 years ago. He hopes his granddaughter, Abigail Grace Ailstock, around three years old, will help. But she is getting fussy and tired and doesn't feel like helping right then. For now she's more interested in seeing what the vendors in the front yard of are selling.
Sitting at a table outdoors, next to Mike, is Jeff Ishee, host and producer of "On the Farm" radio, heard by thousands each week in the Mid-Atlantic states. He is also the host and producer of the Public Broadcasting Service program, "Virginia Farming."
It's past noon and Tim Duff is explaining the process of sugar maple production to a group of tourists at his camp in Meadowdale. Duff says he has the smallest camp in the county - a wooden shack with a small evaporator and a big kettle for finishing off. The shack hasn't been in use long enough to have that characteristic maple color in the rafters.
Bottles of syrup sit on a table in all sizes. Shannon Salmon, 6, is from Mechanicsville. She isn't as interested in the syrup as she is in the kitty curled up in her arms. The cat is doing his part to keep visitors entertained. Shannon's grandmother, Janis Wilson, is with her, as is Shannon's mother, Kerri, sister, Shane and brother, Shelby.
"My parents brought me to the festival and now I'm bringing my daughter and her children," says Mrs. Wilson.
By 2 p.m. at The Highland Center, the bluegrass band 220 South has just finished performing. Little Switzerland Cloggers are getting ready for their show. The Maple Queen and her court are seated in the front row as a large crowd fills the auditorium, chairs forming a horseshoe around the floor. The foot-stomping, heart-pounding dance has the audience whooping and hollering and clapping to keep time.
Maple Queen Cappy Sullenberger and her court, princesses Ashton Hill and Amber Botkin, are having a good day talking to people and eating pancakes, they say. Sullenberger says she put tons of syrup on her pancakes at Highland Elementary School breakfast. She had buckwheat and regular pancakes and recommends them both.
The Sunday morning crowd at Ivan Puffenbarger's camp in the Blue Grass Valley stops to look at the large evaporator boiling sugar water in Puffenbarger's shack. His camp is nestled in an orchard of tall maple trees on the side of Monterey Mountain. On the other side of the trees in a meadow is a herd of cows, seemingly unperturbed in their daily grazing by the steady line of cars in and out of the farm. People are walking through the maple forest, inspecting clear plastic tubes carrying sugar water to the shack and catching a glimpse of an occasional squirrel. The crisp March air is warmed by the sun, sweaters and light jackets are the dress of the day.
Harris Westerberg is visiting Highland with his friend, Joyce Van Meter. They live in Newmarket. "Highland is wholesome and quiet," says Westerberg. He's a retired farmer and high school teacher of Swedish descent. Westerberg wants to farm, and buy a place of his own near New Market to raise sheep, cattle and chickens, he said, but New Market is getting too crowded. He has his eye on a piece of property near Monterey. The price is right, he says. "It's a place you would want to live," says Van Meter.
The Uppper Branch of the Potomac River is running fast past New Hampden and the village of Blue Grass, melting snows adding to its frenetic rush to the sea. A lone vender sells gifts by the road just outside New Hampden. Judging by the traffic between Ivan Puffenbarger's camp to the south and the Ruritan pancake breakfast in Blue Grass, the young vendor may have chosen the ideal location to set up shop.
At Ginseng Mountain Farm and Store, Debra Ellington waits on customers. Edwin Seal and his wife, Jane, of Elkton, have been coming to the festival for 30 years. They like the rural, undeveloped nature of the county. They are a little saddened by development near Elkton, encroaching on what was once rural land, now a land of subdivisions.
At Virginia Trout Co., people are tossing food to the trout in the pond. There's no fishing today, just visiting. The trout surface to catch the treats. At a nearby trailer, trout fillets are deep-fried and squeezed into a bun, with or without cheese. Several plastic bottles with tartar sauce dot the counter.
At 3 p.m. pancakes are still being served up with sausage gravy, sausage and ham at the Stonewall Ruritan Building in McDowell. Dwayne Harkleroad of McDowell is collecting money. Sheriff Herb Lightner and Roy Malcolm are flipping pancakes, pouring out precise measurements of buckwheat or buttermilk batter onto the hot grill. Ray Eagle, 90, of Doe Hill, is washing dishes. He says he still likes to help.
Joe Malcolm has taken a day off from his veterinary practice to serve hot tea, coffee and milk. "We don't have any decaffeinated coffee," he says. There's plenty of room this late in the day. Groups of 10 walk in at a time, finding no line and a warmer full of hot cakes waiting for them.
Jim De Poy is selling tools in one of the old classrooms in the former school building, now the Ruritan meeting hall. He lives in Mount Crawford with his wife, Liz. She has the other half of the classroom filled with her hand-sewn items. Her grandson, Jamie De Poy, holds up a stick horse Liz made out of polyester stuffing, an antique quilt and a pole. She gets the quilts at yard sales. Often worn with age till they are threadbare, she gives them a second life as a child's toy.
She shouts at Jim, "How many do you think I've made?"
"Thousands," he says.
Liz's mother was raised at the old McClung place south of McDowell. Her mother was Minnie Copeland Blair and was the last person married at Clover Creek Chapel until a young couple made it their wedding chapel three years ago.
Jamie is 12. He lives in a log cabin in the woods near Bridgewater. He has a collection of knives he is trying to sell. So far, he's sold a few. He keeps some of his special knives hidden in his pockets. One of them for sale is used for skinning and gutting deer. Jamie demonstrates his technique as he slashes at the air pretending to cut the invisible belly of a recently killed deer. A small hook on one side of the knife resembling a bottle opener is used for that purpose.
His grandfather, Jim, has tools laid out on half a dozen folding tables. The tools are old, but look like they could cut down a tree or shaving the sides off a log. Some are quite valuable, he says.
He points to one tool and says Civil War reenactors tell him it was used to cut off body parts of soldiers wounded in battle. It makes for an interesting story, but this particular saw was not used by surgeons. But it could cut through bone if it had to, he says.
The De Poys have a hunting camp on Route 612 south of McDowell. Jim says one of the county supervisors told him he didn't vote here so he didn't have a right to tell the county how to do its business. Jim has opinions and thinks the money he spends on local taxes entitles him to a say.
Congressman Bob Goodlatte stops in to look at the tools. He is eyeing a large ax. Jim shows him how it was used to shave wood off a log. The ax is heavy enough that all one needs to do to cut through wood is drop it.
At 4:30 p.m. the crowds are thinning in Monterey. Vendors are starting to put away their goods and button up their tents. A few people are scrambling to make one last purchase before the day is over. The sun is still high in the western sky. The night before was the beginning of daylight saving time. Everyone gets an extra hour of afternoon sun. No one will have to pack up in the dark.
Last week Ivan Puffenbarger was concerned because the weather was not right for sugar water to flow. The days weren't warm enough. The trees have to freeze at night, too. "I ain't never seen anything like this in my life," he said. He had only made about 100 gallons of syrup. Usually by the end of February he has 500 gallons finished. Sunday morning his sugar trees were running and the tanks were filling up. Cars were pulling into his camp and people were buying doughnuts and syrup at his shack.
He sat in his chair next to the evaporator and talked to visitors one by one as they strolled past the steamy silver box boiling sugar water into golden, mountain maple syrup - the festival's star attraction.
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