Lost homestead habits and household discoveries
A few weeks ago, my husband and I stopped at the Cowee School’s annual folk festival. We talked with people about their families' traditions over generations in Appalachia, from brine to moonshine.
In addition to a “regular” journal with poetry, story ideas, and intentions, I keep an “adventure journal.” The latter contains lists of different hikes, unique places, and festivals I’d like to visit. (I also have a “foodie” journal of different restaurants to try.) Sometime over the winter I learned about the Cowee School Arts and Heritage Center in Franklin, North Carolina. (Franklin is in the “West of Asheville” side of the state about 45 minutes from my mountain apiary.) While exploring their website, I learned about their annual Franklin Area Folk Festival. Fortunately, our summer plans and the weather worked out so that we could go.
At the first booth we visited, a woman cut corn off a cob while she explained the crock of pickling peaches resting in the shade under her canvas tent. To prep the brine for the peaches, she needed to add enough salt to the crock of water that would float an egg. She chatted about her mother growing up in Appalachia and how her mom, as a child in a home without refrigeration, would leave pork chops in lard in her family’s attic, then take them out and fry them whenever they needed them. As she sliced the kernels into a wooden bowl, she motioned to the canvas sacks hanging from the tent and explained that her family would hang the sacks with sliced fruit in their attic to prevent mice from eating it while it dried and stored.
Food preservation is one of the top three most important things to modern homesteaders this year, according to the Homesteaders of America’s recent survey. More than half of the people surveyed said that food security and healthier food were reasons why they started homesteading. Looking back at how previous generations preserved food could help inform our practices today. At this preserving tent we also saw wooden boards set up with apple slices drying in the sun. Before we had our modern food dehydrators (reminder that you can visit the previous link and use code LBDAY2023 for 25 percent off all Excalibur dehydrators), our ancestors left fruit slices out on tin roofs or wood boards in the sun for a few days, sharing some of their harvest with wildlife and partnering with bees and wasps to help accelerate removing the moisture.
As we wandered between booths, we noticed that the festival was not only dog-friendly, but all-animal-friendly. One family walked their cat on a harness. Another walked their goat. A local beekeeper had an observation hive set up, which is probably the closest equivalent to having bees on a leash. We stopped nearby at a local baker’s booth and she explained how she makes her homemade almond paste, which was the best I’ve ever had. Serendipitously we visited the moonshine booth while snacking on the baker’s creations, and the bear claw with almond paste tasted even better paired with apple-spice moonshine.
Between learning how to prep brine for preserving food and tasting apple-spice moonshine, I remembered a century-old book I had found at a vintage shop, GOOD HOUSEKEEPING’S BOOK OF RECIPES AND HOUSEHOLD DISCOVERIES. The last portion of the book has reader-submitted tips, essentially life hacks from the turn of the century, that still feel relevant but lost today. One tip explains that you can make your screened porches more private by painting the outside of the screens white—that way no one can look in but you can still see out. Another explains that you can re-soften hardened brown sugar by adding some prunes to the container. (I may have shared this tip in an earlier post because it WORKS. And I’ve had success with raisins too.) We risk losing these practices as generational and societal shifts move in different directions. Homesteading might feel antiquated, but it’s one of the fastest growing trends. While I couldn’t find a specific source to link to, a few YouTubers that I follow shared that homesteading outpaced beauty on YouTube last year. Last year, trend forecaster Scarlet Opus predicted that “‘homestead’ is one of the core trends that will influence consumer demand and housewares product development over the next three to five years.”
Hopefully over the next few years we can make it to more events and back to the Franklin Area Folk Festival. The festival is free, easy to access, and hosted indoors and outdoors. Majority of the vendors dotted the large flat lawn in front of the center. Vendors ranged from a mix of modern food trucks, jewelers, and local trail conservancies to tents with demos on how to milk cows, honey tastings, food preservation, herbalism, military camp reenactments, and woodworking. Shade and iced coffee at their on-site coffee shop drew people inside the school. We milled through the school shoulder-to-shoulder taking baby steps in the large crowd as people visited the pottery space, quilting, and artist studios.
I imagine similar crowds at a grander scale this fall at Homesteaders of America (HOA). In the hobby farming community, HOA is a keystone annual event. I’m thrilled that I snagged a ticket before sales sold out. This will be my first HOA. In six weeks, I’ll share more homestead habits and household discoveries with you from what I learn there. In the meantime, let me know about your family’s traditions or old timey life hacks you’ve heard.