Derry Area Historical Society's Lammas Day Festival celebrates area's agricultural heritage
The only thing out of place was the cellphone.
Evelyn Ruffing held up the piece of modern technology Sunday and used her thumb to snap a photo of Liza Seiner, who was hand-spinning cotton into yarn.
Ruffing was dressed as a docent in the Fulton House, built in 1817, in New Derry that once served as a resting spot for travelers — and their animals.
Outside, water bubbled around ears of corn in a copper kettle over an open fire.
It was the Derry Area Historical Society’s annual Lammas Day Festival, a time to celebrate agricultural history of the sprawling cornfields and other farms that make up Derry Township and the surrounding municipalities.
The society has been celebrating a sort of “reverse Thanksgiving” for about 15 years, president Bill Snyder said.
“It has its origins in ancient Europe as a celebration of the first harvest,” Snyder said.
It’s a perfect way to celebrate the Derry area’s heritage, but with a little tweak, said Ruffing, who is a charter member of the society. Lammas Day traditionally celebrates the initial wheat harvest, a key ingredient for bread.
“We’ve, of course, turned it into corn today,” Ruffing said.
Seiner wore a shawl she knitted out of hand-spun yarn while working in an entryway room at the Fulton House. She had clumps of cotton at the ready to stretch out and feed into her spinning wheel.
She estimated she has spun at least 30,000 yards in the last five years.
“It goes from this lump of something to yarn,” she said.
Meanwhile, corn husks lay strewn on the lawn outside of the Fulton House, the society’s headquarters and museum. The Riverside Players performed traditional American music under the shade of a tree on a warm, sunny day.
Festivalgoers were invited to write their regrets from the past year on the empty husks. Legend has it, Ruffing and Snyder said, that throwing those husks in the fire would cast away those feelings.
In the past, the society had a short procession and blessing of the fields from a nearby church, but since that priest’s retirement, they’ve been looking for help from local clergy to fill that gap, Snyder said.
Renatta Signorini is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Renatta at 724-837-5374, rsignorini@tribweb.com or via Twitter @byrenatta.
