I barely covered my ears before an antique cannon shot fake fire over the Maumee River with enough force to make me skip a breath. To my right, a man dressed as Mark Twain, wearing a white suit and a black Colonel Sanders bow tie, nodded approvingly. On my left, a woman wearing a white bonnet and a blue dress that looked like it was made of bonnets returned to spinning yarn on a wooden wheel. It was at that moment that I thought, “There must be an easier way to find apple butter.”
The town of Grand Rapids holds their Apple Butter Festival every year on October’s second Sunday. This was the 37th festival, which included a live apple butter stir, a juried craft show, and historical reenactments of pioneer America. There was also a live bald eagle. All the festival needed was a choreographed fireworks display and a Tom Brady autograph signing to be the most American event of all time.
I sampled pumpkin preserves, lilac jam, and “mystery meat” from a wood-fired spit (I think it was bologna). I tried everything except, well, apple butter. A man in denim overalls let me stir a batch in a giant kettle with a six-foot brush—I was a natural—but the festival ran out of take-home jars while I waited in line. In Ohio’s autumn, apples become as desired as gold.
An apple appellation
Bob MacQueen delivered instructions to his grandson, Zach, on where to direct a butane blowtorch. Bob’s trucker cap framed his frosty eyebrows. “Up a little higher,” Bob said, as Zach lit an indoor heater. A few minutes later, a woman walked in to the warehouse to order some bushels of apples for a shopper at the Cider Mill next door. “That was my aunt,” said Zach. Only four years ago, Zach was a senior at Ohio State—now he helps manage operations. A man whisked behind us and into a storage room. “That was my dad,” said Zach. The MacQueen Orchard is a family business.
MacQueen Apple Orchard has grown apples since 1936. A couple of the original trees, in fact, are still standing. But MacQueen’s did not become an “entertainment farm”—allowing guests to pick their own apples while kids take train rides through tree-lined runways—until the early 1960’s. The farm grew thirty acres of peaches one summer that, unpredictably, all became ripe at once. The family was unable to pick all the peaches on their own, so they invited the public out to the farm in a newspaper ad. “It was kind of a mistake, but it worked out,” said Bob. They sold all of their peaches and, a few years later, they invited people out to the farm to pick apples. Now, almost fifty years after their first public apple picking, people continue to flock to their farm each fall in order to rip twenty-six varieties directly from the tree branches, and to pick up donuts so fresh that you have to wait for them to cool before eating.
“I think I was always kind-of meant to be here,” said Zach, a fourth-generation apple farmer. “I grew up here. These trees have been here my whole life… and it doesn’t feel like work.”
The sun had sunk low in the sky as the last visitors of the evening packed their cars to drive home. Zach and his grandfather wished me goodbye, and then walked back towards the orchard to prepare for more pickers to arrive the next day.
Dorian Slaybod is 27, a local attorney, single, and happily living in Toledo.
