Two local apple festivals set to usher in October
Apple lovers will have plenty to celebrate next weekend as two annual fruit-themed festivals come to Southwest Ohio.
The arrival of autumn brings us local apples and two special local apple festivals. Both festivals are Saturday and Sunday Oct. 5-6, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The better known of the two festivals in Oxford, the Apple Butter Festival at Hueston Woods State Park, lets visitors create apple butter the way early settlers made it. More information can be found elsewhere in the newspaper.
Also upcoming is the Downing Fruit Farm Fall Festival, hosted by the Downing family, well-known fixtures at the Oxford Farmers Market. The Downing festival is special because visitors can walk amid the farm’s 2,500 fruit trees and pick apples. The trees are so heavily laden with bright red apples that the green leaves are obscured. Visitors can also ride around the 50 acres in a horse-drawn carriage.
Downing Fruit Farm has 75 varieties of apples, so it’s interesting to walk through the different rows of the orchard. Some rows contain a single variety, whereas other rows have a mix. Why the difference? Scott Downing explains that some varieties of apples like Fuji and Golden Delicious self-pollinate, whereas other varieties such as Honeycrisp pollinate only through proximity with other varieties.
Scott Downing was one of the local growers instrumental in getting MOON Co-op Market open, because the large supermarkets wouldn’t take their produce, even though it’s fresher and more nutritious than the produce imported from elsewhere. He is the seventh generation of the Downing family to grow apples on the farm, which was started in 1838 when John Downing brought apple tree saplings and seeds west to Ohio. MOON Co-op displays photos of several Downing generations.
Scott was never told by previous generations that his family had a direct connection with Johnny Appleseed. However, John Downing and Johnny Appleseed were doing the same thing at the same time in the same place.
John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed’s real name) is pictured as an eccentric hippie, but in reality he was a clever entrepreneur and financier. Chapman bought land throughout Ohio, planted apple seeds, built fences to protect the saplings from livestock, arranged with neighbors to care for the nurseries in exchange for a share of sales receipts, and either sold off the land for a profit or maintained the property as a nursery (selling individual trees). When he died in 1845, he owned more than 1,200 acres, not counting all the land he had bought and later sold.
Chapman focused on apples for practical reasons. First, in order to establish their claim, homesteaders out here on the frontier were required to plant 50 apple trees and 20 peach trees within three years.
Second, the apples he grew were tart, so they got used mainly for hard cider rather than for eating. The food writer Michael Pollan called Chapman “our American Dionysus,” because he brought “the gift of alcohol to the frontier.” The cider market contracted during Prohibition in the 1920s, so now most apple varieties are for eating.
The last known tree planted by Chapman still stands in Ashland County and produces tart green apples.
Admission is free for the Downing Fruit Farm Festival and $5 per adult or $10 per car for the Hueston Woods Apple Butter Festival. Downing Fruit Farm’s address is 2468 Harrison Road, New Madison, Ohio 45346. Google Maps suggests several routes from Butler County, all using back roads, so use GPS to get there.
James Rubenstein is president of the Board of Directors for the Oxford Free Press and professor emeritus of geography at Miami University.
