New Things Happening at Huntersville Tradition Days this Year

With Huntersville Tradition Days coming up on Friday, October 4^th and Saturday, October 5^th, we asked Tim Wade to tell us about this year’s Tradition Days.

“Huntersville Tradition days, we hold on the first weekend in October, Friday and Saturday” said Wade. “It’s mostly to celebrate the traditional arts and old-time music of the past. And we try to emphasize all that old-time stuff like ice cream making, apple butter making, the muzzleloader and some of the old traditional arts that’s been in the past. We try to educate people about what that was like back in the day.”

“This year we got a couple of new things going on. We’re going to do some oral histories with our senior citizens and anybody else that would want to share some history, at the Methodist Church on Saturday. I think it’s from Saturday morning -we’ll have a brochure out with the hours. It’s going to be an oral history, and we hope to have some participation for that, and get some new information and some new incite of history, not only of Huntersville, but maybe Pocahontas County.”

“We are also going to have our events on Friday morning through the day until three o’clock. From eight-thirty until about three, we are going to have students from throughout the County School System that will be coming for tours and to meet our reenactors that will be portraying living history and will also be touring the jail, the Civil War cemetery, the schoolhouse, and some of the Civil War camps that will be set up in Huntersville.”

“And then Friday evening, we are going to have a full schedule of events. We are going to have a barbeque picnic at the schoolhouse, and it’s by free-will donation, or whatever you feel like, or just free, whatever you want to do. It’ll be there. And we’ll also have a pie auction, which is one of the few fundraisers that Huntersville Traditions Day does. It’s a fun event, we auction pies off for the benefit of Huntersville Traditions and then we’ll also have a cake-walk that evening. We’ll have a live band there, the Bing Brothers will be there in concert for probably about three hours Friday at the schoolhouse. It’s all basically free, so come and enjoy. We’ll also have some period dancers there on Friday evening that will be dancing to the old-time music provided by the Bing Brothers. And we’ll have our Civil War Reenactors around at their camps and around visiting with people. It’s going to be kinda fun Friday evening.”

Something new this year that we are gonna do, I’m going to have a shuttle wagon on Friday evening, and they will pick you up. The FFA Chapter at Pocahontas County High School will be providing the tractor to pull that and they will be shuttling people from the parking areas to the schoolhouse and back. So, there’s not going to be a lot of walking for people who are not physically able to do that. We are going to do that on Friday evening and Saturday evening with the shuttle wagon. And we are also going to have the horse wagon there. A team of horses pulling a wagon provided by Brandon Ruddle from over in Pendleton County. He will be there on Saturday evening.”

“We got a full schedule of events on Saturday. We will have square dancers there, and we’ll have old-time music throughout the community at the Huntersville Church. We’ll have a cornbread and bean dinner, like we always do, throughout the day on Saturday. We’ll have apple butter making going on outside the church. And we’ll have a cornbread and salt-rising bread contest, and we urge people to enter the cornbread contest or the salt-rising bread contest.  The cornbread contest we are doing in memory of Hazel Sherbs, a long-time Huntersville resident, and the salt-rising bread were doing in memory of Joyce Varner up in Durbin. She was our Judge last year and she passed away this past year. And she was also a long-time cook for the schools and did a lot of salt-rising bread. It will be judged by the lady from up in Morgantown, named Susan Brown, who wrote a book on the art of salt-rising bread, which is an old traditional art. So we will have those contests, And then we will have our venders around the school. And we will have a full slate of people demonstrating different kinds of crafts and things. And we will have the quilts in the schoolhouse-we’ll have a whole room of quilts. Pretty well full day of things on Friday and Saturday both this year. And, like I say, I am pretty excited that we are going to provide a shuttle wagon and the events on Friday evening are all moved over to the schoolhouse. I think everybody will enjoy themselves. I think it will be fun.”