Mountain State Maple Days Return to West Virginia
WBOY, March 16, 2024.
ARTHURDALE, W.Va. (WBOY) — Today was sweet for several communities across West Virginia, including one in Preston County.
The seventh annual Mountain State Maple Days celebration took place on Saturday across the state. At the Arthurdale Heritage Center, around 60 people showed up to learn the sweet history and process of making maple syrup. This location has participated in Mountain State Maple Days twice before.
Elizabeth Satterfield, Curator and Director of Education at the Heritage Center, expressed her excitement in getting to spread both the knowledge and history behind making maple syrup in West Virginia. “Maple syrup has been a part of this community for many years and historically we know that here in Arthurdale, in the thirties and forties, that some folks produced maple syrup as well, so we’re happy to continue that tradition,” Satterfield said.
“So we’re doing it in a copper kettle over an open fire outside, and that’s just kind of the long slow way to do it. And takes longer, and you kind of end up with a little bit of a smokey taste in your maple syrup but it’s the traditional way that it was done.”...
https://www.wboy.com/news/west-virginia/mountain-state-maple-days-return-to-west-virginia/
- Arthurdale is an unincorporated community in Preston County, West Virginia. It was built in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression as a social experiment to provide opportunities for unemployed local miners and farmers. Arthurdale was undertaken by the short-lived Subsistence Homesteads Division and with the personal involvement of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who used her influence to win government approval for the scheme...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthurdale,_West_Virginia
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called the Dyess Colony.
https://livingnewdeal.org/gonna-get-dad-johnny-cash-dyess-colony-arkansas/
"Will we get cold and hungry, will times be very bad? When we’re needin’ bread and meat, Where we gonna get it, Dad?”
Upon hearing Johnny Cash sing those lyrics, one wouldn’t typically think of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the New Deal, or any of the myriad programs that arose from the FDR administration’s response to the Great Depression. In fact, that’s not what the song is about. But it could easily describe how Cash and his family felt as they faced poverty and hunger when he was a young boy. Fortunately, the Cashes made it through those hard times thanks to a New Deal agricultural program that helped resettle destitute farmers.
The name of the experimental program was far from glamourous: Colonization Project #1, later called the Dyess Colony after William Dyess, an Arkansas FERA administrator. But for the Cashes, it had to be dazzling. Indeed, Johnny Cash called it “the promised land” in his autobiography. Arriving in 1935 when the future country music star was just three years old, they were among the five hundred families who were resettled on wild but fertile land that needed tending.
All were given a plot of land complete with a barn, chicken house, shed, a five-room house, and enough money to begin the arduous task of clearing the land and growing crops. A community center, administration building, schools, a theatre, and other buildings rounded out the small community."....(more)