RANGELEY – Come and experience part of western Maine’s apple history when the Rangeley Lakes Region Logging Museum holds its 16th annual Apple Festival on Saturday, Oct. 3, from 9 am to 3 pm at the Church of the Good Shepherd on Main Street. Museum volunteers will make the beef stew for the luncheon that begins at 11 am, and also serve up hot dogs, sandwiches, apple desserts, and more.
Inside the Church, all kinds of homemade foods made with apples and more will be for sale, including pies, breads, muffins, and cookies, and jellies. Crafts from throughout the region will fill the church Undercroft. Margaret Yezil of Oquossoc will offer her many creations, such as place mats, toy moose, and bright Christmas items. From Salem, Daria Babbitt and friends will bring their knit goods and textile arts. Robin Harnden of Wilton will display his ornamental metalwork. Other crafters have promised apple cookie cutters, pot holders, wood crafts, and much more.
At the festival, the Logging Museum will unveil its new project: the sale of reproductions of the 19 paintings by Alden Grant that detail logging in Kennebago in the 1920s. Museum vice-president Ron Haines will display a reproduction of “Sluicing Long Logs” and take orders for copies of that painting and of any other painting in the series. Museum Treasurer Harry Simon, co-director of Simon Gallery, Morristown, New Jersey, (www.simongallery.com), is overseeing the reproduction process.
John Richard will oversee the sale of the Logging Museum’s publications Logging in the Maine Woods: The Paintings of Alden Grant and Working the Woods, as well as T-shirts, sweatshirts, and raffle tickets. The raffle features a child’s Kawaski 50cc four-wheeler for the Fall raffle to be drawn at the Apple Festival, and for the child’s Arctic Cat F-150 snowmobile for the Winter raffle that will be drawn at the Sno-deo. Donated by L.L. Cote Sports Center of Errol, N.H., the sports equipment can be viewed on front lawn of Museum President Rodney Richard, Sr., Main Street, Rangeley.
Outside the church, Rodney Richard, Sr. and Rodney Richard, Jr., of Pownal, will rev up their chain saws and bring a host of Maine animals out of blocks of white pine. Logging Museum Board members Richard Hill and Wayne Lessard will demonstrate apple pressing and cider making on the apple press. Terry Trask of Trask Orchard, Jay, will sell cider, apples, and more so festival visitors can press apples into cider at the festival. People may also bring their own apples to be pressed.
Apples loom large in the history of western Maine. The apple press, owned by Bill and Margaret Ellis, points to Rangeley’s earlier years. From the family’s apples, Bill’s mother, Katharine, made dried apples, apple rings, apple leather, apple sauce, baked apples, and cider. And the family would walk up to their orchard where Bill’s great-grandfather Jerry lived for the Jerry Ellis Apple Picking Day. “Just whoever was around in the immediate family would go up there and pick apples,” Bill explains, “and fill our backpacks. There must be twenty different kinds of apples up there.”
Admission to the Oct. 3 Apple Festival is free. For more information, call the Richards at 864-5595. From October to June, the Rangeley Lakes Region Logging Museum is open by appointment only; call 864-5595. Visit the Museum website at http://mason.gmu.edu/~myocom and click on “Maine Folklore Projects.”
