Apple Festival

Saturday, September 18, 2010    10:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.

Apple Fest Flier [pdf/713kb/1p] 

Come and celebrate the harvest at Apple Festival 2010. Unique crafts, traditional music and food fill Historic Bethabara Park. Local orchards, handicraft demonstrations, and colonial re-enactors highlight this festival, as do horse-drawn wagon rides and colonial games.

This year's craftsmen & Vendors

This Year's Mainstage Music

Steve and Ruth Smith

Steve and Ruth Smith, from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, play a unique blend of Celtic Appalachian music featuring hammered dulcimer, mountain dulcimer, guitar, and clawhammer banjo.

Steve and Ruth, both of Scots-Irish heritage, have been performing together for over 35 years across the United States and around the world. View their website at www.steveandruth.com.

Bruce Peiphoff

Bruce Piephoff is a folk singer/songwriter and poet who has been writing and touring the folk circuit for nearly 40 years. His fingerstyle guitar playing came from the rolling ragtime blues rhythms of Elizabeth Cotten and Mississippi John Hurt. Visit his website at www.brucepiephoff.com.

Mel Jones and His Bog O Bones

Mel Jones and His Bag O Bones take acoustic Blues down the road to the next fork by doing the same thing that the old country blues masters did. They listened to the music around them, paid attention to the world around them, and lived their lives. From these sources they made the Blues well up in a musical spring that became a branch that became a creek that became a river that has now become a flood. The Bones are proud to add a few drops of their own. View them at www.myspace.com/bonesblues.

Apple History at Bethabara Park

When Moravians arrived in Bethabara in 1753, they almost immediately set about planting apple trees from seeds brought from Europe. According to records, it was recommended to plant six apple trees for every family member.

Within a few years, all the hills around the Park were filled with apple orchards. It is estimated between five and eight acres, according to the maps the Moravians kept.

Apples were among Bethabara's biggest products, probably not far behind cattle. The settlers also probably traded grafts from apple trees to pioneers who passed through Bethabara on their way out West.

Historically, apples were a big part of American life. In the Piedmont, people mostly dried apples but the Moravians built root cellars where fresh apples could be kept for a long time.

Apples were used the same as today - dried apples in pies, apple cider to drink, as a side dish and as vinegar.

We celebrate Apple Festival with a tribute to the Moravian way of life on this day.

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