Festival Gives Glimpse Into Cane Hill Past

CHILDREN ENJOY KID ZONE ACTIVITIES

CANEHILL — The Cane Hill Harvest Festival is about yesterday’s lifestyle but it also is about getting children involved.

Tom Pennel, festival chairman, added children’s activities to the schedule this year and he hopes to increase the attendance of children each year.

As he watched children running on the grounds of Cane Hill College, he said, “This is what it’s all about. If these guys don’t come, we won’t have any more volunteers. The future is in these guys.”

As an “old soldier,” Pennel said he looks at the festival each year to see how it can be improved.

Evaluating last year’s festival, Pennel said he noticed the children didn’t have anything to do.

The 30th annual Cane Hill Harvest Festival featured a kid zone where children could play on a large inflatable bounce house, ride camels or enjoy a petting zoo and have their faces painted.

Students also had other opportunities. Members of Lincoln High Band parked cars and volunteered to cut sugar cane. Students with Lincoln Middle School’s EAST program gave demonstrations on new wireless technology that is available in the Cane Hill area.

“I’ll keep focusing on kids,” Pennel said.

The main purpose of the festival, though, is to celebrate historic Cane Hill and help visitors learn about yesterday’s lifestyle.

The most popular demonstration shows visitors how sorghum molasses is made from cane. The festival has featured this demonstration for about 25 years and it is important because it show visitors “the old way of doing it,” said Leonard Carlton, who has been in charge of making molasses almost every year.

The cane is grown on the festival grounds, specifically to make molasses for festival patrons. Two mills are used to crush the cane. One is powered by mule and the other by tractor.

Cane juice is squeezed from the stalks, goes into large bins and then travels by hose underground to a copper cooker sitting on top of a bed of hot coals. The juice then is cooked into molasses.

It takes 10 gallons of sap to get one gallon of sorghum. The festival sells the molasses with proceeds to benefit Cane Hill College fund.

Historic Cane Hill Museum was open throughout the festival and visitors could learn about the history of the community and see exhibits of what life would have been like years ago. The A.R. Carroll Drugstore building also was open and it was filled with beautiful hand-made quilts. Volunteers explained about the history behind some of the quilts.

Allen Bartlett of Prairie Grove said he enjoys the festival because of the people and their stories.

“The people are wonderful,” Bartlett said. “I could sit down and talk to them for hours.”

Pennel said attendance at the 2016 festival was good, especially on Saturday. Storms and rain came through Sunday morning and that probably affected turnout that day. However, overall the festival was “terrific” and a great success, he said.

One thing Pennel noticed this year was that people seemed to stay longer and enjoy the festival and the music. Bluegrass music was featured on Saturday and Fennel said he would like to add more bluegrass bands to the schedule next year.

“The bluegrass bands kept everything lively. People stayed all day and the music helped with that,” Fennel said.

As chairman, Fennel said his plan is to “keep tweaking” the festival to make it better each year.

“The people are wonderful. I could sit down and talk to them for hours.” Allen Bartlett Prairie Grove resident