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As the morning sun peeks over the Blue Mountains, my brother and I join other members of Centre Presbyterian Church and begin husking a waist-high pile of sweet corn. It is cool on this August morning, and even when the sun reaches overhead, we will be comfortable husking corn in the shade of towering oak trees.
On August 19, 1766, the Reverend Charles Beatty preached to a congregation gathered in this oak grove in Perry County, Pennsylvania. Soon after, on the tract of land called “Devotion” by its earliest settlers, a log church was built. As frontiersmen settled along the Appalachian Trail, the congregation grew, filling the log meeting house. In 1793, to accommodate such growth, a stone church was constructed. Then in 1850, a white-framed church replaced the stone, and it is this church, with the addition of Sunday school classrooms and stained glass windows, that welcomes members and visitors today.
The first parishioners of Centre Presbyterian Church were, indeed, devoted. They used only stumps for pews and worshipped without so much as a fire, even in the wintertime. They traveled by horseback, sometimes fifteen miles, and packed lunches to share between the morning and afternoon services. Church historians believe it may have been this practice of packing lunches that became the Centre picnic, a community affair now held on the third Saturday in August.
I have helped husk corn and prepare for the picnic since I was a little girl, and always I feel a sense of belonging and history. While I wipe silk from the ears of corn, I remember stories of the picnic that my grandmother told to me.
“We had such fun at the picnic when I was a child,” she said. “Of course, preparations started long before picnic day.” She recalled that in the winter, men cut blocks of ice from Bixler’s Run—a stream to the south—hauled the blocks to an icehouse, and covered them with sawdust. This ice was then used to make ice cream and chill the cantaloupes and watermelons on picnic day. “The boys thought it great fun to haul the ice,” Grandma remembered.
“Father would pick the nicest, fattest chicken from the flock,” she continued. “Mother would clean it up, cook it, and pick the meat off the bones.
Then on picnic morning, Father would go to the corn patch and fill a feed sack with sweet corn. Everyone else in the congregation would do the same thing. The children would husk it, and the women would clean it, and there would always be somebody with a big iron kettle of water over an open fire. That’s how we made the chicken corn soup.”
Now, the menu of homemade food has grown to include barbeque, baked beans, applesauce, chicken noodle soup, and iced tea. The picnic crowd has grown as well; in addition to church members, hundreds of visitors enjoy homemade fare from 11 a.m. until the kettles are empty, usually around 6:30 p.m.
Today, the chicken is bought—plucked and cleaned—and the soup is stirred on a stovetop, but farmers still donate feed sacks of sweet corn as my great-grandfather did. Families still gather early on an August morning to husk, silk, blanch, and cut the ears of corn. These same farmers also bring cans of milk to the church basement the day before the picnic, and while the women make pies, the men churn 100 gallons of ice cream: vanilla, chocolate, raspberry, pineapple, teaberry, and banana. What’s more, there still lives a spirit of fellowship, of community, as we pull the corn silk from our fingers, wipe its juice from our bare arms, tell stories, and remember.
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