REAPING WHAT YOU SOW: SEEDS OF HOPE REJUVENATE MOLASSES FESTIVAL

(09/25/2015)

Agriculture teacher Donald Poage holds one of the seed pods he intends to use for planting a new crop in the spring. Photo courtesy D. Michael Young ARNOLDSBURG - This weekend's West Virginia Molasses Festival will feature something that it hasn't had a single sweet, gooey drop of for the last two years: West Virginia molasses. "It was basically a molasses festival without any molasses," said Gary May, a local farmer who was part of the grass roots solution this year — and maybe, for years to come. It's fair to say that without him and a handful of high school students, there wouldn't be any molasses this year, either. The weather in 2013 and 2014 just wasn't cooperative for growing sorghum, a tall, thin, bamboo-like plant that's so closely related to sugar cane that most people here just use the two names interchangeably. It's the key ingredient — in fact, the only ingredient — for making molasses. "And you just have to have the right kind of weather to grow sugar cane," said Linda McCartney, vice chairwoman of the West Fork Community Action (WFCA) group that helps to organize the festival. It was "really rough," she added. "We had gotten some Amish molasses from Ohio and we fell back on that, and people understood. But you know, 'Why do I go to a molasses festival if they don't have any molasses?' People got a tad disgruntled. That's putting it mildly." It wasn't just the lack of local molasses that was so hard to swallow. It was the aching absence of a decades-old molasses making tradition that has long united the people of this community, a small but important piece of heritage on which the festival itself was built. "People look at it as a homecoming," said McCartney. "They come and see their old neighbors that they haven't seen all year," just as they did in years gone by when cooler temperatures signaled winter's approach and friends came together to press and boil and bottle the dark syrup that would sweeten the cold months ahead. Read more Reaping what you sow: Seeds of hope rejuvenate W.Va. Molasses Festival By Maria Young, Lifestyles Editor, Gazette-Mail

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