Highlights Archives
Wade House Celebrates the Autumn Harvest
Horse-drawn wagon rides, hot cider, colorful Irish and American Halloween customs, ghost stories, and bobbing for apples — these are just a few of the ways Wade House will close out its 2006 season with an Autumn Celebration Saturday and Sunday, October 28-29. Wade House, which ended its regular season on October 17, will reopen for the special Halloween and harvest festival. Guests will be treated to a two-mile wagon ride over tree-lined sunken gravel roads that crisscross the rolling hills of the site's wooded pastures — a ride reminiscent of the days when the 1860s stagecoach inn served as a lodging place for travelers using the old plank road that passed by the inn. Upon their return, visitors will assemble in the taproom to enjoy hot cider and tales of Irish Halloween customs.
In the inn's dining room, learn the Irish origins of the jack-o'-lantern and the legend of a lost soul behind it. Discover how the Irish originally carved jack-o'-lanterns from turnips — their vegetable of choice for making jack-o'-lanterns until Irish immigrants to America found that pumpkins were not only more abundant than turnips, but larger and far easier to carve. Guests can try their hand at crafting their own Irish jack-o'-lanterns from turnips as well as from the more traditional American favorite, the pumpkin. In the Wade House kitchen, learn about other Celtic-born Halloween customs such as using apple peelings and burning nuts to foretell one's fortunes in love.
At the nearby Herrling sawmill, prepare for some scary but family friendly Halloween storytelling as the mill's doors are closed and the building darkened for candlelight tales of All Hallows Eve — Halloween's original name — when spirits of the dead were said to revisit the mortal world and roam their old haunts. Just a stone's throw away, at the Dockstader Blacksmith Shop, see a blacksmith ply his time-honored trade and take part in the traditional Halloween games of snap apple and bobbing, or "ducking," for apples.
Each afternoon, from 12:30 to 3:30, guests can get in the spirit of Halloween with a half-mile wagon ride to the Greenbush Cemetery, the final resting place of the stagecoach inn's builder Sylvanus Wade and many of his kin. Learn about their lives and times as told by readings from actual family letters describing their travels and hardships.
For complete details on admission, location and contact information, visit the Wade House visitor information page.
:: Posted October 23, 2006
|
