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 tradition that has long united the people of this community, a small but important piece of the 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.
Trucking the molasses in from out of state just didn't seem right.
"We wanted the cane brought in, so people can see it, and we can show the process of how [the molasses] is made," said Harold Carpenter, chairman of the community action group.
This year, thanks in part to the hard work of Gary May and his family and friends, and in part to the hard work of several dozen Calhoun County High School Future Farmers of America students, that's exactly what's happening. The boilers and presses are being called into action this week, and the sorghum molasses that's slowly oozing its way into pint and quart-sized jars is pure, rich, all-West Virginia goodness, ready for the festival to get underway Thursday night.
It happened because this community has a park that everyone loves, a park that has no real funding other than what's raised during the festival. Arnoldsburg and the surrounding "blink and you miss them" communities also have a hard-scrabble habit of relying on each other, of not taking no for an answer, of finding solutions to life's not-so-little challenges.
"We applied for and got a grant from Little Kanawha Resource Conservation and Development for $1,000 for seed, fertilizer, things needed to prep the soil," Carpenter said. "The FFA students provided the work."
And it has been a lot of work, starting back in April when they tilled the soil behind the school's football field and then in May when they planted the seeds. After that there was fertilizer to add and, inevitably, weeds to pull from the half-acre lot. All the while, plants that first showed up looking like miniature blades of grass continued to grow until finally the golden-green stalks towered over all the workers, with sun-ripened pods waving in the breeze to say that harvest time had come.
"I just have fun coming out here doing this," said Krystal Vanhoose, 16, a junior. "We made the field, and like, tilled it and everything, then planted it, and it grew, and now we're out here taking the leaves off so they can cut it all down and have molasses for the molasses festival."
Few things involving high school students are strictly focused on the serious business at hand, and this task was no exception. There were playful screams and claims of snake sightings. But slowly, the long, thick leaves came down. And despite the mixture of business and pleasure, this is an important project for the students - and for the community they live in, said Donald Poage, the agriculture teacher and FFA advisor overseeing the project.
"We are out here blading the cane," he said, surveying a field full of his students on Monday.
"First they pull all the leaves off of it, then it all has to be cut down and chopped up," so it can be transported to the community park in Arnoldsburg where the festival will be held.
Poage's mission is two-fold: to get his students interested in a future that includes farming and, more immediately, to provide the seeds for next year's crop, to ensure the future of a festival that benefits almost everyone here.
Snapping one of the burgundy tassels from the end of the stalk, he said, "This is a seed pod. We can reuse these and they'll regenerate by falling off and becoming a parent plant."
He's saving most of the pods to plant in the spring - there is no grant to cover the costs of seed and fertilizer for the coming year - but he's also willing to make some seeds available publicly. He's giving students other pods to students to take home, in the hopes that they'll grow their own sorghum to be used for next year's festival.
"That would be the point," he said. "That would build the festival back up to where it used to be."
That simple process of sharing in abundance is how the community-based molasses-making tradition began, and it's how May got involved all these years later.
"The reason we planted the sugar cane, not because we know anything about it, but our neighbor, Ralph Carpenter, gave us some seeds and told us how to plant it," May said. "With his advice we got it in the ground and now we got it chopped down, bladed and hauled down to the park so they can make molasses."
A host of volunteers help make the molasses, and sales directly benefit the West Fork Park in Arnoldsburg, where kids play tee-ball, where May's family reunion is held each year, where the festival and scores of other activities take place.
Growing a field full of sugar cane?
"It's just giving back," said May. "I've lived in Calhoun County 30 years, made a living here, and it's time to give back a little. It's been good to us. It's just a good place to live."
Anyone interested in growing cane for next year's festival can contact Donald Poage at 304-354-6148 extension 651, or by email, dpoage@k12.wv.us.