Well, our 117th annual reunion has come and gone. This year we celebrated our longstanding family tradition the same as we do every other year—we made Hollinger Apple Butter! Family members rolled in from near and far for a weekend at Jennifer Romick’s house in Covington Ohio. This was the third year we’ve held the reunion at Jenny Jo’s house and despite a late evening shower during the Friday night cookout, the rest of the weekend’s weather was absolutely perfect. We enjoyed a beautiful Ohio Fall day. Lots of blue skies, white clouds, and sunshine. The tree’s leaves were changing colors, Greenville Falls Creek was clear and beautiful and the temperatures were a bit cooler than normal hitting highs only in the mid 50’s during the days and dipping down into the upper 30’s at night.
Our weekend festivities started on Thursday afternoon as the large fire ring and cooking fires were lit and the campers began to pop up their tents and trailers around the property. This year we had about 20 or so people camping for the weekend. Thanks to our family members who showed up early Thursday to get the little bit of the extra work done that the reunion requires.
Friday started off with breakfast cooked over the campfire and we completed a few lingering jobs that we needed to finish up for the reunion. Then we moved away from the chores and started getting ready to produce our Apple Pie Moonshine. This year we cooked and canned 100 quarts of our special concoction complete with a sprig of cinnamon and a whole peeled and cored King David apple. As the day led on we gained a few more family members till we had a decent Friday night turnout of about 30 or so people. We settled in around the central fire pit, shared some laughs and had a substantial spread of meat offerings to choose from on the cooking grate. As the evening drew on the rain came with it quickly putting a dampening on our Friday night cookout.
Saturday started off cold and beautiful. Our families two copper kettles hit the fires about 4:30 in the morning with 32 gallons of cider and a few apples quickly coming to a boil. About 8:30 or so our peelers and snitzers settled in to tackle processing the 13 bushels of apples we got from Downings Fruit Farms. We cored, peeled, sliced and added our apples to the kettles as the day went on. Around 1 pm we met in the garden in front of the barn. We had approximately 83 people in attendance this year. We listened to a few family announcements and Chad Hollinger led us in prayer before our fantastic meal of hand turned rotisserie chicken and a spread of carry-in dishes, desserts, pies, and cookies that would put most reunions to shame. We also passed the hat to help cover some of the families costs associated with our reunion. Thanks to all your generosity we’ll be adding some funds to our treasury again this year. We also sang Happy Birthday to Rita Fannon and Thomas Hollinger.
Thanks to everyone who helped to update our family records by signing up for the beautiful gift basket provided by Jennifer Romick. The big winner of the “bribery basket” all the way from sunny Arizona was Greg Gullett!
We had a bit of a milestone this year. For years now our apple butter isn’t ready until Rita Fannon does the taste test, look, and thickness tests to confirm our quality. It’s a significant step in our process, however, going forward she has bequeathed this honor to Jeremy McKnight. And of course, Jeremy was smart enough to make sure he got her opinion on this year’s batch before certifying it as ready to pull. This year our first kettle was pulled off the fire at 6:10 pm. We dipped gallons of apple butter for all family members and guests who wanted some. The second kettle came off about 15 minutes or so later and the final yield for this year’s apple butter was 29 gallons and 1 quart, which is +1 quart from last year’s batch. This year for our apple butter we used a mix of 4 different apples; MacIntosh, Jonagold, Gala, and Red Romes.
We concluded the day with a bit of clean-up and a trip down the hill to the large fire pit where we enjoyed the company of family and the musical talents of Thomas Hollinger. We laughed, remembered good times passed and made many new memories. As the night grew on and the crowd around the fire diminished several stayed to enjoy the late night beverages, a cheeseball fight, and the spirit-filled fun of the campfire!
In addition to another camp breakfast cooked over the fires Sunday morning also brought a lot more clean up and the packing away of our kettles, cookers, spitz’, paddles, buckets, and all the other stuff we use each year to create our apple butter. I would like to thank everyone who helped us pull this reunion off this year. It’s way too much work to do alone but as a family, we manage to pull it together and make it better every year.
Below are a ton of pictures, taken by many people of this year’s reunion. Please enjoy and share them. If you were on hand this weekend and took some pictures please feel free to add them to the mix on Facebook by visiting and tagging Hollinger Applebutter in your pictures of you can send them to Rob Anspach via email or on Facebook. He will post them to the group for you.
The 2019 Hollinger Apple Butter Reunion is again scheduled to take place at Jennifer Romick’s house in Covington Ohio on October 11th, 12th, and 13th. So until next year, you’ll just have to stay tuned for more updates and family news as it’s posted!
Hollinger AppleButter 