Patten’s annual Pioneer Days started Monday, Aug. 3, with a pet parade and continues all week with food, parades, art shows, live music and historical reenactments through Sunday, Aug. 9.
This packed schedule of activities and events is steeped in this Penobscot County town’s historic roots with such offerings as the river driver’s authentic bean hole bean dinner and the 3rd Maine Infantry’s Civil War reenactment.
For several of the event’s non-profit sponsors — the Patten Cultural Center, Patten Historical Society and the Lumbermen’s Museum — the proceeds help fund activities for the coming year.
On Friday, the museum is holding a bean hole bean watch day from noon to 2 p.m. for people to observe how the historic beans are made. Volunteers and Museum board members will be building fires in the bean holes, seasoning the beans with salt pork, onions, molasses and spices and then lowering the pots onto the bed of hot coals. The beans are also covered with coals and left in the ground to cook overnight.
The preparation of all the food for Saturday’s famed dinner is authentic, said Dottie Tucker, executive director of the Lumbermen’s Museum.
Beans were a staple of the river drivers and they generally ate them for every meal, she said.
Four barrels of beans, half a barrel of pork, one barrel of flour, half a barrel of meal, a quarter of a barrel of sugar and five gallons of molasses were used every day at the logging camps. according to an 1877 Lewiston Sun Journal story.
This year, museum cooks will make 20 pots of beans. Each pot holds about 15 quarts and weighs about 80 pounds, said Tucker.
The dinner — bean hole beans, biscuits cooked in outdoor reflector ovens at the museum, homemade coleslaw, a drink, and locally made gingerbread — is $14 for adults and $7 for children.
There will also be coffee brewed on an open fire, authentic Maine red hot dogs, live music, blacksmith demonstrations and horse rides.
Also on Friday, bean hole bean watchers can watch the 3rd Maine Regiment Volunteer Infantry, Company A set up in the field across from the Lumbermen’s Museum. The authentic Civil War reenactors will march in the parade on Saturday morning, said Marcia Pond Anderson, president of the Historical Society.
Pond Anderson led the initiative to save the 1845 Regular Baptist Church that has been transformed into the Cultural Center.
After the parade, 3rd Maine will be on the grounds demonstrating tasks like loading and firing muskets, she said.
“It was really well received last year, especially with the children,” Pond Anderson said. “I had tried for a couple years to get them and they came up last year. It puts it in more perspective to see the historical accuracy.”
The Cultural Center, which is the original church of the town founders, was where young men signed up for service in the Civil War.
There will be an art show at the Cultural Center on Tuesday, tours of the center and historical society on Wednesday and Friday and the very popular pie contest on Wednesday.
Also on tap next week will be the Katahdin Masons steak dinner on Thursday, a yard sale on Saturday and Sunday and fireworks at Shin Pond Village on Saturday night.
