Note: If any viewers have photos of the Apple Butter Festivals, please send to millslawngreenspace@gmail.com

The following are excerpts from Joan Horn’s book entitled Playing All the Keys: The Life of Walter F. Anderson, published in 2007 by the Yellow Springs Historical Society. The author, a 1956 graduate of Antioch College and a Yellow Springs resident, details the extraordinary life and accomplishments of Walter Anderson. Mr. Anderson, affectionately known as Andy, was the founder and driving force of the famous
Yellow Springs Apple Butter Festivals.

“Walter F. Anderson was one of nine children, born in Zanesville, Ohio, the grandson of former slaves, and a child prodigy in music. When he was hired by Antioch College in 1946, he set a precedent, being the first African American chair of a department in any predominantly white institution of higher learning in the United States. He was Coretta Scott King's professor, and helped Leontyne Price get her start on the concert stage. His career was capped as Chair of the Music Committee at the National Endowment for the Arts. Throughout, he managed to stretch his days to outrun everyone else, and several prestigious posthumous awards attest to his triumphant accomplishments.” (Amazon.com)

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Pg. 126
“… if anyone mentions Andy’s name to old-timers in the Village now, more that forty years after he held the last event (they remember)…The Apple Butter Festivals. This community wide tour de force, orchestrated by Andy himself, still conjures up memories for all who participated in any of them.”

Pg.128
“So an idea that had begun as a few folks stirring cider and apples in a kettle over an open fire in their backyard mushroomed into an event that involved the entire community and many of the students on campus.”  “They chose Mills Lawn, a square block of lawn and huge shade trees surrounding the home of Judge William Mills (founder of Yellow Springs), a sprawling, white, three-story clapboard house with wide porches on all sides, used then as an Antioch dormitory.”

Pg. 128
“Serendipitously, it was located near the center of the village. Andy considered it a particularly significant spot as the festival would be the first event held there since the college, which owned the square block, had started talking about giving the land to the village. In fact, President Doug McGregor turned the deed over to the village in 1949 on the condition that good community use be made of the land.”

Pg. 128
“Ultimately, the festival was held at Mills Lawn in 1948, 1951, 1952, 1954, 1955, and a later revival in 1960. Andy … was supervising, encouraging, sampling, basting the barbequing pork, and stirring the beans cooking in pots in holes in the ground.”

Pg. 129
“After laying out the site, volunteers were constructing booths, stringing makeshift lights, cutting wood for the day-long fires needed for the apple butter cooking, erecting tripods from which to suspend the kettles over the multiple fires, and installing a sound system.”

Pg. 129
“And volunteers showed up with regularity for a myriad of tasks.” “… an aged, grizzled man would periodically walk up to one of the kettles of apple butter as it was bubbling, pull a spoon from his vest pocket, dip it into the mixture and taste it, then return the spoon to its resting place. He was apparently a self-appointed quality-control expert. He didn’t bother anyone with his findings, and nobody bothered him.”

Pg. 130
“In the spirit of the old-time event it was meant to be, there were slipper kicking contests, husband-calling contests, a country auction, storytelling, silent movies projected after dark against a scree hung between two trees on Mills Lawn, a per show, and a one year Senior Citizen sponsored century old display.”

Pg. 130
“Thanks to the sound system, there was square- and folk dancing in the streets around Mills Lawn. And through it all, the continual stirring of the apple mixture in the giant copper kettles. There were beans baking in holes in the ground and pork shoulders being turned on spits. It was a truly multi-sensory event, with a wonderful collaboration between the college and the larger community.”

Pg. 134
“Today, when Andy’s name is mentioned in Yellow Springs, the first thing people are likely to think of is not his sterling musicianship but the Apple Butter Festival, which caused him to become a legend in his own time. With not a little nostalgia, there are those who wish a new “Andy” would come forward and re-create the festival, to try and to recapture the innocence of simpler times.”

Pg. 194-5
“Other musical adventures sprang up during Andy’s years at Antioch..” One such was the Trolly Riders of Lower Limestone Street, Inc., a men’s barbershop quartet formed by Bill “Cap” Adams, a former vet who attend Antioch in the late forties. “During Andy’s Apple Butter Festivals, the Trolley Riders rented costumes – white flannel slacks, red and white striped blazers, and straw boater – and strolled around Mills Lawn singing as the pot stirrers kept up a rhythm with the paddles in the kettles of apple butter.

Read the Yellow Springs News interview with author Joan Horn from 2008.

Read the Yellow Springs News obituary for Walter F. Anderson from 2003.