The sights, sounds, smells and tastes of autumn will be featured at the 1719 Hans Herr House and Museum’s 22nd Annual SNITZ FEST on Oct. 3 from 10am to 4pm. The family festival celebrates the importance of apples for the early Pennsylvania German settlers of what is now Lancaster County. Apples provided food for the settlers and their livestock, fuel for heating and cooking, and cider, the most popular beverage of the colonial Pennsylvania-German community.
Watch orchard ripened apples being pressed into cider. Take a bite into a crisp heirloom apple, grown in the museum’s orchard. Nearby, the wood smoke rises as sausage is gently smoked over an apple wood fire. See apples being cut into pieces, to be dried as “snitz” and watch as bright orange pumpkins get cut with a pumpkin cutter. Tour the orchard of heirloom and historic varieties of apple, pear and nut trees. Taste and compare examples of many heirloom varieties of apples. Decide if you prefer a York Imperial or a Sheepnose, a Winter Banana or a Northern Spy. Summer Rambo, Gravenstein, Lady of Oldenburg, and Chenango Strawberry apples may all be sampled at the table. These apples are all grown on the museum grounds.
The 22nd Annual SNITZ FEST features many traditional harvest time activities and crafts. Visitors will have the opportunity to witness hog butchering, to watch blacksmithing, fabric dyeing and quilting. View basket-making, sausage stuffing and smoking and candle making. Children will enjoy colonial toys such as the Game of Graces, tabletop ninepins and the Bilbo catcher. Both the 1719 Herr House and the 1835 Shaub House will be open for tours. Traditional Pennsylvania German recipes such as cabbage to cauliflower, bread soup, apple fritters are cooked at the hearth and rye bread, snitz pie and apple pie will be baked in the outdoor beehive bake oven. Apple dumplings, apple fritters, sausage sandwiches, doughnuts, hot cider and coffee may be purchased at the food tent.
Admission is $6 for adults and $2 for children ages 7 to 12; children 6 and under are free. The 1719 Hans Herr House and Museum is located at 1849 Hans Herr Drive, Willow Street, 5 miles south of Lancaster between US 222 / PA 741 and Penn Grant Road. For more information call 717-464-4438 or see the Museum Web site, www.hansherr.org