by Gary Schenkel | Apr 28, 2014 | Business, Food, History, Tourism
The sun shone brightly Saturday on the ribbon cutting and open house that marked the beginning of a new chapter in Urbana, Ohio’s oldest downtown business, Carmazzi’s Deli and Candy Store. I offer you a recap of the celebration in photos. And if you haven’t read it already, check out my original post on the continuation of Carmazzi’s 121-year tradition under new ownership.
John Carmazzi, and his wife, Michelle, at left, with new owners Jeff and Teresa Donay, who will continue the Carmazzi’s tradition begun 121 years ago by John’s great uncle Sam Bianchi.
Jeff Donay cuts the ribbon to mark the store’s transition to its new name, Carmazzi’s Corner, a tribute to the Carmazzi family’s many years of dedicated service to their customers and community.
Carmazzi’s tantalizing selection of classic candies will continue to draw kids and the young at heart.
Carmazzi’s Corner also introduces some new features, including Young’s Jersey Dairy ice cream and store manager Nanette Hagan’s sandwiches, salads and desserts.
by Gary Schenkel | Sep 19, 2013 | Agriculture, Events, History, Music, Tourism
I’m looking forward to a festival-filled fall weekend in Champaign and Union counties.
I invite you to join me at the Ohio Fish and Shrimp Festival at Freshwater Farms of Ohio, just north of Urbana, and the Covered Bridge Bluegrass Festival in Union County – both Friday through Saturday, September 20-22. Click on the links for details.
Both feature a hearty selection of live music and good food — and lots of family fun.
Not Your Average Harvest Festival
An unusual fall harvest celebration for Ohio, the Fish and Shrimp Festival marks Freshwater Farm’s annual freshwater shrimp harvest with lots of mouth-watering locally grown shrimp, as well as trout grown on the farm, too.
Music on the outdoor stage includes folk, blues, country, rock, reggae — and steel drum. Other features include a shrimp peeling and eating contest, games, self-guided tours of the farm, displays of native aquatic creatures, a chance to pet Ohio’s largest native fish, the sturgeon, and the debut of a new habitat for the farm’s resident alligator, Fluffy, who made a surprise appearance at the festival three years ago, delivered by sheriff’s deputies after they caught her in a local pond.
A Festival That Has It All Covered
The Muleskinners Bluegrass Band will perform at the Covered Bridge Bluegrass Festival.
Union County’s historic covered bridges set the theme for the Covered Bridge Bluegrass Festival. One of the bridges, the Pottersburg Bridge at 17141 Inskeep-Cratty Rd., North Lewisburg, will serve as the festival’s centerpiece and the setting for an elegant sunset dinner, a breakfast and a church service. The bridge also will serve as the stage for a variety of bluegrass bands and folk musicians.
Other festival features include guided bridge tours, a pie baking contest and auction, a marketplace of antiques and local artists’ work, painting classes, a vintage fashion show, old-fashioned games for kids, horse drawn wagon rides, appearances by folk artist Billy Jacobs and a concert by Nashville bluegrass band the Banjo Cats.
See you out and about this weekend.
by Gary Schenkel | Sep 15, 2011 | Events, History, Music
Ever wonder what it would be like to crash a reunion of the family von Trapp?
OK, probably not.
Daniel Dye and his niece Carrie Miller, nephews Thomas and Andrew Miller and sister Sarah Kelly help bring the first Madden Road MusicFest to a close.
But if you’d had the pleasure, as I did, to attend the Madden Road MusicFest Saturday, September 3, the thought may have at least fleetingly entered your mind as Mutual, Ohio’s one-time town hall and schoolhouse was brought back from decades of suspended animation, alive with the sound of music—thanks in large measure to a very talented family.
Local singer-songwriter Daniel Dye orchestrated the festival with a chorus of family members. His mother, Janet Dye, owns the Town Hall Emporium on the building’s first floor. He credits his sister Sarah Kelly, visiting from Massachusetts (check out her blog about her happy reacquaintance with Urbana), as the driving force behind the festival. She had the vision of a music festival as a way to begin raising money to restore the building and turn it into the Madden Road Music Hall, a permanent music venue.
The Dye Family Singers, with Daniel and sisters Jenny, Amy and Kelly, brother Steve and father David continue a tradition of singing together.
Between bands at the MusicFest, Daniel, Sarah and other members of the Dye Family Singers – father David, sisters Amy Blanton and Jenny Miller, and brother Steve – harmonized gospel arrangements.
The next generation of the Dye clan got in on the act, too, as Andrew, Carrie and Thomas Miller (children of Jenny) joined their Uncle Daniel, backing up his vocals, guitar and harmonica with fiddle, cello, banjo, mandolin and accordion as the Miller Road Band*. Here’s a video of them performing “I’m Gonna Let You Go” as the final act of the Madden Road MusicFest.
The second floor of the old Mutual town hall—used in recent years to hold an overflow of antiques from the downstairs emporium—formed the perfect backdrop for the day’s celebration of roots music—from folk and Americana, to bluegrass and gospel, and even some acoustic indie rock.
The Muleskinner Band opened the festival. Other performers included The Kurtz Trio, Dr. Chris Bingman, Like A Child and Andolino.
The scene could have been lifted from the brittle, curled page of an album found in a trunk in the attic: bare, sepia-toned plaster walls, sunlight streaming through tall arched windows, four ceiling fans churning through the hot, damp late summer air.
In restoring the building, the Dyes hope to preserve much of its frozen-in-time charm – maybe even down to this scrawled notation they found when cleaning years of grime from a wall: “Lewis Rodman … Mutual Ohio … Jan. 5, 1901 at the Show.”
Fast forward a century and decade later … from babies to grandpas and grandmas, people filled the hall again on wooden chairs and benches, feet tapping the worn floorboards.
Guitarist Johnny O of Urbana, far right foreground, was joined by several other musicians for an impressive jam session outside the town hall.
And the feeling of a bygone era before the age of social media, a traditional family reunion, a church gathering, spilled outside the old brick hall to a tent where people conversed over food and musicians gathered, one calling out a song title and all joining beautifully, in community.
* You have two chances to see Daniel Dye and the Miller Road Band live this weekend at the Ohio Fish and Shrimp Festival at Freshwater Farms of Ohio, north of Urbana – at 6 p.m. Friday, September 16 and 2:15 p.m. Saturday, September 17.
by Gary Schenkel | Aug 20, 2011 | Events, History, Music, Tourism
I was looking forward to hearing my favorite living musical legend over the Labor Day weekend, at the Detroit Jazz Festival. But then I read online that Dave Brubeck’s “medical team” (mere mortals have doctors) advised him to cancel. Although still a virtuoso of the keyboard, he is, after all, a few months shy of 91.
While concerned for him, I’ve overcome my disappointment. Now I’m looking forward to my new Labor Day weekend destination: Mutual, Ohio (population 129).
More specifically, I’m looking forward to a brand new music festival, the Madden Road MusicFest, which will debut in Mutual’s old town hall (5854 E. St. Rt. 29, at the corner of S. Mutual-Union Road), Saturday, September 3, noon to 9 p.m.
Mutual, situated at the intersection of State Routes 29 and 161 and surrounded by farmland, is a mere six and a half miles from my house in Urbana and 170 miles or so separated from the distractions of the Motor City (though just 40 miles from Columbus or 45 from Dayton).
For the old town hall of Mutual, Ohio, the writing's on the floor, marked in dust: The building will debut in its new role, music hall, September 3 at the Madden Road MusicFest. Daniel Dye, at right, with his wife, Yasmin, and brother-in-law Scott Blanton take a break from getting the building ready for showtime.
The Madden Road MusicFest is all about the music—a mix of folk, bluegrass, rock, gospel and Americana, performed by talented central Ohio musicians, including the coordinator and headliner of the whole affair, local singer/songwriter Daniel Dye. Dye, who recently completed a solo European tour, wants to restore the building to become a regular, intimate concert venue.
Tickets for the Madden Road MusicFest (at a reasonable $10 for the day or $6 for a half day) will support the restoration.
Performances will be on the second floor, above the Town Hall Emporium, an antique shop that Dye’s mother, Janet Dye, has run for the last several years. The building also served as a school with a scaled-down basketball court (a slate scoreboard, marked “Mutual” and “Visitors,” still hangs on a wall on the second floor).
On September 3, the lineup will be The Muleskinner Band, Andolino, Rockin’ Chairs, Like A Child, the Kurtz Trio, and Daniel Dye’s own band featuring two nephews and a niece, Daniel Dye and the Miller Road Band. Also featured is jazz guitarist Johnny O, who will be holding court outside the old town hall, inviting guests to bring instruments and join him in some pickin’ and grinnin’.
If you like your music up close and personal and want to have a part in preserving history, the Madden Road MusicFest is the place to be. See you there!
One more thing: food will be available for purchase – also to help support the cause – along with coffee from Hemisphere Coffee Roasters, the subject of a previous Champaign Uncorked! post.
For more, visit the Madden Road MusicFest website and Facebook page (and “like” it).
And here’s a little bonus: a bit of Mutual history that parallels my abbreviated Labor Day journey, more or less….
Mutual, incorporated as a village in 1869, traces its roots back to William Lafferty, a Union Township farmer. In 1840, he told his neighbors he was leaving for Texas. A few miles into his journey, at Old Post Road, now State Route 161, one of his wagon wheels snapped. Near that spot he built a cabin. Others settled around him. They named their new haven Little Texas, a name that was ultimately rejected, apparently by mutual agreement. (Never fear, citizens of Mutual. I will never refer to your home as Little Detroit.)
by Gary Schenkel | Apr 10, 2011 | General, History
This Tuesday, April 12, marks the 150th anniversary of the Confederates’ first shots on Fort Sumter, the start of the Civil War.
In God’s grand scheme 150 years is but a day (actually, a little more than three and a half hours, if you calculate by 2 Peter 3:8). Even from our limited perspective it’s less than twice the average American’s life span.
It’s difficult, at least for me, to believe that we’re quickly approaching the 10th anniversary of the tragic 9/11 terrorist attacks on American civilians. The memory of the moment I first heard the news is still fresh, as it probably is for you.
The Man on the Monument, downtown Urbana, Ohio.
But time marches on. Memory fades.
Even so, reminders of the War Between the States still stand among us. In Urbana, Ohio, every time we navigate the roundabout on Monument Square we see the iconic Man on the Monument. He’s an unnamed Union cavalryman preserved in bronze, head poignantly bowed for his fallen comrades—a testament to the 578 Champaign County men who gave their lives to preserve the Union and the principles and freedoms it was founded on.
Urbana firefighters and paramedics stand in front of the World Trade Center steel on Saturday.
In this same spirit, the Urbana Rotary Club stirred our memories and emotions on Saturday. The Rotarians coordinated a caravan of emergency vehicles and motorcycles, which escorted through the county a flatbed truck bearing a flag-draped, twisted and bent steel beam—a testament to the violence of 9/11 that brought down the World Trade Center and with it the lives of 3,000 innocent victims, including one of Champaign County’s own, Alicia Titus, a United Airlines flight attendant.
The caravan, witnessed by hundreds of Champaign County residents, came to a stop at Freedom Grove, where the twisted steel will become the centerpiece of a memorial to 9/11. To be designed by local artist Mike Major, the memorial will be dedicated this September 11, the 10th anniversary of 9/11, reminding future generations of the terrorist attacks, just as the Man on the Monument reminds us of the sacrifices that saved our country from destruction.
Fred Maine, who transported the WTC beam from New York, speaks Saturday at Freedom Grove.
Freedom Grove, at U.S. 68 and State Route 55 on the south end of Urbana, sits on land leased by the Rotary Club for a dollar a year from the Champaign County Board of Commissioners. The Rotary Club is developing the six-acre park through a countywide collaboration of organizations and citizens. It already includes:
- Monuments dedicated to Americans who have sacrificed their lives for freedom, from the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror
- A bell tower that houses Champaign County’s Bicentennial bell
- A one and a half mile walking path
Click here to find out how you can support the development of Freedom Grove, the 9/11 memorial and pay tribute to loved ones.
Watch a WHIO-TV report on the 9/11 memorial.
Read an Urbana Daily Citizen article about the WTC steel procession.
by Gary Schenkel | Nov 11, 2010 | History
Only one day is marked on the calendar to honor the men and women who have defended our country. But at the Champaign Aviation Museum in Urbana, Ohio, every day is Veterans Day.
Guests view planes during the Champaign Aviation Museum's open house on Saturday. The Champaign Lady B-17 can be seen in the background.
World War II B-17 vets often stop by to check progress of the museum’s project to rebuild a B-17 Flying Fortress—the Champaign Lady—to flying status. In its fifth year, the volunteer effort recently moved from Hangar 9 on the south end of Grimes Field to the museum, on the airport’s north end. It shares the space with other vintage aircraft.
When B-17 veterans arrive they get a hero’s welcome. Photos of the veterans decorate the work area. And work stops as the volunteers take in the veterans’ recounting of nighttime raids over Nazi Germany, of their riddled planes lumbering back to base.
The B-17 restoration and the museum are not just about antique flying machines. Urbana businessman and benefactor Jerry Shiffer started the project—and his family has continued it since his death—as a way to remember the sacrifices made for our freedoms.
Take a moment to visit the museum’s website—in particular a page that features bios of a couple of the many veterans who have visited the Champaign Lady. Stop by the museum, too. You might even get to meet a B-17 crew member, as I did on one visit.
And thank the veterans around you.
My nephew Wes, back from Iraq.
My nephew Mark, in Afghanistan.
I take this opportunity to honor the memory of my father-in-law, Kenneth Markley, who served in the Korean War, and my father, James Schenkel, who served in the Pacific Theater in World War II and at the beginning of the occupation of Japan at war’s end.
And a special salute to my nephews, Wes and Mark Poppel: Wes is back at Cannon Air Force Base, N.M., after a tour in Iraq, and Mark, with the Ohio Air National Guard, is back from Afghanistan.
Click here to view a brochure that I and graphic designer Melinda Thackery created for the Champaign Aviation Museum.
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