Lansing - Brad Fast and two children bundled in coats, hats and gloves slowly pulled a long wooden spoon through a charred kettle of boiling brown butter on Sunday afternoon.
The trio revolved around the copper pot, avoiding the white apple-scented smoke emerging from the fire.
“That’s it, now stir around the edges,” Fast, a general management senior and defenseman on the MSU hockey team, said to his boiling buddies. “If we move this way the smoke may not be so bad.”
The activity brought MSU athletes, park employees, volunteers and Lansing-area residents together to celebrate the Apple Butter Festival at the Fenner Nature Center, 2020 E. Mount Hope Ave.
Participants stirred apple butter, cranked an apple press, sawed logs, dipped candles and watched demonstrations of quilting, weaving, lace making and wool spinning.
“I just think it’s fun for all of these little kids here to see all these different events and get out on a beautiful day like today,” Fast said.
The festival has been around for over 30 years.
“We try to combine fall harvest with the history of people in the area,” said Clara Bratton, a naturalist for the center.
It took volunteers from the Friends of Fenner Nature Center eight days to prepare for the festival. Ron Eggleston, a volunteer for five years, said the days consisted of constant apple butter production, which includes cooking cider and peeled apples for six hours, stirring the substance and then adding cinnamon and sugar.
“These are things that people used to do tens, twenties, hundreds of years ago,” he said. “It’s always fun to expose the visitors to something new. Something old that’s new to them.”
Inside the center, volunteers sold the homemade apple butter along with cider, baked goods, popcorn and doughnuts to raise money for educational programs and improvements for the center.
“Unfortunately it’s harder and harder to get enough public money for the park system,” Eggleston said.
“So there’s a lot of things the park wouldn’t be able to offer if it weren’t for the Friends of Fenner. Most of us who live around here get a lot of enjoyment out of this park, and it’s good to share it with other people.”
Lansing resident Becky McCarthy, who came to the festival with her husband and two young daughters, said her family uses the park for other events as well.
“We come most years,” she said. “A lot of people don’t know the park is here or how big it is.”
