News on Aunt Firma from the 2016 Maple Syrup Fair

Greetings to all you Firma Phillips fans. 2021 seems to be my year for catching up on old news. 

In 2016 we went to the Parke County Maple Syrup Festival with friends the last Sunday of February. Like the Park County Covered Bridge Festival, the Maple Fair is an annual event that takes place over two weekends, in its case the last weekend of February and the first weekend of March when the tree sap is running. The artists always set up in the main building at the fairgrounds where the pancake breakfast is served. I always meet some interesting artists there. That year they were raffling one of Aunt Firma's paintings as a fund raiser. :) Ben talked with an artist in one of the booths - I wish I had taken her card - her Mom was a contemporary and colleague of Aunt Firma's. Anyway the very first year of the Bridge Festival the artists association asked to display in the courthouse. (When I was growing up in the sixties, that is where the artists displayed their paintings, but they eventually had their own building).

Anyway this lady told Ben the organizers didn't want to let the artists use the courthouse because the space was too big and there wouldn't be enough paintings to fill it. Well, as the story goes, Aunt Firma got busy painting and she earned $8,000 that year - or else the group did! That would have been in 1956.

Oh, and I took a photo on my iphone of the painting being raffled.

Happy New Year, All!

Junebug

And speaking of Painters and Poets - Archie Foxworthy

I have posted frequently on this blog about my great-aunt Firma Duchene Philips, a well-known scenery painter and one of the charter members of the Parke County Covered Bridge Festival. I'd now like to introduce some other memorable folks from my youth - namely Archie and Mary Foxworthy. I spent my teenage years with my grandparents Claude and Helen Alward in Fountain County just outside the town of Wallace, Indiana. Every fall my grandparents would help Archie and Mary ready the produce and products they had raised on their Parke County farm to sell at the Rockville Covered Bridge Festival. My grandparents would tie bunches of bittersweet and help bundle other local fruit and flora such as persimmons and sassafras roots as well as various jams and jellies, I suppose. For many years Archie and Mary ran a produce stand on the corner of highway 234 and US 41, across from a little store called Jipville, where they sold the fruits and vegetables they had raised throughout the growing season. I got to know them there, and at Wolf Creek Community Church, and through Lodge and Eastern Star activities in Wallace. Also Archie had a sugar camp for as long as I can remember - and I have an oil painting of it painted by my Aunt Firma Phillips. The painting has also been around for as long as I can remember. When Parke County started the Maple Syrup Festival which runs from the last weekend of February through the first weekend of March, Archie and Mary became very involved in this event. In fact I'm looking forward to attending this coming weekend and buying some of Foxworthy Farms maple syrup. Now 93 years old, Archie is a musician, a poet, a humorist, and a philosopher. Duane Busick, an Indiana journalist, has produced a wonderful three-part series of videos about Archie entitled "Archie Foxworthy, Parke County Treasure" which can now be viewed on YouTube - and the links follow below. I hope you enjoy meeting Archie and his family as much as I have enjoyed knowing them throughout my life.


Archie Foxworthy, Parke County Treasure - Part One - opens with spectacular scenes of Parke County Covered Bridges as Archie picks his banjo with a hickory nut and sings in the background ...





Archie Foxworthy, Parke County Treasure - Part Two



Archie Foxworthy, Parke County Treasure - Part Three



And here's my Aunt Firma's painting of Archie's Maple Syrup Camp.

JuneBug