Fair Parade Highlights

The St. Tammany Parish Fair parade rolled through downtown Covington Friday morning with bands, marching groups, dancing troups, and a number of pageant winners. It's an election year, so there were many candidates waving and tossing beads and cups as well. Here are some photographs, click on them to make them larger. 

 

The Slidell High Band

 

An old sign found at the fairgrounds

 

Rodeo Queen contestants

 

Decorated family pick up truck

  

Walking along the parade route

 

Flag team

 

Even clowns love selfies

 

Pat Brister, Mike Strain, and Curt Sprang (Grand Marshal)

 

St. Scholastica Students congratulate  Miss St. Tammany

 

Sheriff Randy Smith and his deputies

 

A family of fair parade watchers

 

Dancers and exercise groups

 

Mayfield Elementary Pep Squad

 

Covington High Jr. ROTC Color Guard

 

Local football teams

 

The Clerk of Court's crew

 

Some of the pageant winners

100 Years Ago This Week

What was going on 100 years ago this week? CLICK HERE for a link to the St. Tammany Farmer of October 4, 1919. The link is provided by the Library of Congress and its Chronicling America service.

Click on the sample images below to see larger versions.

 

 

Parish Fair Exhibits

The St. Tammany Parish Fair displayed a large number of personally created exhibits in a variety of categories. Judging of exhibits took place Wednesday. Here are few photographs of exhibits in the Home Economics and the floral and produce exhibit areas. 

 

It was an emotional moment for longtime Parish Fair leader Frances Barker when she visited the Lee Road Jr. High School exhibit booth at the fair in Covington. The students had recreated downtown Barker's Corner, complete with Family Name street signs, old photographs, and the front entrance to Atwood Barker's General Merchandise Store. Two old time gas pumps had even been made for the scene. The exhibit spotlighted the tung oil industry north of Lee Road, as well as old classroom photos. It brought back many memories for Frances, whose family worked closely with school officials to build the school at the new site, consolidating three smaller schools in the area.

See also:

http://sttammanyparishfair.info/ 

St. Tammany Parish Fair 2019 

Parish Fair Facebook Page

Information on the St. Tammany Parish Fair

Hosanna Quilting Group

The Covington High School

Before Covington High School, there was THE Covington High School. Here is an ad from the early 1880's in the St. Tammany Farmer. Click on the image to make it larger. 

Homemade Ice Cream

Nothing brought a family together faster on a hot summer afternoon than one of the parents saying, "Let's make some ice cream."

It was no small task, one that took a lot of preparation, hand-cranking, and encouragement from the younger children to "keep on cranking." They wanted ice cream, and although they wanted it now, they knew that making ice cream took an eternity (it seemed) though it was actually about 30 to 45 minutes.

Because cranking the ice cream churn is what it was all about.

The Basics

People didn't use to go out and buy ice cream. They had a big ice cream freezer, which consisted of a metal cylinder hanging vertically inside a wooden bucket. You mixed together the ice cream ingredients: cream, eggs, vanilla extract, and sugar, and then poured it into the cylinder. You placed the metal cylinder into the wooden bucket, suspending it from a metal arch that contained within it the cranking gears which were attached to a large hand crank, about a foot long, that jutted out the side of the metal arch and hung down alongside the wooden bucket.

Then you poured crushed ice into the space between the metal can and the interior of the wooden bucket, and on top of that, you poured ice cream salt. The salt made the ice melt, the coldness from the melting ice went through the metal cylinder walls and starting freezing the cream mixture.


The Cranking

Then the cranking began. The cranking was fast and easy at first, and gradually became harder and harder. Why was that? Well, inside the metal can were a set of paddles affixed to a vertical shaft. The hand crank turned the gears on top of the metal cylinder, the rotating action was transferred to the paddles, and the paddles going around and around kept stirring and stirring the ice cream mixture.

The hand cranking continued. More ice was added to the space between the bucket and the cylinder. More salt was added to the ice. It melted. The ice cream mixture got colder. It gradually froze, making the cranking of the paddles around harder. 

 

A Covington woman in the early 1900's takes a turn at the cranking

At some point in time, either when you ran out of people to continue the cranking or it got too hard to crank any further (or maybe when the younger kids started jumping up and down and screaming "It's ready! It's ready!), then you pulled the metal can out of the ice, opened the top, carefully pulled the set of paddles out of the frozen ice cream, and started the delightful process of spooning out servings into the bowls and cups for the reward.

It was a great way to spend a summer afternoon, sitting on the porch with the parents, the siblings, and a couple of cousins, eating a couple of scoops of homemade ice cream. Then the debate began on who did the most cranking, who did the best cranking, and especially who got to eat the ice cream still clinging to the paddles. If you got to do that, it was a special gift, and you were a most favored child. 

Then more drug stores offered ice cream parlors with soda foundation drinks, and the homemade ice cream family team efforts began fading away. 

 

See also: 

The Cafe Cabaret Ice Cream Parlor