Preserving Tradition

Apple butter and ham jowl at one of Appalachia’s last communal canneries.

- Shane Mitchell

Around three in the morning Ronald David turned on the lights and fired up the boiler at Glade Hill Cannery in rural Franklin County, where tobacco fields and apple orchards checkerboard the red clay foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge. A sturdy 74-year-old former mechanic with a bottle-brush mustache and a crescent wrench stuck in the back pocket of his jeans, he is the master canner at one of the remaining community canneries in operation.

It was still dark when parishioners from Greater Mount Parrish Baptist Church arrived to cook the 40 bushels of fruit they had cored and sectioned here a day before. Soon, steam from the pressure cookers gathered on the ceiling and fogged the studio windows of this cinder block building, a former schoolroom and occasional garage for the county fire truck. David donned a red apron and scribbled notes on his clipboard after checking the gauges and valves on his equipment.

“I needed something to do when I retired from DuPont back in ’93,” he said. His accent was burred with an Appalachian cadence slightly impenetrable to an unfamiliar ear. “The lady used to run this place, I’ll bet you, consistently every pot she made tasted the same. She and my mother went to school together, that’s why she asked me to come up here and take over.”