What I Learned At the Farm ShowbYesterday

Roger is busy right now picking through a box of Clapp family history. The Clapps were inventors, investors, artists, writers. Henry Clay drank lemonade on the porch of Benjamin Clapp’s house in 1840. You can still see the Clapp mansion in Wappinger’s Falls, New York, it’s an apartment house but still grand. Clinton Clapp’s paintings hang in the library, and there is a Clapp Street. 

And while the Clapps were building their name in New York, my family on all sides were raising chickens and cows and crops in Mainsburg Pa, and in Jefferson County, Pa. I come from a long line of farmers. 

Now I am glad, glad, glad, to live in town. I like having neighbors and listening to the swish of cars going by in front of my house.  But when I go to the Farm Show I remember where I’m from. 

I’m from people who milked cows. I’m from a grandpa—the first county agent in Wyoming county, PA—who advised farmers on new and better methods. I’m from a mom who learned to sew first in 4H club. She did it so well she made every semi-formal gown I ever wore, including my wedding dress. 

My sister, brother, cousins, and I used to run all over the Farm Show complex. We were impressed by my grandfather’s blue ribbons for his apples. We were impressed that he knew lots of people and  talked to all of them. But we were most impressed that we got to explore that huge place on our own.  

We discovered cows and sheep. We discovered apples and maple syrup cotton candy. We ran up and down the empty service hallway where somebody might be leading a cow or horse any moment. 

When I stepped into that hallway yesterday with my own grown up kids, I was glad they were at the Farm Show with me. I hoped I passed along something of the farmers in my family and even the inventors and painters and businessmen named Clapp.