These stouthearted folks are up early and braving the elements for a simple reason: to eat buckwheat cakes and sausage served up by the Bolar Ruritan Club. This is the first day of the two-weekend Highland Maple Festival, going strong for 52 years. For locals who like a hearty breakfast and want to support the annual festival—including just about all of the 2,500 residents in isolated Highland County—the question is not whether you will eat pancakes slathered with sweet, locally produced maple syrup; it’s where you will do so and how early you’ll get in line.
The Bolar Ruritans—one of more than a dozen organizations throughout Highland County that take part in the Maple Festival—have been firing up their griddle since the first festival, in 1958, when members made pancakes on a coal-fired stove. Today, in a converted meeting hall room at the church, they offer the only made-on-site pancake batter in the county. A lot has changed in 50 years, but the recipe for the Bolar Ruritan pancakes hasn’t been altered a smidgen. County resident Harriet Criser offered her pancake recipe to the club in the 1950s—and today it is still taped to the club house wall.
Inside the eating room, veteran Maple Festival early birds pack into rows of long tables dotted with glass pitchers containing the light amber syrup that put Highland County on the map half a century ago. Bustling up and down the rows, club members take orders. There, longtime Ruritan Bill Bratton, 65, flips cakes and works the spatula with the dexterity of a short order cook while bantering with a half-dozen fellow Ruritans who are teasing him to work faster. Bratton’s hair glistens with grease accumulated from the steamy air, and he occasionally wipes his brow with the corner of his apron, but working the festival is a treasured tradition for him. His father, also a Ruritan, did it before him. Bratton and Ryan Hodges, his partner at the griddle, will turn out about 4,000 cakes before this weekend is over. “I’ve always liked to cook,” Bratton says. “I can remember the very first Maple Festival that was held here. As a kid, I always wanted to bake the cakes, and I’ve been doing it ever since then.”
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