Harvest and culture

QUINCY — Quincy will once again showcase the cultures that combine to make the area a great place to live, as it hosts the Celebration of Harvest and Culture on Sept. 28. 

“It's kind of a hybrid of two different festivals we've done in past years,” said Harriet Weber, director of the Quincy Valley Historical Society and Museum, which is organizing the event. “The first one is the harvest festival, and we did that for years every fall in conjunction with our third-grade field trip, with hands-on stations for all the third graders in Quincy. … And then a few years ago, we decided to start a Celebration of Cultures festival. So now we’ve made a hybrid of the two.” 

The harvest festival part includes things like a working cider press, a hayride and displays of pioneer life of more than a century ago. 

“And then we’ll also have an old-fashioned hymn sing inside the Pioneer Church, which has the beautiful barrel vault ceiling, perfect acoustics inside, so it makes it a wonderful place to sing,” Weber said. 

The hymn sing was a staple of the festival until a few years ago and was brought back by popular request, she added. 

The cultural festival will include booths and displays from many different heritages: German, Mexican, Salvadoran, Danish and more, Weber said. And many of those cultures will bring food to match — German sausage with sauerkraut, little Scandinavian pancakes called ebelskivers and, of course, tacos. 

There will be live music as well, Weber said. The Welter Brothers will perform their folk-bluegrass fusion music, and Pioneer Elementary School student Kataleya Garcia, who recently performed at the Grant County Fair, will sing traditional Mexican music. 

The fourth and final book in the Quincy Valley children’s book series, “Jose’s Grand Adventures,” will also be available for the first time, Weber said.  

“It’s the story of a Hispanic boy growing up in Quincy in the early 1960s,” Weber said. “The author, Melissa Slager, is going to be there and she’ll be doing book signings.” 

All the authors in the Quincy Valley series are local. The first book in that series, “Lena, Pioneer girl,” tells the story of a German-Russian girl who settled with her family in the Quincy Valley in 1904. “Ruby, Town Girl” is about another Quincy girl, this time set in the 1930s, and “Tuk’Luki, Wanapum Boy” follows a local Native boy during the building of Priest Rapids Dam. “Jose’s Grand Adventures” is the first in the series to be available in both English and Spanish. 

The high point of the festival, Weber said, is called the Ceremony of Oneness, in which the flags of 27 different nations whose descendants now live in Quincy will be carried in a parade and arranged around an American flag. State Rep. Alex Ybarra, a Quincy native, will speak and the Quincy High School choral and band department will perform the national anthem. The whole thing is to highlight the principle behind the national motto “E pluribus unum,” the Latin phrase that means “Out of many, one.” The motto originally referred to the United States coming together to form a union, but it can just as easily apply to the meeting of disparate cultures, Weber said. 

“We're all these different ethnic backgrounds, but we've all come together to be one community,” she said. “It's kind of a microcosm of the American community, that we are out of many, one.” 

Quincy Valley Celebration of Harvest and Culture 
11 a.m.-3 p.m. Sept. 28
Quincy Valley Historical Museum, 415 F St. SW
www.qvshm.org

    Part of the Celebration of Harvest and Culture on Sept. 28 is the Ceremony of Oneness, where flags of many nations are brought together around a U.S. flag to symbolize Americans’ many origins.
  

    Rafael Farias, foreground, provides the horsepower and Steve Weber feeds the corn for the machine that separates the kernels from the cob at the 2022 Celebration of Cultures. This year’s celebration, which will give attendees a glimpse of pioneer life in the Quincy Valley, is Sept. 28.