Angelpond began as a deep hole in the ground, 12 or 15 feet deep depending on which side of the dog-leg from which an adventurer needed to climb. Two swales allowed runoff to slowly begin filling the pond, naturally lined with clay soil. It took an autumn heavy storm to transform the hole overnight.
Swale runoff two-feet deep appeared as like a river. Slowly the filled pond came to life with nature planting water vegetation. A neighborhood child captured two turtles in a bucket from a golf course water hazard. Thus the sea life began in Angelpond. Wabash River and Kunkel Lake fishing initiated the now ongoing fish stock. God took over and aquatic life of flora and fauna multiplied, and it was good.
Today’s beginning of 2022 autumn will be celebrated with a fish sandwich. Tuesday’s opening day of 2022 Bluffton Free Street Fair’s likewise began with a fish sandwich for Angelkeep. Walleye became a daily staple. Who was first to come up with the realization that walleye fish are long and thus fried walleye belong in an elongated bun? They got it right, if it’s slathered with a double dose of tartar sauce.
Angelkeep Journal’s writer lived most of his life in Lancaster Township. As a rural Uniondale farm child, attending Street Fair constituted a family affair. This family of seven, one to be added in a later year, marched the streets in a small mass, like the Angelpond fish schooling together awaiting bread to be cast upon the water.
Back in those 1950s days, no games were played, too much like gambling. The Mettler family fish booth, passed by without eating, proved too costly for a family of seven and counting. Mom fried a Granite Ware roaster full of fried (then steamed, her way of cooking) chicken which everyone ate cold for Saturday’s Street Fair noon meal. All-you-can-eat cold chicken right from the trunk of the car parked along a Bluffton side street became a nostalgic feast. And it was good.
Farmers initiated the idea of Street Fair. A meeting notice in Bluffton Chronicle called for farmers and businessmen to meet for considering holding of a street fair in Bluffton some time in autumn. Particulars included meeting at City Hall, 1 p.m., June 4, 1898. “All are invited,” read the notice signed by “Many Farmers.” To revisit that memorable first beginning of Bluffton Free Street Fair meeting location, one must step into the Republican Headquarters. It’s easy to find, just outside the carousel.
Angelkeep puffed up as proud as the band major leading the band down the Street Fair midway. Why? Lancaster Township farmer John R. Davis became the first name ever mentioned as one of the originators of Bluffton Free Street Fair. He and other Wells County farmers desired an opportunity to showcase farm products, “and show the extreme fertility of the soil of good old Wells.”
Davis intended to write Peru for details on how they pulled off their annual exhibitions, Peru being a circus town of great renown. Farmer Davis made a Lancasterite very proud of the heritage.
To celebrate Davis’s April 1898 initiative toward beginning a two day Bluffton carnival novelty (it grew to three days that year,) Angelkeep would follow up that walleye sandwich with a Street Fair jumbo breaded tenderloin with pickle, onion, and mustard. Thursday dessert must be a piece of Southern Wells booth pie, before the black raspberry selection disappeared. Southern Wells provided years of the best pie on the midway.
Meanwhile back at Angelkeep, holding down the fort so to speak, Gwen fed the multitude of furry and feathered fairgoers attending the Angelpond Free Pond Fair. Corn placed on the south side of the pond’s midway, not caramel nor wrapped around a hot dog, was just good old farmer-grown kernels like what farmers of old exhibited on tables in front of the courthouse hoping to win a premium. More important was a year of bragging rights as Best Corn Grower.
Angelkeep’s Free Pond Fair’s sunflower seed feeders recalled memories of gardeners and farmers leaning sunflower stalks against the east wall of the Community Building Gym. As a child, and later as an adult clinging to Street Fair child-like wonderment, those giant sunflowers seemed to reach to the moon.
Some Lancaster natives, including the Angelkeep Lancaster native, attended Street Fair not seeking thrills via a wild ride, nor sweet elephant ears, fire engines in parade, nor even losing two bits when a mouse runs amuck diving into the wrong hole. Bluffton Free Street Fair to this Lancasterite was nostalgia to the nines, recalling all the beginnings.
And it was good.
Mr. Daugherty is a Wells County resident who, along with his wife Gwen, enjoy their backyard and have named it “Angelkeep.”
