And the Winner Is

Maggie Barnes Pat Kelly Don Knaus

Bruce Dart

Carol Myers Cacchione Michael Kulbacki Linda Stager

Sometimes Good Sh!t Happens By Michael Capuzzo

Maggie Barnes, Mountain Home’s humor columnist, was looking for a good laugh in the fall of 2021, when the sky and the news were bleak, and found it in a bottle of wine. It was a fine cab-merlot blend with the label: “Sh!tshow, A Fine Wine for the Times.”

Maggie won a prestigious Keystone Media Award from the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association for her hilarious story about how Grovedale Winery in Wyalusing came up with a popular “line of wines that spoke to the times,” giving people “a way to laugh, when you really want to cry.” Sh!tshow’s “trio of red, white, and rosé wines, all dry,” are “a perfect consolation for the next time something in your life falls apart,” Maggie wrote. The wine came out of the bottle in 2020, but the label applied equally to 2021, and 2022 looks promising for the blend.

The old chestnut “laughter is the best medicine” comes from the Bible. (Actually, it’s “A merry heart does good, like medicine,” Proverbs 17:22). Even Nietzsche, who said God was dead, agreed. So take it from me and read “Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut,” along with Maggie’s other musings, which won first place for columns in the state. Prove to yourself you can grin like a fool without drinking.

New York poet Frank O’Hara once wrote: “In times of crises, we must all decide again and again whom we love. And give credit where it’s due.” And that’s what Mountain Home did last year. Gayle Morrow cherished the natural rhythms of the end of summer—“September will soon concede to October, which in turn gives way to November… The mullein stalks are dry and brown, the bee balm’s flowers are just a memory, and the goldenrod has gone to seed. See you all next year, with or without a calendar”—and won second place for outdoor columns.

Photographer Linda Stager was struck by the cold, snowy November dusk of Main Street in Wellsboro “and the warm, lighted, inviting businesses we were passing, reminding us of holidays and gatherings ahead.” Her picture won first place for feature photos, one of two prizes for Linda. Outdoor writer Pat Kelly, his trout fishing interrupted by two homeless men, traveled from annoyance and fear to bringing food to one man along the creek shortly before Christmas, showing his children what was really important in life and love. He won first place for sports feature.

Don Knaus’s parents met on the factory floor of the Corning glass plant in Wellsboro during World War II, when the plant turned out most of America’s Christmas bulbs. Don won a feature story prize for his recounting of how one of those machines that lit the world has gloriously returned to town.

Carol Myers Cacchione, whose mother, the late Mary Myers, also wrote for this magazine, took first place for a stirring personality profile of Brian Stahler, her Shakespeare-quoting English teacher at Wellsboro Area High School who shaped so many lives, including that of my wife, Teresa Banik Capuzzo, Mountain Home’ s publisher.

Michael Kulbacki took a remarkable New Year’s Eve photograph, which won a news event photo award, of his family standing outside a Buffalo area hospital praying toward a window where his grandmother Judy Smentkiewicz lay dying of covid—until a judge ordered the ivermectin that saved her life.

Teresa and I, who co-founded this magazine seventeen years and some 200 journalism prizes ago, toast these talented creators and our thousands of readers. Instead of Grovedale’s “Sh!tshow,” we’ll raise a glass of their popular new fine dry red “for the times” called “Grat!tude.”

The Butchers, The Butchers, the Legacy the Legacy

The Hillstone Farms Human Herd Mooooves from Green Fields to Main Street Wellsboro

By David O’Reilly

It’s a five-and-a-half-mile drive from Hillstone Farms to Hillstone Farms. But ask Todd and Jessica Webster how long it took to get from the first one— their family’s beef farm on the outskirts of Wellsboro—to opening their Hillstone Farms store six months ago on Main Street, and they’ll look at each other.

Three years? Ten? Since before they got married? Longer, even. It depends on where you start counting.

See Legacy on page 8

the Bakers, the Bakers, Makers Makers

Where’s the beef? Todd Webster stands among his herd on the family’s four-generation farm.

(2) David O’Reilly

Legacy continued from page 6 Start when Todd’s dad, Tim, sold his dairy herd out on Dutch Hill Road and took up raising beef, and it’s thirty-five years. Reach back two more generations, to when Todd’s greatgrandfather began assembling the farm’s six hundred acres, and you’re talking nearer to a century. In short, it took generations to fully realize this pasture-tobutcher shop, kitchen-to-bake shop dream called Hillstone Farms. And it takes a whole family to keep it going. At about 850 square feet, the storefront is just one thirtythousandth the size of the farm. But it is to here, 76 Main Street, that their black Angus heifers and steers reappear (after a brief detour) as choice rib eyes, sirloins, briskets, hamburger—along with cuts you might never have heard of. Whole chickens, hams, pork chops, and sausages are also in the freezer case. Beside it, a cooler holds local milk and cheese—both pasteurized and raw—as well as butter and whatever pies need refrigeration. Here, too, are the family’s chocolate chip cookies, sourdough loaves, blueberry muffins, maple syrup, sour cream cakes, jams, and canned goods—many from secret recipes that The farmer doesn’t fall start life every week in Jessica’s self-described “liiiiitle” far from the farm: Todd home oven. and Jessica Webster (top) work alongside Todd’s brother, Garrett, and father Tim Webster “The idea of opening a store was always there,” says Jessica, thirty-eight. She manages the store with her mom, Danna Darrow, who’s also her cookie (bottom) to keep the baker. “But we’d say no, we’re not ready, and push cows happy, pastures it aside.” Not only are she and Todd raising children healthy, and tractors ages eleven, eight, and six; she’s also the full-time running. biology teacher at Wellsboro High School. “Some nights I’m up to one in the morning, waiting for the sourdough to rise,” she says. “Then I wake up at four or five to shape loaves and get everybody up for school.” Throw in the music lessons, soccer games, tummy aches, tooth fairy duties, homework, baseball practice, church, trips to the dentist…and “it’s controlled chaos,” she says. “The children are feral,” says Todd, forty-three. Yes, he’s a wise guy. In truth, it’s a family held together, well, by family. On a visit to the farm you find Todd’s mom, Karen, lugging recycling into her car before heading off to fetch grandkids from school. Another afternoon, Todd passes his sister Lauren as she’s walking her three young children down Dutch Hill Road from her house, once great-grandfather Jesse Webster’s, who started the farm, to her parents’ to play with cousins. All four of Tim and Karen’s children, and all of their eight grandchildren, live on the farm. Asked how they managed to keep all their kids so close, Karen—for thirty-six years the health and physical education teacher at Wellsboro High School—fills with emotion, dabbing her eyes with a Kleenex. “I don’t know,” she says, then laughs. “I hope it’s more than just the free babysitting.” It was her idea to build the giant, sunny rec room above the garage/workshop, with its tables, tumbling mats, coloring books, and space to do homework. It’s the scene, too, of birthday parties and multifamily dinners on Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving. Then you visit the store on a weekday afternoon and find Danna—she’s spent the last two days baking cookies—wrapping her arms around eight-year-old Lily, tearful from a sibling’s teasing, or taking all three kids and a cousin to the nearby

playground. “They need to blow off some steam,” she confides, “and Jessica needs a break.” The Websters have been raising beef since 1988, the year Tim and Karen sold off their struggling dairy herd to the federal government. A nationwide overabundance of milk had so suppressed prices that dairying was unsustainable for most farmers. The U.S. Department of Agriculture intervened to radically reduce the number of farms.

But it was never Tim’s dream to be a dairy or beef farmer. He was studying forestry, with plans for a career out West, when his father, Jerome, developed a brain tumor. With his mother, Mary, facing widowhood, and three younger sisters still at home, he returned to Hillstone at age nineteen, took over after his father died, and never left. “You do what you have to do,” he says. Still, milking twice every day and struggling to pay bills was a “tough way to raise a family.”

They got a good price from the USDA for their herd, and, with barns, silos, pastures, and feed already in place, the transition to beef looked easy. “I had no idea what I was getting into,” Tim says. “I bought a couple of herds that were disasters, [with cows that] ended up calving in the middle of snow storms,” or delivering oversized calves that did not always survive birthing.

He can laugh now, gray-bearded and seventy-one. Beef husbandry has become far more predictable, he says, thanks in part to Penn State University’s breeding programs and carefully screened auctions. Here a farmer can see the metrics for each bull on the block, from his scrotal circumference to his offsprings’ average birth weight, pelvic circumference at birth, and average daily weight gain.

Tim points out a window to five big bulls lounging in the bullpen. He bought three of them at auction in late March, and opens the catalogue to show the listing for one. Costing three thousand dollars, JAR Emerald 4920 is described as a “calving ease bull,” meaning the “dams” bred to him should deliver wellproportioned calves without much difficulty. JAR Emerald and his buddies will start mating in late summer so that calving begins next May, when the weather is warming.

While Tim remains active—he was fixing a tractor on a recent visit—much of the hard physical labor falls to Todd and his twenty-eight year-old brother, Garrett.

“I do this side of the farm and Todd does that,” says Garrett, who points to a broad pasture where half the herd is grazing. “But if one of us mows hay, the other will rake,” if one shovels up the manure with a frontloader the other spreads it, and if one is away the other will move his cows across a pasture to taller grass and reset the electric fences. The two rarely disagree, they say, on what needs to be done.

Don’t Name the Cows…

It’s a sunlit afternoon late in April, and Todd hops into a small flatbed called a side-by-side to inspect the first calf of the season. Turning off Dutch Hill Road, he’s soon bouncing up a steep path to the pasture they call “the orchard” for the gnarly old apple trees nearby. “There it is,” he says, and points to a black, spindly-legged male nursing happily. Mama is protective, however, and turns repeatedly to keep herself between Todd and the calf.

The calf is nursing properly, so Todd glances around to see how the fifty other cows are doing. “Whoa. She’s ready to pop,” he says, pointing to the swollen belly and udder on one. But they all look okay, and so he heads

See Legacy on page 10

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Legacy continued from page 9 home, chased and raced by his gleeful Australian shepherd, Tucker.

The Websters used to give names to their dairy cows, but the lives of beef cows are so short and purposeful that even the children learn early not to form sentimental attachments. “It makes it easier to let go,” Todd explains. And he tells the story of a visiting cousin who once grew fond of an affectionate heifer and announced he’d named her “Doris.”

“I said, ‘No, no: don’t do that!’ but it was too late.” With a name, Doris had attained bovine personhood—and was spared the fateful “one-way trip.” For fifteen years she loped around the fields, nosing everyone for pats and ear-scratches. “Yeah, she was sweet,” Todd recalls. Nowadays their beef cows are identified by four-digit numbers: a green tag in the left ear for females, blue in the right for males.

Their cows are mostly black Angus, with a few red Angus and Herefords. They’ll spend fourteen to twenty months grazing in pastures and chomping down on the dried alfalfa the Websters grow on the farm, fertilized only with manure. Then, in their final weeks, with steers approaching 1,400 pounds and heifers 1,200, most get a mixture of alfalfa, corn silage, and a small amount of grain. The finishing diet helps to produce the marbled fat that turns beef more tender and flavorful, earning it a USDA grade of “choice” or “prime.” (Both are measures of fat content, with prime the priciest.) The Websters aim for “choice,” which, they say, can be as tender and flavorful as prime. About twenty percent of the herd feeds entirely on grass.

While their beef, by choice, is not organic, which allows them, for example, to use pressure-treated fence posts and to spray their crop fields, the Websters use no antibiotics, animal-based feed, or added hormones. They send about 130 cows a year to slaughter, with seventy percent going to Meyers Local Harvest. It’s a Coloradobased beef marketer that requires suppliers to raise healthy animals humanely, and Meyers oversees their slaughter at the Cargill processing plant in Wyalusing.

For the beef they sell to area restaurants, such as The Roost and Beck’s Bistro (formerly The Red Skillet, which also served Hillstone beef) both in Wellsboro, and out of their store, the Websters use Bryan’s, a family-operated meat processor in Milan, Bradford County.

Their new store is not Jessica’s and Todd’s first foray into retailing their own meats. Soon after their marriage in 2011 (they met snowboarding), they set up tents and tables at the weekly farmer’s markets in Mansfield and Wellsboro. Alas, “just the threat of rain would scare customers away,” recalls Todd, and leave them with coolers full of unsold product. Or they’d sell out of sirloins and blueberry muffins one week, bring lots more the next, only to discover everybody today wanted rib-eyes and oatmeal cookies. He “always wanted a brick and mortar” storefront, but it took the covid pandemic to “resurrect the idea.”

Early in 2020, friends and neighbors nervous about entering supermarkets began descending on the farm looking to buy meats from the family’s modest on-site freezer case. “We understood,” says Todd. “But it got to be too much. My phone would ring, and I’d have to come in off my tractor to sell someone three bags of hot dogs.”

And so, last summer, they started searching for a shop in Wellsboro’s business district. Problem was, “you couldn’t rent

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Legacy continued from page 10 anything for less than $2,000 a month.” Then a friend urged them to “just buy a building; it’ll cost you the same.” When the former BonHoffie Skin Culture storefront became available in September, they took out a mortgage, and the building was theirs.

Through the fall they spent afternoons and weekends knocking down walls with help from Jessica’s brother, Trent. They exposed the brick, sanded the floors, wrestled an impossibly huge freezer through their impossibly narrow door, built shelving, and set up the front counter. Things were still a bit rough in early December, but they opened their doors in time for the annual Dickens of a Christmas.

…But Do Name the Sourdough

Six months later it’s still a work in progress. There’s nothing high-concept about the décor. They’ve exposed an interior brick wall and some wooden beams to give it a rustic, country feel, but the back of the store is cluttered, and the glass-front freezer humming opposite the checkout counter is strictly functional. They have plans to bring in a refrigerated case for fresh meats and deli, but for now all the meats are sold frozen. Todd talks about getting a meat dehydrator to make jerky, they have a line on a lamb producer, the three-bay sink is working, and they just got the gas line hooked up to their giant ten-burner, twin-oven commercial stove so Jessica and Danna may bake and can during store hours.

Until that’s functional, however, the solitary electric oven in Jessica’s home kitchen—state certified for commercial use—serves as their workhorse. It’s here that Danna, who lives with her husband Eric out by Hills Creek, labors Mondays and Tuesdays, often starting at 3 a.m. A late Tuesday morning finds her already hours into the work, pulling sheet pans of plump cookies out of the oven every twelve minutes and sliding in the next. These she shapes while the previous batch is baking, plucking and weighing each until it’s precisely two ounces.

She makes nearly all the cookie doughs—oatmeal raisin, gingersnaps, lemon crinkles, to name a few—on Monday afternoons, then refrigerates them overnight. The exceptions are the chocolate chips, made with imported butter, sourdough, and dark and milk chocolate. Jessica makes those, and all their breads, from a blob of sourdough starter she calls “Harriet.”

Baking, running a store, and raising kids “isn’t something you could do alone,” says Danna, sixty. “You have to have family.” She opens a large, black book—“our bible”—to a hand-lettered recipe for snickerdoodles, then flips the pages. They’re filled with generations of both family’s baking recipes. “Here’s my Aunt Jean’s sugar drop cookies,” she says. On another page is the recipe for Eric’s grandmother’s oatmeal raisin cookies, and here are Grandma Anne’s snowballs. “Cream butter and sugar well until light and fluffy,” it begins. “Add vanilla...”

So, how many cakes and cookies does Danna bake each week? “You know,” she marvels, “I’ve never even thought of it.”

Making Friends, Making Progress

By mid-spring the shop the shop is doing even better than expected. “People have been very welcoming,” says Jessica. On a recent Saturday the store is enjoying a steady stream of customers.

Tim Mosher, thirty-six, says he used to go to the farm to