No Place Like Home

The first grape festivals I remember were held where the old Tontitown Mercantile is now (on the northwest corner of U.S. 412 and Barrington Road),” Andrew Penzo, the son of Angelo and Flora Bariola Penzo, recalled. “I thought they were great. Soda pop for a nickel, a hamburger for 10 cents. You could get your picture taken for a nickel. It was a big wide world. It was a chance to meet everybody.

“As best I can remember, it was not a grape festival as such. It was a thanksgiving, a feast, a picnic is what it was. My dad called it a picnic.”

Penzo was 72 years old when he shared those recollections in 2003. They’re the perfect example of “Memories I Can’t Let Go Of,” a new book of Tontitown history edited by Susan Young. It will debut at the 114th Tontitown Grape Festival, which starts Tuesday.

As Penzo said in that interview, the grape festival started as a celebration of the harvest in the predominantly Italian-Catholic community west of Springdale. Established in 1898 by a group of immigrants led by Father Pietro Bandini, the community held a picnic in June 1898 in observance of the Feast of St.

Peter, Father Bandini’s patron saint. The annual picnic was moved to August in 1913 to coincide with the grape harvest.

In 2002, “a group of folks with roots in Tontitown” set out to interview town elders with the support of the Tontitown Historical Museum, the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History and the University of Arkansas history department. This year, Susan Young, outreach coordinator for the Shiloh Museum, took on the task of turning the oral histories into “narrative stories” and collecting them into a book “for more people to enjoy.”

Young, also the author of “So Big, This Little Place,” a history of the founding and early years of Tontitown released in 2009, says the process of editing the interviews was fascinating.

“Of course it’s of interest to the families, but for me, being someone not from Tontitown,someone who has no family connection, what I enjoyed was hearing these stories of growing up - during the Depression for the most part. It was a real treat to get that insight into everyday rural life then.”

Having also been integral in the 2010 publication of Wayne Martin’s book, “Pettigrew, Arkansas: Hardwood Capital of the World,” Young couldn’t help but compare and contrast.

“In Tontitown, the kids were taught by nuns and it was a given that you went to Mass, they had parents or grandparents who still spoke Italian at home, but it was still not much different from growing up in the Madison County hills in that time period,” she says. “And in those days, they were still very much aware the grape festival was about thanksgiving.”