Local Successes: Preston County Buckwheat Festival

Perhaps the most exciting sign of fall for the denizens of the Morgantown area is the Preston County Buckwheat Festival. Besides, Monongalia County (where Morgantown is) doesn’t really do a great job with the whole county fair thing, so this is like the best shot for something as good or better. And though you can find buckwheat cake mix year round in the local supermarkets, there really is something quintessentially fall about the sweet and sour flavor.

There are a few ways to get to Kingwood from Morgantown, most take about a half hour (I-68 to WV-26, WV-7, and Kingwood Pike). On this day, we took Kingwood Pike, favoring the rolling hillsides and pastoral farms coupled with the lack of heavy truck traffic.

Parking could be a disaster, but they handle it well, using a large parking lot on the periphery of downtown and offering continuous free shuttle service on the Buckwheat Express (the local transit agency) from the lot to the center of downtown, which is also the center of festival activities.

The first stop is the Kingwood Volunteer Fire Department Hall, this is the place to gorge on cakes. Many other places around town also sell buckwheat cakes and I’m sure they’re delicious too, but you can’t go wrong here. At the KVFD hall, you pay at the window, walk in, they direct you to a kitchen area, and you can get your first serving of cakes and sausage. The sausage and milk are finite, but the coffee and cakes are not. With true Appalachian hospitality, you can eat until you’re ready explode. We did. Thinking about it, six weeks later, still makes me feel stuffed!

Once you’re so full it hurts to move, you’ve got to move on to the crafts and exhibits. Like a county fair, local children are showing and selling the animals they’ve raised. Chris and I are partial to the goats.

We love a lot of the vendors at these events. Forget about Bath Fitter and that stuff, I love the local businesses. This year, we discovered Mountain State Honey, a honey company based out of Parsons, WV. At the urging of our friends Kelly and Cody, who we ran into unexpectedly while perusing the craft and vendor area, we loaded up on all kinds of tasty of honey. It is true, there are at least two things you should spend the money on: honey and maple syrup.

After taking in a bit of the parade, we picked up the shuttle and headed back to the car. While the parking lot was deserted when we first got to the festival, when the shuttled pulled in on our way out, the line of people waiting to go to the festival was immense. It is so awesome to see such a successful local event!

We decided it would be lovely to go for a hike up at Coopers Rock to top off the wonderful day. We headed out WV-7 to Masontown, where we took Rohr Rd/Snake Hill Rd to Tyrone Rd and eventually got on to I-68 to get to Coopers Rock. Then the strangest thing happened: for the first time ever, we could find absolutely no place to park our car. Not a single picnic area or trailhead had a parking place. When we started noticing the trend, I started counting license plates, almost three-quarters were from out of state. I hope each one spent lots of money in Morgantown!

Somehow, we managed to work off the energy because eventually we made it to Chaang Thai for dinner. The weather was perfect so we enjoyed what would probably be our last meal on a patio in Morgantown for the year.