PHOTO COURTESY CALVIN B. TAYLOR HOUSE MUSEUM
Peaches are featured for the upcoming Berlin Peach Festival, this Saturday at the Calvin B. Taylor House Museum in downtown Berlin.

By Cindy Hoffman, Staff Writer

Peach Festival celebrates heritage, helps museum

(Aug. 3, 2023) Berlin will celebrate local sweet, juicy, delicious peaches on Aug. 5 at the 15th annual Peach Festival on the lawn of the Calvin B. Taylor Museum.

The festival, which will run from 10 a.m. – 3 p.m., will provide peach treats and entertainment for young and old throughout the day.

“The focus of this year’s festival is local food and highlighting Berlin’s agricultural history,” said Melissa Reid, president of the Calvin B. Taylor House Museum.

Local amateur bakers will have the opportunity to show off their baking skills in the peach pie contest.

Registration for the contest closes on Aug. 4, with just three sports left as of Tuesday. The pies will be judged by Chef Phil Cropper, Laura Sterns, manager of the Atlantic Hotel and Joyce White, of the Great Maryland Recipe Hunt. To sign up, email info@taylorhousemuseum.org

Cropper, of the Worcester Tech High School Culinary Department, will be hosting peach-based cooking demonstrations at 11 a.m. and 2:15 p.m. on the porch stage.

Peach lovers will have a plethora of opportunities to enjoy the fruit throughout the day. And those who wish to put their eating skills to the test can enter the peach cupcake-eating contest. The contest is not about quantity but speed:the person who can eat the peach cupcake the fastest wins.

Kids and adults will have chances to enter. The winner of the children’scontest will get a gift certificate at Island Creamery. The winner of the adult contest will get a Peach festival T-shirt.

For those who would rather take their time enjoying their peaches, bags of peaches will be for sale by Harris Market for $10. They plan to bring 100 crates of peaches to the festival to sell.

Baked Dessert Café will be selling its peach dumplings on the lawn. Buckingham Presbyterian Church will be selling peach pies and Buckingham Elementary will be peddling homemade peach treats. Chesapeake Bay Farms will be serving up its peach ice cream and the museum will serve peach slushies.

“We have purchased another slushy machine so we hope we can keep up with demand this year,” Reid said.

Other activities throughout the day will include music by the Belinki Duo and the Walnut Hill Violin Studio. Storytimes are scheduled throughout the day along with Magic Jack’s show, face painting, and plenty of games.

For those who have a recipe they want to share, for peaches or anything else, the Great Maryland Recipe Hunt will have a table on the lawn. In honor of the 60th anniversary of the publication of “Maryland’s Way: The Hammond-Harwood House Cookbook,” an iconic cookbook that has sold over 100,000 copies, they are collecting recipes to go into a companion cookbook that will be published in 2024. The goal is to reflect the cultural diversity of the state since the publication of the original cookbook.

All proceeds from the Peach Festival go to the Calvin B Taylor House Museum.

“The peach festival is the biggest fundraising event we have for the museum,” Reid said.

The festival pays for the programming, including the junior historian program, storytelling, concerts and other learning opportunities as well as archiving many historic documents and artifacts.

“We hope to build capacity for a full-time curator in the future,” Reid said. Currently, the museum is run mostly by volunteers, including Reid.

Reid said the festival is rooted in Berlin’s agricultural history. The town was home to Harrison Nursery, which used to be the largest mail order fruit orchard in the world. It was also home to a basket factory, which produced the baskets used to pick the peaches at the nursery. The local ice plant, which is still in business, provided the ice for the peaches to be shipped on the rail cars heading out of town.

All of this came to an end in the 1940s when the Harrison’s peach trees fell victim to a blight that killed them all and the Harrison family moved from orchards to investing in real estate in Ocean City.

The peach festival honors this history, said Reid, and through the funds raised, helps the Taylor House continue to tell the stories of the town for generations to come.

The museum will be open for tours during the festival, which will occur rain or shine.

For a schedule of event that day visit https://www.taylorhousemuseum.org/events