Lebanon 'ponies up' with a picture-perfect Lebanon Festival

Emily Hebert, 10, left, shares a moment with her sister, Odie, 5, as they pet Captain, a 13-year-old, 32-inch tall miniature horse at Lebanon's festival on Saturday. Captain is owned by Lois Lang of Lebanon. (Lebanon Voice photos)

LEBANON - It was as relaxing as a family picnic and went as smoothly as a Kenny G. concert.

It was the 3^rd annual Lebanon Festival, and if anyone were looking at it as a tune-up for next year's 250^th town birthday celebration, they'd be looking forward to next August with unbounded enthusiasm and confidence.

Besides great entertainment from the Hanson School Jazz Band and Cheap and Easy SoPo, there were dozens of vendor booths and food options like offerings from the Ripcord Café serving up delicious chicken salad with chips and homemade salsa and the Dough You Didn't food truck with their delicious pizza and breakfast sandwiches.

Other favorites were the occasional cannon firing by Steven Wanager and demonstrations of barrel making by cooper Ron Raiselis, who explained that in olden times, barrels, or casks, were the main method of transport for many goods, including gunpowder, apples, wine and meat.

Cooper Ron Raiselis tamps down a hoop during a barrel making demonstration at Lebanon's festival on Saturday.

Raiselis, who worked many years as a cooper at Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts, said the casks he was working on Saturday take about a day to make by hand and were designed to carry pork.

He explained that they could carry up to 300 pounds, which would include 200 pounds of meat plus 70 pounds of salt and 30 pounds of brine to preserve it. The barrels had to be wooden because the brine would've eaten through metal during shipment.

"The real advantage to a cask is that they could hold water or other liquid, they could hold a lot of weight and they could be rolled easily," Raiselis said. "Think of shipping one cask of wine or a 100 bottles, so this was basically a packaging industry."

He said coopers began their trade in the Middle Ages to ship goods over longer distances.

In the Seacoast long ago, he said coopers made containers to carry fish, apples and gunpowder among other things and that most coopers would specialize in a specific size to maximize their efficiency and profit.

By statute the barrels had to be white oak or white ash and most of the hoops, which hold the barrel staves together, were made of hickory, noted Raiselis, who currently works as a cooper re-enactor at Strawberry Banke in Portsmouth.

Ben Cyr of the Good News Club serves up popcorn while another member of North Lebanon Second Baptist Church makes balloon animals on Saturday at Lebanon's annual festival.

Meanwhile, at the Good News Club table, the North Lebanon Second Baptist Church was serving up boxes of free popcorn, free bottled water and free balloon animals for kids of all ages.

Ben Cyr of the church, who runs the Lebanon Good News Club, said the club meets with kids from the Hanson and Lebanon Elementary School once a week once school begins to talk about God and the Bible.

"We share stories about the Bible, do crafts, tell stories and play games," said Cyr who with his wife have seven children themselves, five who are already in Lebanon schools.

"I pretty much have a class, myself," he joked.

And while the adults enjoyed shopping at craft tables and munching on yummy homemade treats like those from the Sanford Lion's Club, the day really belonged to the kids, who enjoyed face painting, an exhibition from Wildlife Encounters sponsored by Spence and Mathews Insurance and more balloon animals with Butterfingers Da Klown sponsored by The Lebanon Voice, which also held raffles for a Lebanon Voice coffee mug and a full year's Lebanon Voice subscription among other prizes.

Several hundred attended the festival, which was held on the soccer fields next to the Hanson School.