Sloping down from the WVU Coliseum to the banks of the Monongahela River, the university’s Core Arboretum comprises about 100 acres of woodland. A space on campus dedicated to trees, it’s an ideal setting for the WVU PawPaw festival.
For the past several years, on a warm autumn afternoon at the end of September, the parking lot of West Virginia University’s Coliseum fills with visitors. But they don’t come to watch basketball.
Sloping down from the Coliseum to the banks of the Monongahela River, the university’s Core Arboretum comprises about 100 acres of woodland. A space on campus dedicated to trees, it’s an ideal setting for the WVU PawPaw festival.
“It’s an event to celebrate the pawpaw fruit, which is the largest fruit native to North America, the largest fruit native to this region” Zach Fowler said. “And it’s a spectacularly delicious and actually quite common fruit that, for whatever reason, a lot of people these days have not eaten.”
Fowler is the director of the arboretum and the organizer of the festival. He said the pawpaw’s appeal isn’t in being exotic, but in being incredibly common.
“It’s not at all a rare tree, it’s just a lot of people haven’t eaten the fruit for whatever reason.” Fowler said. “It’s kind of important for people to understand that there’s this wonderful thing out there on the landscape that’s been growing here for 1000s of years.”
Free to the public, the festival’s biggest draw is the opportunity for newcomers and acolytes alike to try cultivated pawpaws, specifically those grown and developed by Neal Peterson. Peterson has dedicated decades to tracking down and creating named pawpaw varieties, selected for flavor and texture.
The samples of river-named pawpaws served at the festival: Shenandoah, Allegheny, Potomac and Wabashes, were all developed by Peterson. His bringing them to the festival is something of a full circle.
“Neil was a graduate student here in the 70s,” Fowler said. “Believe it or not, the first pawpaw that Neil had ever tasted, he tasted here at the arboretum down near the river in the wild growing pot balls that have been here for 1000s of years.”
Fowler said the festival is a product both for, and by, the community, and dozens of volunteers help to ensure attendants can taste the titular fruit. Despite cutting up dozens of pawpaws for others to try, student volunteer Dominic Moll has yet to try one himself.
A box of pawpaws waiting to be cut up as samples for festivalgoers at the WVU PawPaw Festival Sept. 30, 2023.
Dominic Moll prepares samples of pawpaws at the WVU PawPaw Festival Sept. 30, 2023.
“This is the Shenandoah,” Moll said as he raised a slice of pawpaw for his first taste.
He chewed for a moment, although the fruit’s soft texture offered very little resistance.
“It does taste kind of mango, it has like that mango texture with it,” Moll said. “It’s very sweet. And it’s actually it’s really nice.”
The festival draws people in from near and far, and Fowler says the furthest traveler he met Saturday was from upstate New York. Yoshi Henderson had a shorter drive, but still came down from Pittsburgh after discovering a pawpaw tree near his office just a week ago.
“Never heard of it, didn’t know there was like a tropical fruit native to the region,” he said “I’ve been on a mission to try it. And then I just found out that this was going on, so we drove down and finally got to try it. I’m super excited. Now, we’re going to plant a tree. And hopefully in a few years, maybe we’ll get some fruit out of it.”
Attendants could also listen to music, sample food made with pawpaws, buy their own trees and learn more about how to cultivate their own pawpaw.
Nick Elmore, a chemistry student from Martinsburg, also volunteered at the festival. He said he grew up with pawpaws and didn’t expect them to draw so much fanfare.
“There’s not really a festival for like bananas or other fruits, you know?” Elmore said. “The pawpaw I guess is like a cultural thing around here. They only grow in certain areas, and there’s even a town called Paw Paw, West Virginia. So it definitely is like a local thing that I guess we need to hold on to.”
Ultimately, Fowler said the fruit and the festival both are a great way to get people to interact with nature and the land’s history on a deeper level.
“I really love it as sort of this golden egg for connecting people to nature,” he said. “When I go down and I gather the fruit and bring them to the top of the hill it does give me chills sometimes to think about the ancient nature of this and how many times that people sit on this hillside and eat pawpaws through history and it really is a very exciting and interesting thing.”
On this West Virginia Morning, for the past several years, on a warm autumn afternoon at the end of September, the parking lot of West Virginia University’s Coliseum fills with visitors. But they don’t come to watch basketball. As Chris Schulz reports, they come out for the paw paw fruit.
On this West Virginia Morning, for the past several years, on a warm autumn afternoon at the end of September, the parking lot of West Virginia University’s Coliseum fills with visitors. But they don’t come to watch basketball. As Chris Schulz reports, they come out for the paw paw fruit.
Also, in this show, this week is banned books week. Groups like the American Library Association encourage people to look at the books that have been banned and to think about why people attempt to remove them from public view.
News Director Eric Douglas spoke with Megan Tarbett, the director of the Putnam County Library and the president of the West Virginia Library Association to find out what it is all about.
West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting which is solely responsible for its content.
Support for our news bureaus comes from Shepherd University.
Caroline MacGregor produced this episode.
Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning
It was early August, a fresh summer afternoon in Jackson County, Ohio at the Leo Petroglyph, which is a huge rock carved with images of animals and humans. The sounds of insects in the dense woods combined with the sounds of a nearby creek.
“These pawpaws are on the edge of the forest,” Chris Chmiel said as he motioned to a group of trees nearby. “There’s a clump of them about 15 or so feet away, you know, they grow in a patch.”
Chris Chmiel is the founder of the Ohio Pawpaw Festival and is showing me the numerous pawpaw trees in the area of the Leo Petroglyph. This sacred and historic site is the work of Indigenous Americans who visited this site over 1,000 years ago. What we were searching for isn’t made of stone, but like the petroglyph, it has survived here for thousands of years.
The pawpaw represents a cultural connection between displaced Native American tribes like the Shawnee and their ancestral lands in what we now call Appalachia. Removal robbed them of access to the food, but the pawpaw lingers as a ghost in their language and memory. Now, almost 200 years later, people are trying to bring it back in the flesh.
Chmiel is an expert in all things pawpaw running the festival for many years along with co-owning Integration Acres, the world’s largest processor of pawpaws. Over the years, he’s noticed something about where pawpaws grow.
“It just seems like every one of these ancient sites I hear about or talk about with someone, they mention there’s pawpaws everywhere” he said. “At places like Shawnee Lookout, the Serpent Mound, there’s pawpaws there.”
And they were at the Leo Petroglyph, too. All around us.
The mounds that Chmiel referred to are earthworks that functioned as graves and ceremonial sites for the Hopewell, Adena, and later the Fort Ancient people – a Native American cultural group that had flourished in the Ohio River Valley from about 1000 to 1600 AD. Some scholars believe the Fort Ancient people who made the Leo Petroglyph were ancestors of the Shawnee, who by the 17th century would call this part of the Ohio home.
“These are ancient native plants, they’re well adapted to our soils and the region,” Chmiel told me as we looked out at a patch of pawpaw trees on the trail leading to the creek and gorge. “I’d say these things have been here for a long time.”
We know that the pawpaw was an important resource for the Shawnee because it left an imprint on their culture even after the Shawnee were forcibly removed from this region by the U.S. government in the early 19th century.
Todd Jacops
/
Chris Chmiel shows a pawpaw tree and its leaves at the Leo Petroglyph, a Fort Ancient culture site that is around 1,000 years old in Jackson County, Ohio
Joel Barnes is one of the major guardians of Shawnee culture and language in the present day. Barnes lives in Miami, Oklahoma, and is the language and archives director for the Shawnee Tribe and is a tribal member.
Barnes said that the Shawnee marked time by phases of the moon, they used the fruit to mark one of those phases.
“The word for pawpaw is ha’siminikiisfwa. That means pawpaw month. It’s the month of September,” Barnes said. “That literally means pawpaw moon. That moon would indicate that was the time the pawpaws were ripe and it was time to go pick them and probably also indicated, ‘Hey, we’re getting close to winter.'”
Barnes’ ancestors were forcibly moved from their Ohio Valley home in Appalachia by the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The Shawnee were sent first to Kansas, and then after the Civil War, they were pushed into Oklahoma.
For the Shawnee, the pawpaw is a direct tie to Appalachia and their uprooted past. Pawpaw’s are hard to find in Oklahoma because the state is at the edge of the tree’s climate zone.
“Some tribal members have planted them out in their yards, just to get them to grow,” Barnes said. “They’re not quite that abundant in this part of Oklahoma. Once you start moving east you start seeing more and more of them pawpaw trees.”
He does remember eating the fruit when he was growing up. It was rare, but it existed.
“We never did get really fancy with it,” he said. “We would just cut it open and peel it and eat it. It was pretty good, and I’ve ate some off and on throughout my life, but it’s been a while since I’ve had any.”
Brian Koscho
/
A patch of pawpaw trees in Athens, Ohio.
Cut off from their ancestral homeland and the plants that grow there, the Shawnee have seen some of the pawpaw’s cultural relevance fade with time, according to Barnes.
“Some of these old folk, they all had them, they’ve all ate them,” Barnes said, but no ceremonies or dances connected to the pawpaw remain. “If there ever was, nobody knows.”
Somehow, through all that upheaval and across all those miles, the Shawnees’ connection to the pawpaw tree has endured. Even though the food is largely absent from their physical surroundings, traces of it persist in memory. And in the Shawnee language itself. Barnes closes our conversation by teaching me a Shawnee phrase that translates to “I’m hungry for pawpaws.”
Loading…
And some Indigenous people are working to strengthen their cultural connections with the pawpaw. Dr. Devon Mihesuah is a professor at the University of Kansas, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation, and also a Chickasaw descendent. She has devoted her life to recovering lost knowledge of indigenous foods.
“I have spent decades taking a look at travelers’ reports, people who observed back in the 1700s, coming through,” she said. “Nobody ever mentioned pawpaw. They just say this strange fruit. They didn’t know what to call it.”
She has not found any traditional pawpaw recipes among the Choctaw, who called the Mississippi Valley and Southern Appalachia home before they were forced West. She says there’s a reason for that. Like a banana, the pawpaw has a short window of ripeness. That meant it was probably consumed right on the spot–a convenient, fast food.
“They would just wait until the time to eat it because they don’t store well,” she said. “Maybe they dried it and it could be that they mixed with other things, which is what I like to do.”
Despite the difficulty of obtaining written records, Devon has her own special ways of preparing the pawpaw that extend its use. She mashes it, mixes it with berries, cooks it down into a flavorful sauce, and freezes it. Occasionally, she adds it to cornbread.
Brian Koscho
/
Pawpaws for sale during a short window of availability in September at Kindred Market in Athens, Ohio.
Even though they had to forage to find pawpaws, Mihesuah’s Choctaw grandparents introduced her to the fruit when she was a child at their home in Muskogee, Oklahoma.
“They had a massive garden,” she said. “It was a model of my grandmother’s ancestors when they lived in Mississippi. They had all kinds of trees. But they didn’t have pawpaws. But they knew where they were.”
Just like Joel Barnes, Mihesuah has childhood memories of the pawpaw, even though it was scarce. Mihesuah reminisces about that first taste in her grandmother’s kitchen.
“It was delicious,” she said. “Just the most amazing flavor. It was sort of like a banana mango combo with a hint of a little strawberry.”
Mihesuah runs a popular Facebook group on indigenous foodways. There’s a lot of interest among American Indian people in getting reacquainted with the foods their ancestors ate, she said. But many of those traditional foods are disappearing or not available where Indigenous people live, like the pawpaw. She worries that it’s a food that some people “will never get a chance to taste.”
There are a few pawpaw trees in Kansas where she currently lives, but the fruit tends to be on private property and inaccessible.
“I just wish more people who had them on their property recognized and appreciated what they have,” Mihesuah said, “There’s a yard in Lawrence and you can just smell it because there’s hundreds of them laying there.”
Brian Koscho
/
Ripe pawpaws on the forest ground in Athens, Ohio.
Three years ago, Mihesuah decided to try and grow pawpaws herself. She is propagating about 50 seeds in containers and eventually hopes to transplant them. She said it was a long process.
“I ate the fruit and then I packed the seeds away and I put them in the refrigerator,” she said. “They overwinter. I took them out at the end of February and planted them. They each had their own little container. And nothing happened for months and months. It wasn’t until the end of July that finally one sprouted.”
It will be years until they are ready to transplant, and even longer until they bear fruit. So why is she going to all this trouble? Mihesuah believes that not having access to where your ancestors lived, and the foods they ate, is a form of historical trauma that needs to be healed.
“It’s very important that people who are interested in learning their culture and being reconnected to their culture understand what it was that sustained their ancestors,” she said. “Food teaches us all of these different lessons that expand into every aspect of your life.”
By bringing these foods and their lessons back into circulation, Mihesuah hopes to address some of the losses her people have sustained.
In the hills of Appalachia, it’s easy to take the abundance of pawpaw for granted. But far away, on the plains of Oklahoma, it’s a piece of precious history for those who once called Appalachia home.
This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council. The Folkways Reporting Project is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.
You may have heard of the Paw Paw, but how much do you really know about this mysterious Appalachian fruit? Learn about the Paw Paw from WVU Core Arboretum Director Zack Fowler!
Edible Mountain – What Is A Paw Paw?
Paw Paws are the only member of the Asimina family that do not grow in the tropics—instead they grow here in Appalachia. But they certainly taste tropical. They’ve never been commercialized because they only last about three days on the shelf.
How did this tropical fruit tree with a big, heavy seed get to Appalachia? The theory is that extinct megafauna like woolly mammoths and ground sloths moved the Paw Paw into this region thousands of years ago.
The banana-mango-like Paw Paw starts to ripen in early September; which makes it the perfect time to get out in woods, find one and enjoy!
If you want to try and grow a Paw Paw, save the seeds and plant in March or April. Water well, and expect to wait until July or August before you see it start to sprout.
Edible Mountain is a bite-sized, digital series from WVPB that showcases some of Appalachia’s overlooked and underappreciated products of the forest while highlighting their mostly forgotten uses.
Disclaimer: Folks, we hope that you take caution when entering the forest. Please always be aware of your surroundings, while treading lightly, so as to not disturb the natural joy and wonder that our wilderness provides.
Although most of the flora or fauna described in Edible Mountain has been identified by experts in the field, it is critical to your health and safety that you properly identify any item in the forest before eating or touching it. If you are uncertain about anything, please leave it alone and ask for an expert’s advice. Many dangerous plants and fungi share similar properties, which make them easily confused with their nonlethal relatives.
West Virginia Public Broadcasting (WVPB) wants you to discover, protect and enjoy your natural surroundings. We do not want to see you harmed. Please harvest sustainably so that the bounty can be enjoyed by future generations.
The information contained within Edible Mountain is for general information purposes only. WVPB assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions in the contents on this service. WVPB make no guarantees as to the accuracy of the information presented, and any action you take upon the information in this program is strictly at your own risk.
In no event shall WVPB or contributors be liable for any special, direct, indirect, consequential or incidental damages or any damages whatsoever, whether in an action of contract, negligence or other tort, arising out of or in connection with the use of the service or the contents of the service. WVPB reserves the right to make additions, deletions, or modification to the contents on the service at any time without prior notice.
Those who’ve eaten a pawpaw before often say that the creamy, tropical fruit resembles a mix of a mango and a banana, or a mango and an avocado. They often can’t believe that the fruit is native to Appalachia.
“It’s creamy, but you get that tropical fruit taste,” said Katie Wight, a resident of Athens, Ohio, upon eating her first paw-paw. “It’s not really mango, but mango-papaya – that kind of genre.”
To the rest of the country, the pawpaw is little-known. It’s not commercially grown, in part because it’s so tricky to eat – it’s not ripe until it looks rotten on the outside, and ingesting the seeds or the skin causes some to fall ill. But the Appalachian fruit is showing potential.
Credit Anne Li/ WVPB
/
Katie Wight holding first pawpaw at the Ohio Pawpaw Festival
In Charleston, a locally-owned ice cream shop called Ellens Homemade Ice Cream increased its supply of pawpaw ice cream this fall due to increased demand. And every year, thousands flock to Athens, Ohio, to celebrate the Pawpaw Festival, where they can learn about the pawpaw and buy pawpaw art, saplings and raw pawpaws.
“At my place, a Belgian gentleman comes and buys all my seeds,” said one attendee who traveled from his home in the Netherlands for the eighteenth annual Pawpaw Festival this year. He spoke of the growing market for pawpaws in Europe. “Before that I threw them away but he pays me 15 cents a piece. I ask him (why) and he says he (uses it) for curing cancer.”
Credit courtesy Katie Wight
/
pawpaw teapot by artist, on display at the Ohio Pawpaw Festival
According to Andy Moore, a writer who recently published a book called Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit, pawpaws have been consumed in the United States for generations. Towns are named after the fruit, and folk songs, like “Way Down Yonder in the Pawpaw Patch,” have been written about them.
Writer Andy Moore in Phyllis, Kentucky at the Lucky Penny General Store. Credit courtesy Andy Moore
In the last few years, pawpaws have started to be cultivated on a very small scale. “People are growing them in orchards now, just like you would any other crop, which will hopefully give people more opportunity to taste it and experience it,” Moore said.
Credit courtesy Katie Wight
/
A man dressed as a tree was available to take photos with children at the Ohio Pawpaw Festival
Some pawpaw fans hope that pawpaws can be included in the forest farming or agroforestry movement, which means growing and harvesting crops like ramps or pawpaws in the forest that many West Virginians landowners own. Walt Helmick, the West Virginia Commissioner of Agriculture, says that they haven’t looked into pawpaws as a commercial fruit yet, even though they are unique to the Appalachian region.
“We need to see what we can do with agriculture in the forest more than we have in years gone by,” Helmick said.
Verso Corp. says the chemical that spilled into the Potomac River last week at its Maryland paper mill was a synthetic form of latex, posing no allergy threat for people sensitive to natural rubber.
Verso spokeswoman Kathi Rowzie said Monday the substance was half water and half styrene-butadiene, a paper coating. Nearly 10,000 gallons spilled into the river Wednesday from a wastewater treatment plant serving the mill in Luke.
Rowzie says workers failed to close a drain from a storage tank that was being filled from a railroad tank car.
The spill prompted Paw Paw, West Virginia, to close its water intake Sunday before the milky green plume arrived. The town stored enough water to supply customers until Tuesday morning, when experts say the plume will have passed.
