Good Morning!

If you’re like me, you appreciate a good biscuit.

Add some sausage gravy, and you have a great biscuit.

Smother it in sorghum, and what you have is as close to heaven on this earth as many of us can ever hope to get.

Read below and see if you agree.

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- Wayne K.

There ought to be a warning on a jar of sorghum: opening this container may require additional biscuits.

You start with one. Split it, add butter, pour on a little syrup. Then there’s syrup left on the plate, which requires another biscuit. That biscuit needs more butter. Before long, you’re conducting a breakfast expansion project that nobody approved but everybody understands.

Sorghum has that effect.

First, let’s settle a small kitchen controversy. Sorghum syrup isn’t technically molasses, although generations of people have called it that. Sorghum comes from the sweet juice squeezed out of sorghum stalks and cooked down. Molasses is a byproduct of making sugar, commonly from sugarcane. University of Kentucky agricultural publications make the distinction quite firmly.

You are welcome to explain this at breakfast. Whether anybody passes you another biscuit afterward is between you and your family.

Making sorghum sounds simple until you consider the work. Grow the cane. Harvest it. Crush the stalks. Collect the juice. Cook away enough water to turn that juice into syrup.

Then pay attention.

The cooking takes judgment, careful heat control, and removal of impurities. Hurry it carelessly and you can scorch the batch. According to UK Extension, it takes roughly six to twelve gallons of raw juice to produce one gallon of syrup.

That is a substantial amount of farming and evaporation to pour over something you can eat in four bites.

The jar looks considerably more impressive once you understand what went into it. Somebody planted that sweetness months before you unscrewed the lid. Somebody tended the crop, handled the stalks, and watched the cooking. The price includes work you never see at the breakfast table.

Kentucky’s connection runs deep. An Extension history records nearly 22,000 acres of sorghum grown in the state in 1899, producing more than 1.2 million gallons of syrup. That was a serious agricultural enterprise, long before anybody could charge extra for calling a product “artisanal.”

Today, put a handwritten label on a jar and somebody might describe it as a small-batch heritage sweetener. Put it beside a plate of biscuits and the description becomes unnecessary.

West Liberty’s 55th annual Morgan County Sorghum Festival was on the calendar September 25–27, with local producers, crafts, food, and music. A town doesn’t organize that many celebrations around a food unless the food means something beyond its ingredients.

For people who grew up with it, sorghum can summon a kitchen faster than a photograph. The plate where butter and syrup met. The biscuit used to chase the last streak. The person who insisted you hadn’t eaten enough, despite considerable evidence to the contrary.

Food memories have a way of preserving the small details that family histories leave out. Nobody writes down which saucer held the syrup. Years later, that saucer may be precisely what someone remembers.

And sorghum deserves to be tasted by people who have no such memories. Its flavor has more going on than plain sweetness. Try a little before you commit your entire breakfast. Then try it with butter on a warm biscuit, which gives both parties a fair hearing.

We spend plenty of money hunting for experiences that connect us to a place. Sometimes the connection is sitting on a grocery shelf or a farm stand table, waiting for somebody to notice.

Buy a jar from a producer whose name you can learn. Ask where it was made. Give the person who grew and cooked it a little credit.

Then make the biscuits.

Make several. You know how this ends.

Wayne Knuckles is a veteran of the newspaper industry and publisher of The Wayne Train. He began his career as a sports writer for his hometown weekly newspaper, The Pineville Sun.

The Wayne Train visits all 423 Appalachian counties, one week at a time.

Forsyth County got started by a handful of single men walking down from Pennsylvania in the fall of 1753.

They carried a deed.

Bishop August Spangenberg had bought a hundred thousand acres from Lord Granville, and the Moravians named the whole tract Wachovia, after an Austrian estate belonging to their church's patron, Count Zinzendorf.

Their first settlement was Bethabara. It means "house of passage."

Funny name for a place you plan to stay. They stayed anyway.

In 1766 they started Salem, laid out in tidy rows with a blacksmith, a gunsmith, a cobbler and a carpenter, and named it for the Hebrew word for peace. Old Salem still has more than fifty restored buildings. Men in period clothes still hammer on things.

The county came along in 1849, carved out of Stokes and named for Benjamin Forsyth, a Stokes County man who died fighting in the War of 1812. The county needed a seat, so the Moravians sold fifty-one acres a mile north of Salem. The new town was called Winston, after Major Joseph Winston.

Church people to the south. Courthouse people to the north.

Then came a 25-year-old named R.J. Reynolds.

In 1875 he started making chewing tobacco in Winston. The town had a few hundred people and no paved roads. It also had a railroad and a lot of tobacco, and that was plenty.

In 1913 Reynolds introduced Camel cigarettes. Within about four years they were the top seller in America. The camel on the pack is Old Joe, a circus dromedary who passed through town that year and, from what I can tell, had no interest in standing still for the photographer.

Same year, Winston and Salem merged into one city.

Winston-Salem. Camel City.

In 1937 a Kentucky man named Vernon Rudolph showed up with a yeast doughnut recipe he'd bought off a New Orleans cook. He rented a building in what is now Old Salem. He sold doughnuts to grocery stores. Then the smell got out onto the street and people started walking in.

That was the first Krispy Kreme. In a Moravian village. Next to the wrought iron.

Some folks say he picked Winston-Salem because it was the home of his favorite cigarette. I've heard worse reasons to start a business.

Now the part that doesn't get a gift shop.

On June 17, 1943, the women who stemmed tobacco leaves at Reynolds Plant 65 sat down and quit working. They were mostly Black women, doing tedious work for pay that didn't cover the basics. Out of that sit-down came Local 22, a union of about ten thousand, integrated, led mostly by women like Velma Hopkins and Theodosia Simpson.

It is the only union Reynolds workers ever had.

It lasted until 1950, when a labor board ruling stripped away its right to represent the workers. A lot of its leaders got blacklisted and left town. Hopkins stayed. North Carolina put up a highway marker in 2012, about a half mile from where it started.

Then there's the noise.

Bowman Gray Stadium went up in 1937 as a public works project, with money from the family of a man who once ran Reynolds. Nobody built it for racing. Then NASCAR's Bill France took an interest, and on May 18, 1949, Fonty Flock won the first NASCAR-sanctioned race there.

It became NASCAR's first weekly track. Locals call it the Madhouse. Richard Petty won his hundredth race on that quarter mile. Wake Forest played home football there when the college moved to town in the fifties, and Winston-Salem State still does.

Saturday night, the place shakes.

And then there's the quiet.

In 1982, Maya Angelou took a lifetime appointment as the first Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest. She lived in an eighteen-room yellow house on Bartram Road. She threw Thanksgiving dinners that people still talk about. She died there in 2014.

She once said, "I'm not a writer who teaches. I'm a teacher who writes."

She could have lived anywhere on earth. She picked a tobacco town with a doughnut shop and a racetrack.

Forsyth County sits on the eastern edge of the Appalachian map, where the Blue Ridge runs out of steam and the Piedmont takes over. Nearly 383,000 people live here now, counting the Moravians' great-great-grandchildren and the rest of us who drifted in.

If you only have time for one stop, go to Clemmons.

Mrs. Hanes' Moravian Cookies sits at 4643 Friedberg Church Road. Evva Hanes' mother, Bertha Foltz, started baking them in the 1920s to bring in a little money for a dairy farm. Evva took over in 1960 and later left her job at Hanes Hosiery to bake full time. They still roll and cut every cookie by hand. Around ten million a year.

Thin as paper. Ginger is the one to get.

Dip it in your coffee for a couple of seconds and it's gone.

Come see your neighbors.

THE SKY ABOVE

Saturn clocks in at sunset today and doesn't leave till morning.

Opposition, the astronomers call it. Earth slides square between Saturn and the sun, so the planet comes up in the east as the light goes, rides highest around midnight and sets at dawn. Biggest and brightest it gets all year.

It's sitting in a dim stretch of sky called Cetus, the Whale, with no bright stars around it. Nothing to mix it up with. Low in the east-southeast after dark, climbing all night. Your eyes will give you a steady pale-yellow dot. A small telescope will give you the rings.

Early risers get the better show, and it starts before the roosters do.

Sunday morning a thin old moon lines up with Mars and Jupiter in the east. Monday it sits between them. Tuesday the 6th, it does something I'd set an alarm for. It slides straight in front of Jupiter and covers it up.

Not near it. In front of it. Jupiter blinks out behind the bright edge, stays gone for up to an hour, then pops out the dark side. Most of the eastern half of the country gets a look, well before sunup. The exact minute shifts with where you're standing, so check a local time before you turn in. North America doesn't get another one until November 2037.

Eleven years. Plan accordingly.

Thursday night the Draconids show up, and they're the one meteor shower that works the early shift. Most make you wait till after midnight. These are best right after dark, with the radiant high in the northwest up by the head of Draco the Dragon.

Don't expect a storm. Five to ten an hour at the outside, and nobody's forecasting an outburst this year. But the shower has a record of surprising people. The moon won't rise till the wee hours, so whatever falls, you'll see.

Saturday's the dark of the moon. New moon comes that morning, which leaves Saturday night with nothing up there but stars. One of the last good chances this year to catch the core of the Milky Way, low in the southwest right after dark. Drive out past the last porch light. That's all it takes.

And wave at Venus while you can. She's low in the west at dusk, packing up her run as the evening star, and gone from the evening sky by the middle of the month. She'll be back before sunrise come November.

THE GROUND BELOW

The color's coming down off the mountain.

Two weeks back I told you the ridgetops had started. This is the week it gets serious. West Virginia's high country is at or near peak, and the color keeps sliding toward the valleys as the month goes. Down in the Kentucky lowlands it's a second-half-of-October show. Be patient. The trees are not running late. They're running on their own clock.

While you're looking up, look down. Hen of the woods is fruiting.

Some folks call it sheepshead. The mushroom people say maitake. It comes up in a gray-brown ruffle at the foot of big oaks, living or dead, and around old stumps, like a hen fluffing her feathers. The season runs from mid-September to late October, so you're in the thick of it, more so after a good soaking rain.

And it comes back. Same tree, same spot, year after year. Find one and you've got a standing appointment. That's why nobody you know will tell you where theirs is.

The one it gets mistaken for is the black-staining polypore. Press a thumb hard into the pores. If they go dark brown or black, that's your imposter. Edible, just not as good. Either way, nothing goes in a skillet on a guess. If you can't name it, carry it to somebody who can.

Then there's the apple butter, which is a question mark this year.

Spring freezes hammered orchards across a good piece of the East. A late-April freeze did what the USDA called catastrophic damage to perennial crops in West Virginia and twelve other states. Virginia Tech counted near-total apple losses in some Winchester orchards. A grower over in Hampshire County lit 1,200 little fires across 40 acres trying to save his buds, with the thermometer down at 21.

Still, the copper kettles go on the fire in Berkeley Springs Friday through Sunday, October 9 to 11, for the festival's 51st year. Volunteers stirring over open flames in the middle of town.

How they made up the apple shortage, the organizers haven't said.

I'd ask. Politely. Probably with a spoon in my hand.

Sources:

Live Science, Saturn at opposition: https://www.livescience.com/space/saturn/this-week-is-the-best-time-to-see-saturn-all-year-yes-even-with-the-naked-eye

Sterngucker, October 2026 night sky: https://www.sterngucker.de/en/astronomical-events/night-sky-october/

Manitoba Museum, The Sky for October 2026: https://manitobamuseum.ca/the-sky-for-october-2026/

Universe Today, Moon occults Jupiter: https://www.universetoday.com/articles/catch-a-rare-lunar-occultation-jupiter-plus-saturn-at-opposition-in-early-october

When the Curves Line Up, October 6 occultation: https://whenthecurveslineup.com/2026/09/27/2026-october-6-crescent-moon-occults-bright-jupiter-in-predawn-sky/

Space.com, Draconid meteor shower 2026: https://www.space.com/draconid-meteor-shower-2026-guide-where-when-how-to-see-draconids

EarthSky, meteor shower guide: https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/earthskys-meteor-shower-guide/

National Geographic, October night sky events: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/october-night-sky-events-2026

Space.com, planets in 2026 (Venus): https://www.space.com/stargazing/what-to-expect-from-the-planets-in-2026-key-dates-and-sky-events

WOWK, fall color in West Virginia: https://www.wowktv.com/weather/fall-color-begins-emerging-across-west-virginia/

Farmers' Almanac, fall foliage peak: https://www.farmersalmanac.com/when-fall-colors-peak

Mushroom Appreciation, maitake: https://www.mushroom-appreciation.com/maitake-mushroom.html

AmericanMushrooms.com, hen of the woods: https://americanmushrooms.com/edibles1.htm

Backyard Forager, hen of the woods: https://backyardforager.com/hen-of-the-woods-mushroom/

West Virginia Explorer, Apple Butter Festival and the spring freeze: https://wvexplorer.com/berkeley-springs-apple-butter-festival-freeze/

Berkeley Springs Chamber, Apple Butter Festival: https://berkeleyspringschamber.com/apple-butter-festival/

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