FANCY FARM, Ky. — Long before any politician stumped in Fancy Farm, the St. Jerome Church has hosted a family picnic.
If you want to cook all day, you have to start in the morning.
Shortly after sunrise, members of St. Jerome Catholic Church began unloading and salting 18,000 pounds of pork and mutton. An assembly line of volunteers then loaded concrete pits before most of us clock in. Giant burn barrels spaced around the pits were lit to churn out the coal needed to roast the meat for the next 24 hours.
“We used to sit at them stairs at night when I was a kid and put a fan in the back window and draw it in...and we’d lay up all night long smelling the meat cooking,” Ralph Stamper told Spectrum News. Stamper has lived in Fancy Farm, a few feet away from the concrete pits his entire life, and when the barrels start smoking, the smell always takes him back.
The St. Jerome Picnic is well known for the politicians who show up on the first Saturday in August and stump in front of a traditionally raucous crowd. However, the picnic came first and grew over the years to become a church fundraiser and perhaps the largest “one-day-BBQ in the world,” or so it’s touted.
“My family is from here. It’s just tradition, it’s what we do,” Beth Toon told Spectrum News. Toon lives near Mayfield currently but says her family is building a new home in Fancy Farm.
“This is home, and this is where we want to be,” Toon said.
Several hundred volunteers will work the St. Jerome Picnic over the weekend, including those taking the graveyard shift to watch over the pits. Church members will sell pork and mutton by the pound beginning at 8 a.m. CT on Saturday Aug. 3.