STURBRIDGE – Old Sturbridge Village celebrates the taste and history of an old-fashioned apple harvest during its annual Apple Days Festival Sept. 24 and 25 and Oct. 1 and 2. Visitors can taste nearly-forgotten heirloom apple varieties, help the farmers pick apples 1830s-style, try their hands at cider making, and see the ox-powered Cider Mill in operation as it grinds and presses apples.

Village historians will cook with apples over the hearth, talk about apple preservation, and give tours of the root cellar to show how apples were stored. Village gardeners will lead orchard walks and recount the amazing origins of some of today's popular apple varieties. They will also discuss the importance of bees for apple pollination and visitors can tour the village’s beekeeping exhibit and see the Queen Bee, drones, and worker bees in action in the observation hive.

In the 1830s, apples were used fresh, stored in cellars, dried, or pressed into cider, making them an important food source all year long. Among the finest storage apples were Baldwins and Roxbury Russets, which could keep for months. Children had the important job of checking the apples stored in barrels in the root cellar, making sure that “one bad apple” did not “spoil the bunch.”

According to village historians, there were once thousands of apple varieties in North America dating back to the 1600s and 1700s. By the early 1800s, local farmers developed hundreds of unique varieties especially suited to the New England climate. These heirloom apples had distinctive flavors, but today's supermarkets carry only a few apple varieties in comparison, and they are chosen not for taste, but because they ship well, have a long shelf life, and have dependable harvests.

The Old Sturbridge Inn and Reeder Family Lodges, owned and operated by the village, offer special Fall Foliage Packages that include accommodations and admission to the museum; for details visit www.osv.org/inn or call 508-347-5056.