Posts Tagged ‘history’

Connoisseur of Fine Foods

Last year when deciding that I wanted to make it my mission to preserve the small historic farm that I am now working on, I talked my dear friend Rebecca Rivas into capturing some stories from the farm on film with me.

We interviewed Caroline Mueller, the now-90 year old woman whose husband’s grandparents settled the farm in 1883. We dug up old newspaper articles heralding the health benefits of the organic produce that was unique to the Mueller Farm in the 1950’s (when the other farmers at the market would mock the Muellers). We found old photographs of the mules that pulled the plows even into the 1980’s. We interviewed lots of neighbors of the farm and residents from the Ferguson community who worked on the farm during the summer as teenagers or shopped their on-farm farmstand year after year.  We heard stories from Andy Ayers, a local restauranteur that started buying fresh produce from local farmers such as the Muellers to his patrons’ delight long before it was vogue. We even had a little jam session in Caroline’s kitchen with Curtis and Dennis Buckhannon, two brothers who grew up on the same block as the farm and who first started playing folk music with Al Mueller (Caroline’s husband) on their property and now have a popular bluegrass band in St. Louis.

The documentary is 14 minutes long, so unfortunately the whole thing isn’t on YouTube, but here’s a little teaser for it:

Connoisseur of Fine Foods - the short version of our farm documentary

(It’s named after a sign that Al used to have posted on a tree on the farm for customers to see as they were leaving the farm: “Thank you for being a connoisseur of fine foods!”)