ST. ALBANS, W.Va. — The men’s group at St. Andrew United Methodist Church doesn’t deviate from the fruitcake recipe they pledged to honor and uphold.
They just keep making more and more.
This year, the group baked 1,114 pounds of fruitcakes. They stopped baking, gathered round and took a picture to commemorate the moment.
“Every year we just increase our productivity,” said 86-year-old Harry Davis of St. Albans, one of the chief fruitcake bakers.
The men of St. Andrew United Methodist took over fruitcake duties in 2003 and baked about 300 pounds that year.
They took over the holiday baking tradition from Reba Campbell, then 93, who had been making the cakes at her local restaurant, The Wren’s Nest. Campbell had inherited the role herself from her aunt, Grace Hopkins, who started baking fruitcakes for the community to purchase in 1929.
When Campbell needed to turn over the job, she looked to the men’s group at the local church. Davis was the Sunday school teacher who Campbell approached.
“We were looking for something,” Davis said this past week. “We were thrilled. It’s been a blessing.”
Campbell turned over her pans and weigh scales. She also told her regular customers the new place they could get their beloved fruitcakes.
That first year, she and her daughter Janice supervised members of the men’s group as they tried on tradition for the first time.
“She insisted we do it her way,” said Davis, who has been a member of the church since 1959. “We always took the first cake out to let her approve it.”
The men’s group still uses some of the original pans and weigh scales. They also adhere to the original standards. For instance, once the fruits and nuts are added to the mix, it has to be stirred by hand — not with an electric mixer — because too much force could cause the fruits and nuts to be smashed.
Sometimes a newer member of the men’s group suggests a mixer might be more efficient.
“No, we’ll do it this way,” responds 81-year-old Walter Wood, the chief baker and a Nitro resident who has been with the church since 1967.
Davis says the group still has a supervisor: “She’s watching over us.”
Davis and Wood are two of the original bakers. They’re good friends and have a lot in common. Both were raised on Charleston’s West Side. Davis graduated from Stonewall Jackson High School in 1948 (“Well,” he jokes, “they let me out in 1948.”) Wood graduated from Stonewall in 1953.
Wood joined the Navy Reserves after graduation and served on an aircraft carrier. When he came back home, he got on with the Post Office in a series of jobs, first as a clerk, then delivering mail, then serving as postmaster in Tornado. He’d gotten his accounting degree in night school, so he was sent out to do audits, moved into the controller’s office and wound up as a budget manager. He also ran his own accounting business in St. Albans. He finally made retirement official in 2004.
Davis joined the Marines and served in Korea. When he got back, he took a job with C&P Telephone, where, at first, he was an installer/repairman, climbing poles. He moved into the central office in a supervisory role, taught in the technical training center and ended up as an engineer. That’s what he was doing when he retired in 1985.
“I have yet to have a day when I woke up and said, ‘Oh, what am I going to do,” Davis reflected.
One way he and Wood stay busy is through their fruitcake responsibility.
The men start their annual chore in late October, a team of eight to 10 baking every Monday and Thursday. Some of the church’s non-retirees come in on Saturdays to contribute to the effort by prepping and measuring.
“It’s a big team effort,” Davis said.
Members of the team get the pans ready by greasing them up and laying down wax paper. This year that job was assigned to St. Albans resident Chester Carnes, who lost his eyesight when he was a young man. After spending years away, he recently moved back to St. Albans, where he is Davis’s neighbor.
“I liked it,” Carnes said. “They gave me an opportunity so I decided to do it. It’s fun.”
Other baking team members mix the batter. Some put the filled pans on a scale to weigh them out. Some put on the decorations, nuts and thinly-sliced berries that are placed on top, just so.
The cakes are then baked, taken out of the pans and sit out overnight before being wrapped in plastic and made ready for sale. The cakes come in one-pound, two-pound or three-pound varieties.
The cost is $9 a pound, which might sound steep but the money goes to charitable causes such as Christ Kitchen, Jericho House, St. Albans food pantry and help for local schools. Some pays for an annual Fourth of July breakfast at the church, where a giant meal is prepared for anyone who would like to partake.
The men curtail their baking about a week before Christmas so they can spend time with their families. “My wife says she’s a fruitcake widow from the end of October to the middle of December,” Wood joked.
The group’s reputation for fine fruitcakes has spread far and wide. A woman recently called from Signal Mountain, Tennessee, to order a few cakes. A woman from Braxton County dropped by to buy $100 worth of fruitcakes.
“Every year we sell out,” Wood said. “People call and say, ‘Have you got any more? Have you got any more?'”
The fruitcakes have also inspired faith in some early doubters — notably Wood.
“When we first started making them, I said, ‘No, I don’t like fruitcake,'” he said. “Turned me around on it.”