St. James Brats and Crafts Festival kicks off Aug. 5
The 38th-annual St. James Brats and Crafts Festival opens Aug. 5 at St. James Lutheran Church, 5660 Trabue Road, in West Columbus.
The three-day festival is often seen as a homecoming for the festival’s patrons, said festival chairman and St. James member Steve Dodson.
Dodson has served as festival chairman every year but the festival’s inaugural event and said he is pleased that what was first conceived as a typical church festival has evolved into an opportunity to reconnect with family and friends, both local and those who choose to visit from other places.
“We hear every year people talking about who they have seen,” and overhear them talk about seeing that person at the festival, Dodson said.
The 2022 St. James Brats and Crafts Festival is open 4 to 9 p.m. Aug. 5, 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Aug. 6 and 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Aug. 7.
Parking and admission is free.
A full schedule of events can be viewed at stjameslutherancolumbus.com.
The festival is to feature many of the same activities familiar to past festival goers, including a performance by Columbus Maennerchor, the Hilliard Community Band and a Civil War-era “base ball” match played by the era’s rules and uniforms between the Lutheran Strikers and the Ohio Village Muffins.
But the food is the festival’s draw, Dodson said.
Typically, about 5,000 bratwursts are prepared and sold at the festival each year prepared by a secret recipe that originated with St. James founding German families, Dodson said.
Parishioners make about 1,000 pounds of German potato salad and the festival is well known for its homemade desserts, he said.
Planning for each festival begins in January and ramps up as the year progresses, Dodson said.
Profit from the sales of brats and desserts are donated to a variety of local charities each year, Dodson said, which include Lutheran Social Services and the Hilliard Food Pantry.
This year’s festival is dedicated to Reynold and Beth Rausch.
Reynold Rausch died in November 2021 at the age of 93; Beth Rausch died six days later at the age of 90. They owned and operated the Dairy Queen on Main Street in Hilliard for more than 50 years.
Reynold Rausch was also among the founding members of the St. James Brats and Crafts Festival.
As such, he invited Dodson to an audition of Ken Nicol and his accompanists at Schmidt’s, in German Village, in 1984.
“The first year, we had only one accordion player who knew three songs, so we knew we had to do better,” Dodson said.
Rausch knew about an accordion player at Schmidt’s, so he took me there to listen, Dodson said.
Rausch, unbeknownst to Dodson, told Nicol to purposefully play as badly as possible.
“It was bad. They played off key and out of synch and I thought, ‘Man, what am I going to say’,” Dodson said.
After about a minute, Rausch and the band broke into laughter and began playing correctly, Dodson said.
Nicol was hired and continues to play every year at the festival.
The festival concludes, as it does each year, with a traditional worship service in the German language at 2:30 p.m. in the church’s sanctuary.
In 1872, the congregation of St. James dedicated the church at 5660 Trabue Road, in west Columbus, visible from the southeast corner of Hilliard-Rome and Renner roads.
Existing ceiling murals have been cleaned and a new banner of Luther seals – also called Luther roses and widely recognized as a symbol for Lutheranism – traverses the highest point of the ceiling.
The church also refurbished a stained-glass piece depicting Jesus Christ in the garden of Gethsemane.
“You are surrounded by the history here and can feel the presence of it,” said Lesa Kuebler, chairwoman of the anniversary committee.
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This article originally appeared on ThisWeek: St. James Brats and Crafts Festival kicks off Aug. 5
