The beans came out of a can, doctored up with spices and heated in the kitchen. Someone brought German potatoes cooked with onions. The homemade barbecue sauce was from a local recipe. The hot items were held in the big white enameled electric ovens most Texans call turkey roasters. There were lots of pickles and white bread, and a huge bowl full of onion slices. When the doors opened promptly at 11 a.m., there were already 20 people waiting outside.
When the slicing was done and things calmed down, I talked to Bubba about the barbecue tradition in this part of East Texas. "Back in the 1950s, there was a big black guy named Abe Johnson who cooked the barbecue for us. He burned down wood coals in a firepit and shoveled them under the hogs and lambs. This was mostly an African-American farming area. Lots of black folks barbecue around here. They used to hire Abe to do the hard work and everybody else just hung around drinking beer. Abe made the mop sauce, too."
Photos of Southern community barbecues usually show black men turning the meat, shoveling the coals and doing the work. Their white supervisors are mentioned by name, but in the photo captions the pitmen are listed simply as "Negroes." When you're enjoying modern community barbecues, it's easy to forget blacks are part of this tradition, too. It was barbecue men like Big Abe Johnson who did the cooking for the white barbecues as well as the African-American church picnics, family reunions and Juneteenth celebrations.
"When we revived the barbecue, we took over the cooking instead of hiring someone," Bubba said. "But we learned how to do it from watching Abe Johnson."
_____________________
On the wall in the kitchen at Millheim Hall, there's a collection of fading snapshots taken at the barbecues of the 1960s and 1970s. It was the same pit, but the pieces of meat in the photos were a lot bigger. They were skewered with the giant metal rods and rotated over the coals as they cooked.
"The sheep and the shoats (small pigs) were killed and butchered here and cooked whole," Mark Bolten said. "The cattle were cut into four quarters and each one was turned on a pair of metal rods."
The German singing society called the Millheim Harmonie Verein was established in 1872. It was one of many secular societies, or "vereins," established by the German immigrants who began arriving in this area in the 1830s. The Germans founded Millheim, Cat Springs, Industry and New Ulm and began growing cotton and tobacco, following the example of their neighbors in Stephen F. Austin's Mexican land grant nearby.
The settlers of Austin's colony were mainly Southerners, and many brought their slaves along. By 1825, the 300 families who settled there owned 443 slaves. By 1834, one third of the population was African-American. German settlers in Northwestern Austin County didn't believe in slavery, but they no doubt learned how to barbecue from their Southern neighbors and their slaves.
The morning I visited, I joined the group that was cooking the beans and barbecue sauce in cast-iron wash pots over propane burners. When I asked about the barbecue sauce recipe, I was quickly corrected. "We don't call it 'barbecue sauce,' we call it 'gravy,'" said James Grawunder, the head of the barbecue crew, who kept the recipe in his head.
Watching the process, I would guess that a 20-pound sack of onions was chopped and cooked in something like 20 pounds of butter, to which five pounds of ancho peppers and a lot of tomato sauce were added. The men took turns stirring the pots with wooden boat oars. Propane was another newfangled innovation that was grudgingly accepted by Bolten and the traditionalists. "We used to build wood fires under the pots," said Grawunder. "But your pants got so hot standing next to the fire that nobody wanted to do the stirring." Grawunder wasn't sure how long the barbecue had been going on, but he had been part of the crew since 1958. "My father did it before me, and he died in 1955," he said. Bolten and Grawunder told me to talk to Allan "Cap" Hilboldt, the oldest active member of the society and its unofficial historian.
I found Cap Hilboldt at the long wooden table with the crew that was carving the barbecue. Some of the meat was hand-sliced, and some was cut on a Hobart electric slicer. The veteran barbecue man sharpened an old butcher's knife on a whetstone he carried in his pocket before he started slicing mutton. In the booklet published for the Millheim society's centennial celebration, I noticed that the schedule of events included "dinner consisting of Veal and Mutton Barbecue with all the trimmings." I asked Cap why pork, mutton and "veal" were the Texas barbecue meats back then.
