Uniontown’s decades-old Sausage Feed offers links to town’s origins

Don’t ask Ken Oenning, or any of the 30 Uniontown, Washington, men stuffing 1,800 pounds of sausage into synthetic casings, where they’ll be smoking the meat. They won’t tell you.

“We’re afraid that somebody can steal it,” Oenning, 71, said. “A long time ago, there was some people around here that lost a bunch.”

For 62 years, this small, close-knit town of German origin has been inviting residents far and wide to gorge themselves on a special recipe of pork sausage on the first Sunday in March. On Thursday, lifelong Uniontown resident Tom Faerber, 92, sliced pork shoulder and polished off half a pork sausage hamburger – smashed by Oenning himself – with men a third his age.

Faerber said he’s attended every Uniontown Sausage Feed since the beginning. He remembers when the floors of the Uniontown community center, now the site of the annual feast and the beneficiary of the entry fees, were dirt. He also remembers when a whole hog was slaughtered to feed the crowd, rather than today’s use of store-bought pork shoulder.

“We’d have to skin it, and cut the bones out, then cut it up in small pieces,” Faerber said. “It takes a long time.”

Oenning, too, remembers helping as a child, serving sausage and piling pies, sauerkraut, applesauce and other goodies on picnic tables for hungry guests. He’s been organizing the meat-packing operation for 13 years now.

“Too damn long,” Oenning said, with a chuckle.

Guests on Sunday can have as much sausage, pie and punch as they want. But the servers had to change their strategy a few years back when links started flying out the door of the community center.

“We used to leave the sausage on the table; now we serve it,” Oenning said. “Because there were a lot of people who’d stuff it in their purse and all that kind of stuff. I don’t think it’s etiquette for people to do things like that.” The Sausage Feed is an event that benefits not only the community center, but also the small economy of this wheat-farming town of about 300 people 20 miles south of Pullman. Barbara Reed moved to Uniontown a little more than a decade ago to be closer to her daughter, who graduated from Washington State University to become a veterinarian, she said.

A small shop of trinkets and collectibles including old beer advertisements and a working typewriter from the 1920s is also Reed’s home. She’s hoping to welcome weary and sausage-stuffed travelers into her wood stove-heated shop Sunday afternoon.

“I knew I should be open,” said Reed, who knew nothing of the annual feast when she set up shop just a few blocks up the road from the community center. She was in business a year before the feed, which Oenning said should attract anywhere from 1,200 to 1,500 people.

Having downed a few beers in true German fashion, sausage linkers and grinders packed up boxes of the bangers Thursday afternoon. The meat was to be trucked to its secret location for 48 hours of smoking over applewood planks, which gives the sausages their signature smoky, spicy flavor.

Those boxes are a little too heavy for Faerber, who instead looked on, remembering the building, which houses the old Uniontown high school gym and machine shop. The younger men rib him as they hoist the 50-pound trays of meat.

“He’s before sausage,” one of the workers said, nodding in Faerber’s direction.

Faerber just grinned.