American Gothic House Con't.

Back to my stop in Eldon, Iowa at the American Gothic House and Pitchfork Pie Stand.  Since I was the only one in the house at the time, I was lucky enough to get a little tour of the main floor of the house.  Here are pictures showing the Pie Lady, Beth Howard's, tiny kitchen where she's now baking about 100 pies per weekend to sell in the summer.  She spends most of the week getting ready to sell pies on the weekend with having to go to a bigger town (Ottumwa) to get LOTS of fruit and other supplies, has to order the boxes and other things (if you buy a whole pie, they box it and tie it with a red checkered fabric) and peel lots of fruit and makes lots of crusts.  Luckily she does usually have helpers since the number of pies needed keeps going up. 

The lady you see in the picture was a volunteer (also a P.E.O. member!).  She told me that Kohler donated the new sink and Maytag donated a new stove.  I have "Liked" Beth's "The World Needs More Pie" page on Facebook and read that unfortunately the self cleaning feature of this oven doesn't work very well and today the oven handle even fell off while she's making lots of pie for the last weekend open of the year!  

It turns out that the ladies working in the visitor center the day I stopped are P.E.O. members too (one of these ladies has visited our Rolfe P.E.O. Chapter!) AND one of them loves rubber stamping!  So I had to take in my box of things my friends and I had just made on our power stamping weekend in Peoria!  They loved looking at it all!  

Just tonight I finished reading Beth's book, Making Piece, a memoir of love, loss and pie.  It was definitely nice to read her story especially after visiting the American Gothic House recently and because I make pie.  It's about her husband's death and her guilt and grief, all of her travels and places she's lived, how she learns how to make pie, and eventually judges pie at the Iowa State Fair and ends up living at The American Gothic House, near Ottumwa where she grew up.  I hope some of you will read it too.  It will be interesting to see how long she rents the American Gothic House.

By the way, the couple in the famous painting are not husband and wife!

I think the house needs some flowers and rocking chairs on the porch.

Beth painted the cabinets red and Kohler donated the sink.

She just has one normal size oven to bake all those pies in.

She is a writer.  The door is to the narrow, winding staircase.

Beth had to leave, so this is a volunteer selling pies and books.

The visitor center volunteers who are also P.E.O. members and the one on the right is a stamper!

They loved looking at all of my stamped items I was bringing home from Peoria!

Beth's brother painted this for the town.

Cute little Eldon library.

Apple crumb pie for Bill - I tried a slice of chess pie while there.