When the Columbus St. Margaret of Cortona parish festival was established in 1922, it was intended to celebrate family, community and faith. Those are the same reasons the festival continues to be celebrated 101 years later.
This year, the event took place Friday and Saturday evening, July 28-29.
The festival offered live music with a performance from the Reaganomics on Friday evening. Games included instant bingo, blackjack, big wheel bets and tickets for a $10,000 raffle drawing.
On Saturday evening, the festival included a family night, which was held from 5-9 p.m. and offered children’s games, face painting and a bounce house.
“It’s a great money-maker for the parish, and it’s a great community-building thing,” said Jennifer Gramlich, who joined St. Margaret parish 23 years ago and has been volunteering at the festival every year since. “It’s always nice to come here because you get to see people that you don’t always get to see.
“Former members of the parish will come back, … so it’s always a nice time to get together with people and get to hang out and have a good time.”
Reuniting with former parishioners was one reason Chris Cain and his wife, Daphne, came back to the festival this year.
“It’s like a family reunion,” he said.
The couple were parishioners at St. Margaret for 14 years. They have since moved and now attend Grove City Our Lady of Perpetual Help, but they continue to return to the festival at their former parish.
Chris said the festival is an opportunity to “sit and talk to find out what other folks are doing and why they’re doing it and maybe something you’re missing out on.”
“It’s all the community, a sense of community, and getting to see people,” said Brian Brown, who has been a parishioner at St. Margaret for about 20 years and volunteers at the festival. “Typically, folks go to the same Mass, like we go to 10:30 Mass.
“We don’t see people from 4 o’clock or the 8:30, so it’s a chance to bring everybody together and have fun and celebrate, and even if you’re working, you’re doing service for the church. … I’m a PSR (Parish School of Religion) teacher, so typically, I enlist my students to help out a little bit and my kids, too.”
Father Jeffery Rimelspach, the pastor of St. Margaret, said many parishioners volunteer for the festival, and it is a good way to unite the parish.
“The importance is that the parishioners get together and socialize and have a fun experience together,” he said. “It’s different than being at church; it’s different from any specific clubs because all the clubs and organizations all work together for the festival. So, they’re able to do this as a large group, and we do get a lot of volunteers for a medium-size parish.”
Cheryl Steward, who attended the festival for the first time this year, has neighbors who are parishioners at St. Margaret. She came for the festivities after she saw a sign advertising the festival in her neighbors’ yard. Steward said she enjoyed the variety of activities offered.
“We’ve done the instant bingo, we got in on the $10,000 drawing, we’re getting ready to do the big wheel and we’ve ate some food,” Steward said.
The St. Margaret festival is well known for its Italian sausage. Nearly 700 pounds of hot and mild sausage were made for this year’s event. The church’s homemade pizza is also a favorite.
“We are well known for our pizza,” Father Rimelspach said. “We do make the dough from scratch, and we heat it up over in one of the rooms. We heat it up so the yeast expands, … and the sausage that we serve is ground from the pig, and we grind it right here. We put it in the casing, we wrap it, we cut it, and so, it’s all homemade.”
The pizza recipe belongs to one of the 13 families who founded the original St. Margaret of Cortona church. The families received permission from Bishop James Hartley to build the church in 1921, and the first Mass was celebrated there the following year.
“The original families came from Italy,” said Andrew Scott, whose mother was a member of the Castorano family, a founding family of the parish. “The women came up with a recipe, and they kept the recipe until this day. We still use the same cheese, the same sauce, the same dough. We’ve been making it the same way for generations.”
“We make it exactly the same way as they do,” said Nikki Modlich, who has been volunteering at the festival for decades. “It’s a process. They used to make them on smaller pans. We use larger, but the recipe is the same. People come from everywhere to get it, so it’s very good.
“I took this over from (Andrew’s) mom like 35 years ago, and now my girls work with me. It’s a lot of the families, like my son, so it’s very much a family oriented passion. We all chip in.”
Jo Marie Wilson, a lifelong member of the parish who has volunteered at the festival for more than 70 years, is a daughter of the Delewese family, another founding family.
“They started the festival to pay off the original church,” she said.
St. Margaret of Cortona Church, now located on North Hague Avenue, was originally built about a half-mile away on Trabue Road in the San Margherita neighborhood. The festival was the parish’s major fundraising event of the year.
Many of the men in the original families that formed the parish settled on or near Trabue Road and were employed at the limestone quarry across the street.
“Traditionally, it was the last full weekend of July because that was payday for the quarry workers,” Wilson said of the festival.
“The men that worked at the quarry down here would bring their paychecks home at the end of the month, and I think they found out that was probably the best time to have the festival,” Scott said. “They had a little extra spending money for the festival.”
In 1967, the then-bishop of Columbus, John Carberry, gave permission for construction of the new church on Hague Avenue. The old church on Trabue Road had run out of space for the growing community, but it continued to be used for daily Mass until it was torn down in 1987.
On the Sunday following the festival, St. Margaret continues a tradition that the church’s original families brought to the parish from Italy.
“We have a procession that concludes the festival on Sunday morning, where we have the patronal saints of our parish – there are five of them – and along with the festival every year, we take them in procession,” Father Rimelspach said.
“The different families that come from the different towns of Italy that had those saints as their patronal saints, those families are responsible for the people to carry the statues. So, that’s also been a very long tradition. We go around the neighborhood with these statues.”
The patron saints of the parish are St. Anne, St. Anthony of Padua, St. Joseph, St. Lucy and St. Margaret of Cortona.
The procession originally moved down Trabue Road from the first church building, but few parishioners live along that route today. For the first time this year, the procession took place in Cortona Woods, a housing subdivision neighboring the church.
Traditionally, parishioners who lived along the procession route would come out of their homes and pin money on the statue as a donation. It was a time for family reunions and extended family gatherings.