In addition to the parade scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. and the bean dinner starting around 11:30 a.m., a village-wide yard sale has been scheduled and an open house slated at the village hall to celebrate its recent renovation.
The open house begins at 4 p.m. to allow residents and visitors to see work done on the 113-year-old structure under a Community Development Distressed Communities grant. In addition to new ceilings and a sharper look to the building's exterior, the stage to what was originally a schoolhouse has been opened again.
Mayor Sam Sowards is expected to speak about the renovations and Vinton's new wastewater treatment plant, a $2 million project that became operational last year.
The Cherry Ridge Band will also perform.
Additionally, Vinton Masonic Lodge 375 will host a breakfast at the lodge from 7 to 10 a.m.
The parade and dinner are under the sponsorship of American Legion Post 161 and its auxiliary. The parade travels south on Ohio 160 from the vicinity of Vinton Elementary School to Community Park on Ohio 325 North, where bean soup is prepared in traditional cauldrons.
Hamburgers, hot dogs and other refreshments are available, and the event will feature bingo and announcement of the annual “Golden Booger” awards.
Vinton's bean dinner is one of three in the area with ties to reunions of Union Army veterans that began in the years immediately following the Civil War. The others are held at Rio Grande on the second Saturday of August and at Wilkesville on the first Saturday in September.
Another bean dinner with a connection to such reunions is in New Castle, near Coshocton, on the third Sunday in August.
John Holcomb of Post 161, who has researched the history of reunions that later became known as bean dinners, said that anecdotal information places Vinton's first such gathering of Union veterans at 1868. But his research shows the first public mention of the bean dinner was in 1883.
Rio Grande can trace its bean dinner back to 1870.
“These reunions reflected some of the daily aspects of the soldier's life, including a campfire meal of pork, beans, hardtack and coffee,” Holcomb said. “So many beans were cooked at these gatherings that in time these events became known as bean dinners.”
Known at first as reunions or “campfires,” the gathering didn't attain the label of “bean dinners” until the late 1880s, Holcomb said.
As time passed, the Vinton bean dinner came to be regarded as a community reunion, an aspect it maintains today. It was estimated that about 3,000 people had beans in 1912, “while as many more, fearing they could not get beans, brought their dinners with them,” the Vinton correspondent for the Gallipolis Bulletin reported.
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