A group of University students and recent graduates joined the local community to brave low temperatures and a drizzling rain Saturday in celebration of Southeastern culture.

The second annual FOLK Fall Apple Festival took place at Grove Creek Farm, just north of Crawford in Oglethorpe County.

Five University students in the anthropology department founded FOLK – Furthering Our Local Knowledge – in December 2007 in response to the loss of local cultural traditions.

“We wanted to bring people with traditional knowledge of the Southeast to come to Athens to speak,” FOLK co-founder Zach Anderson said.

FOLK established a Colporteurs-in-Residence Program to achieve its goal.

“Colporteurs were people in 18th century France that went door-to-door selling books that were banned by the government,” Anderson said. “We see people that have this traditional local knowledge that’s being pushed to the margins of society as modern-day colporteurs.”

Every semester, the group brings a guest speaker to the University.

Kevin Welch, a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, was the Fall 2009 Colporteur-in-Residence. He spoke at University classes Friday and to festival attendees about the uses of traditional food waste.

“Our job is to propagate and recover plants that are culturally relevant to the Eastern Band of the Cherokee,” said Welch, founder of The Center for Cherokee Plants.

Although the rain and muddy terrain kept some potential vendors and guests from making the trip, nearly 200 people showed up for the apple cider, apple pie eating contest and live music.

Local business Goodness Grows offered potted plants grown in its Lexington nursery.

Several attendees were there to promote organizations sharing FOLK’s goals for cultural and ecological preservation.

Douglas Moore, a resident of Jefferson, distributed literature on behalf of non-profit organization Georgia Organics.

Georgia Organics is promoting a program connecting schools to local farms in an effort to provide nutritional education and combat childhood obesity.

“Most of the time, when you ask a child where they got their food, they’ll tell you from the store,” Moore said. “It didn’t come from the store; it comes from the ground.”

FOLK chose not to seek student organization status.

“We purposely did not make it a student group,” Anderson said. “One of our main ideas was that we wanted our group to be accessible to the general public.”

The Fall Apple Festival was dedicated to University anthropology professor Robert Rhoades.