Ring in the New Year with the 2015 Greene County Calendar
WAYNESBURG – While looking around for a new calendar for the upcoming year, you might want to consider the 2015 edition of the Greene Country Calendar.
This year’s 11- by 17-inch edition has 13 black and white images of Greene County or adjacent areas – all new and original – with all major holidays clearly identified.
For 37 consecutive years, Colleen Nelson of Holbrook has teamed up with Wendy Saul of New Freeport to bring county residents and even folks living as far away as Paris, London, New Zealand and Australia fresh looks of local landmarks.
“The calendars allow Wendy and me to be in people’s kitchens for an entire year,” Nelson said. “They’ve become a tradition and now have their own fan base.”
When the two calendar makers travel the countryside, they take their cameras along, looking for calendar-appropriate shots. Each year, they winnow through hundreds of photos they’ve accumulated to pick the best of the best. Nelson then makes pen and ink drawings of the compilation which become the images for the twelve months of the year plus a cover page.
Each year, Rhodes and Hammers Printing of Waynesburg publishes 500 of their calendars, which are then assembled by attaching the pages with brass fasteners to a locally harvested hardwood stick along with a jute cord for hanging. The calendars are usually ready for sale by Thanksgiving.
The $15 calendars are now available at Artbeat, 52 E. High Street in Waynesburg, at Waynesburg Milling, 387 S. Washington in Waynesburg, at Specialty Herbal Products, 153 E. High Street in Waynesburg and at Gloria’s Ceramics in Rogersville. For the past three years, they’ve also been featured on facebook at facebook.com/greenecountrycalendar. They can also be ordered directly from Nelson for $15, plus $2.50 for shipping and handling by emailing crnelson@windstresam.net.
After 37 years of publishing, the two collaborators have yet to repeat a single image, although they have repeated locations such as different views of the Greene County Historical Society Museum.
“I once included the Crouse schoolhouse in Center Township on Route 18 in two different calendars because things change,” Nelson said. “Once, when I saw buffalo grazing on the schoolhouse lawn, I just had to sketch them and included the second image in a calendar, even though I had already done a Crouse school for a previous printing.”
Nelson grew up in the Pittsburgh suburbs of West Deer Township, but in 1972, she decided to get into the Back to the Earth movement and transplanted her family to a farm near Wind Ridge. Three years later, friend Wendy Saul did much the same, leaving the suburbia of Mt. Lebanon for the rolling hills and farms of Greene County.
“Friends and family back home often asked us why we decided to live here, and we tried to explain to them that it’s because it’s so beautiful,” Nelson said.
The explanations of the two women didn’t really fully sink in to the minds of the city folk they left behind. That’s why, when a friend, Judith Fitch, suggested they create a calendar showing Greene County scenes to sell in a store she was opening in Rogersville in 1978, they thought it would be a great way to visually explain why they liked living in Greene County so much.
“Wendy and I scoured the countryside looking for material for the calendar,” Nelson said. “She took photos of potential scenes, and I made drawings of them. Because I was silk screening T-shirts in my home, we thought it would also be a good way to print the calendars.”
After buying paper, they produced 150 copies of a 13-page calendar the first year with a different scene for each month. These they either sold at Fitch’s shop for $8 a piece or gave away as presents to friends and family.
“When all was said and done, we made enough money to pay for the paper and ink we’d used,” Nelson said.
Thirty-seven years later, the two women haven’t missed a single year of publishing their calendar.
One of Nelson’s major goals is to keep each image seasonal. For instance, April’s image is a scene at the annual Hammer-In at the W. A. Young and Sons Machine Shop and Foundry in Rices Landing. The event is held each year the third Saturday in April.
For July, a summery scene from the Harry Farm just outside Waynesburg on State Route 188 shows a huge motorized hay baler at work making winter food for livestock with a big wooden barn in the background.
The December image is a peek through the lace curtains of Ralph Bell’s home near Clarksville out onto a wintry scene of his back yard bird feeders. Each of the images includes a narrative description that gives interesting information and insightful tidbits that helps explain each picture.
“Sometimes there’s even a humorous aspect to a particular image such as the mailbox that faces away from the road and is clearly marked with the word ‘Bills,'” Nelson said.
People, especially those with large families, like to send the calendars as Christmas gifts to friends and family scattered around the country.
Nelson also said there’s a small burst of sales after the New Year by people who’ve forgotten to buy one earlier, who were expecting one as a gift but didn’t get one or who saw one someone else had and wanted to buy one for themselves.
“When we first started out 37 years ago, we thought we’d do this just for family and friends and never dreamed it would become a lifetime endeavor,” Nelson said.