Day one of Nappanee's 48th Apple Festival a success

NAPPANEE, Ind. -- Opening day at Nappanee's 48th annual Apple Festival welcomed tons of people to enjoy the sweet treats and variety of rides.

Organizers say Thursday night's big event was the Scholarship Pageant, which took place at 7 p.m. with 12 women competing for $2,500.

The big tradition is the roughly seven-foot-wide pie, with roughly 440 pounds of pie filling, and 80 pounds of crust.

The pan itself weighs 100 pounds and it gets baked for 17 hours before coming out of the oven on Friday morning.

Director of the Nappanee Apple Festival Donna Persing said, "So, it takes them three or four hours to put the pie together. They eat lunch then and then the city workers come over to the restaurant. The walls are removable in the Don Carlos restaurant in the back, and it takes 10 guys to carry this 600-pound pie and put it in an eight-foot brick oven. The Don Carlos place was an original bakery, and Ron tell Shaw built the pan, and we keep the pan on display throughout the year at the Heritage Museum on West Market Street, and it's going to bake all night. We shut the oven off. We shut it off, 30 minutes ago, and we open the door, we put fans in to circulate the air. But it continues to bake, and it comes out of the oven after 17 hours at 7:30 tomorrow morning, and then the first piece of pie will be served at 11 o'clock tomorrow."