A big pot of beans draws a big crowd in Cataract

A lot of people might ask what’s so interesting about beans and cornbread, but Cataract has made an entire three-day festival out of it, drawing in dozens of vendors and hundreds of visitors every year. In its 57th year, the Cataract Bean Dinner Festival has done it again. Started in 1969 as a simple fundraising dinner to raise money to create a Cataract Volunteer Fire Department, the event has grown into a full-blown community festival.

The roots of the event run deep and haven’t changed as the festival has grown. The titular beans of the bean dinner are still served, now out of three gigantic cast iron pots with proceeds from the sales funding a significant amount of the Cataract Volunteer Fire Department’s budget. During lunch and dinner time, the line for the beans stretches over 100 feet from in front of the Cataract fire house where the beans are served.

The man serving those beans was firefighter Clint Galloway. He has been cooking them for the last 15 years and assisting for the last 17.

“Ed Rawlings, who used to fix the beans, passed the baton up to me and ‘It’s all yours now’,” Galloway said. “So that’s what you get for helping, more responsibility,” he said, chuckling.

Each pot of beans takes 12 hours to prepare: six hours of soaking and six hours of simmering. Preparation begins late at night the day before the festival and continues throughout the three days of the festival. The Cataract Volunteer Fire Department spearheads the festival organization, but volunteers from all over Owen County chip in to make the festival a success. This year, Millgrove Diner volunteered to bake the cornbread that was served at the festival. In previous years, dozens of volunteers each baked the cornbread in their own ovens.

“We’re always a little short handed, but somebody always steps up,” Galloway said. “Elected officials step up, law enforcement steps up, community members step up… everybody here is a volunteer.”

Beans aren’t the only thing on the menu, though. This year’s event also brought down chef Carlos Dorantes from Indianapolis. He says that his uncle, who lives in Cataract, told him about the event and convinced him to come down and put on a fish fry at the Historic Cataract Schoolhouse. Dorantes studied at the Culinary Institute of America and served breakfast sandwiches during the festival mornings and fried whiting and served coleslaw for lunch. He had a very busy day on Saturday and was impressed by the turnout.

“[Saturday] was a busy, busy, day,” Dorantes said. “We had a little bit of hiccups [early on] but managed to work through them and had a fun time here and made quite a good impression on the people here.”

For Galloway, the people are also a big part of what makes the festival worthwhile.

“[It’s] fun for me because as I get older, I’ve seen a dozen people I went to school with that I haven’t seen other than here [at this event],” he said. “You see family here, you see people that you haven’t seen for years.”

And Galloway’s number one trick to make a delicious pot: “Don’t stir the beans!”

Cataract Bean Dinner Festival by the Numbers

Extrapolated based on bean chef Clint Galloway’s count of the number of beans in one 1-lb bag of great northern beans.

• 850 pounds of beans
• 13 servings/lb
• 94 beans per serving
• 188 beans per bowl
• 1,032,750 beans cooked over the whole weekend
• 5,494 bowls of beans served
• 720 boxes of cornbread seasoning
• 720 eggs
• 100-125 pounds of beans per pot
• 200 pounds of onions for the weekend
• 110 pounds of ham for the weekend
• 37 pounds of jowl bacon for the weekend