This story by Aaron Calvin was first published in the News & Citizen on Sept. 4
On the Thursday before Labor Day, the town of Johnson gathered around its community oven.
This has been a regular occurrence at Legion Field on School Street for nearly eight years and has expanded to include Halloween bakes and “skate and bakes” in the winter, when an ice rink is set up in the park. Members of the town’s community oven committee, many of whom have been involved since the oven’s inception, pull a pie out of the stone column’s fiery maw — sometimes it’s a classic cheese pie, sometimes a custom creation — and place it before a crowd that devours each slice.
Thursday’s affair was like many of the bakes that had gone before it, but more so. There were the usual pickup soccer games, but this time they were led by athletes from Vermont State University’s Johnson campus. Hardwick’s Kingdom Creamery was selling ice cream and a raffle raised $268 for the Johnson Food Shelf. There were Charcuterie boards adorned with meat and cheese from the Johnson General Store. At a set of grills next to the oven, Jesse Whitworth grilled hamburgers and portobello mushrooms, the fragrance of which mingled with the sound of live music; all 90 burgers were gone by the end of the night.
The community oven was first lit in late October 2017, built in an effort led by former legislator and selectboard member Mark Woodward and librarian Jen Burton. Jasmine Yuris, who now chairs the community oven committee, was there at the beginning, as was Sophia Berard, who was shaping the dough before handing it to her husband, Luke Gellatly, who knows the temperament of the oven well enough to produce pies consistently with a chewy, char-kissed crust.
Yuris remembered the early conversations around building a community oven, following the example of other towns in Vermont.
“How can we make food access something that everyone experiences, rather than this idea of charity, which is just for people who need it? We all need it and deserve it,” she said.
The oven cost $8,000 to build eight years ago and has likely produced well over that amount in free meals since then. In classic Vermont fashion, it’s built upon remnants of the past — some of its stones were once part of a former talc mill in the town, according to Seven Days.
Even as the work of the oven appears straightforward, the labor and logistics required to put on the community bakes is challenging. Yuris made the dough used in the bakes in her own home the first few years before securing dough from Elmore Mountain Bread — Berard worked there as a baker before becoming a therapist. This year, for the first time in the oven’s history, they’ve used actual pizza dough. Gellatly makes the sauce with water from Johnson’s cold spring. Toppings and salad ingredients are sourced from Morrisville nonprofit Salvation Farms or purchased locally at Foote Brook Farm.
Other than the occasional repair to its stone edifice, the oven has not changed much since it was built, but the oven committee mission has evolved over the years. In the early phase of social distancing during the Covid pandemic, volunteers donned masks and gloves, and the oven became a takeout spot.
After the flood of July 2023, the oven provided free food to the community in the wake of the devastation, while pizzas were packed up and sent to the selectboard as it worked through the response. When a less damaging flood hit a year later, the committee considered calling off the bake scheduled for that week, but pressed ahead.
“I remember that was more of a question of, like, we’ve all been through this before. Is this too traumatic for us to still hold this thing and continue?” Yuris recalled. “But it all comes back to everybody’s got to eat, and it’s better to eat together, especially on a day like that, so we just continued and did the thing.”
The expanded bake night held last week was a combined effort between the oven committee and the nascent food access task force, one of several ad hoc groups formed in the wake of last year’s “Reimagine Johnson” effort, coordinated by the Vermont Council on Rural Development in effort to address the challenges the town faced after repeated flooding.
After a successful community dinner hosted at the Vermont Studio Center, the task force looked to hold an August event to benefit the Johnson food shelf, which has seen increased need over the summer after serving over 300 people in July alone, according to board member Diane Suter. Hampered by the fact that, unlike the oven committee, the task force is not an entity formally associated with the municipal government, the decision was made to expand the final bake of the summer for the benefit of the food shelf.
“We’re trying to be additive,” Whitworth said.
The task force and oven committee already share members and have similar missions. Yuris, who serves on both, said that, amid the town’s effort to consolidate the groups, she hopes to see a new food access committee take over and expand the oven’s efforts.
The oven, after all, has become more than a way to feed everyone. It’s grown into a symbol of what can be achieved through collective work, much like its new neighbor at Legion Field, the Johnson Public Library, which was moved from its flood-prone former home on Railroad Street earlier this year. When selectboard member Adrienne Parker and her partner Blake moved to Johnson from Rhode Island during the pandemic, volunteering for the oven committee was what she described as the “gateway drug” to getting more involved in the community.
“After the flood, we liked Johnson almost more because we saw how the community responded to each other. Everyone was thinking about each other,” Blake said. “In the places we’ve lived before, it’s kind of like, you’re on your own. Here, everyone’s thinking about everyone else and being strong for each other, thinking of how you can help your community members, even if you’re not affected, and I don’t know, that’s just really beautiful.”
Jasmine Yuris is a News & Citizen community columnist.
