Danville Raccoon Dinner: Volunteerism fuels nearly 80-year tradition

DANVILLE – While Danville’s latest raccoon dinner this winter lasted a few hours, dinner preparation started months prior and the tradition itself dates back almost 80 years.

The latest raccoon trapping season lasted from Nov. 10 through Jan. 31, during which three local trappers caught 200 raccoons for the meal. After storing the meat at Young’s Locker, 500 pounds total, volunteers started defrosting and preparing the meal for consumption two days before the dinner.

The 2022 raccoon dinner on Feb. 7 drew an estimated 500 attendees, both locals and people who traveled from across the state for the occasion. The annual dinner has gained a sizable following since the first dinner in 1944, organized by Clyde Banbury and Clyde Cornell in the basement of a private residence with 30 attendees.

The dinner remains organized by the community, for the community. Danville Lions Club puts on the event, but the approximately 50 people involved with the dinner, from start to finish, are not exclusively Lions Club members.

Long-time volunteers, such as this year’s head trapper Fred Mickley, 71, have been involved since their teenage years.

Mickley trapped about 150 raccoons this year within a three-mile radius of his home in Danville with permission from local farmers.

“They’re all free-range and grain-fed, you might say,” Mickley said with a laugh.

Mickley uses foothold traps and checks them every 24 hours, as required by law.

“They stick their foot down in a trap, it’s a tube, and you don’t have to worry about catching people’s pets or anything like that,” Mickley explained. “And then when I dress the ‘coon, you don’t see any swelling or any real damage there to their paw or leg.”

Another person from the Mickley family headed the cooking, Duane Mickley. Preparation for the Monday night meal begins the Saturday prior, first with thawing by soaking in water overnight. Sunday morning, around 8 or 9 a.m., roughly 20-30 people volunteer to clean the fat off the meat.

The next step is another soak. From Sunday to Monday, the meat is soaked in saltwater — all wild game typically is.

Cooking begins the morning of the event. The meat is breaded and placed in a roaster for roughly four to five hours, just in time for serving to begin at 4:30 p.m. Monday.

Duane Mickley said a key part of the cooking process for raccoon is browning, which involves searing the surface of the meat to lock in flavor and add color. Browning also helps the meat hold together once it is placed in the roaster, he said.

In addition to the meal itself, dinner proceeds go to a cause each year. For many years, the dinner benefitted Lions Club projects, such as purchasing eyeglasses and hearing devices for people, said Pat Crow, dinner organizer alongside his wife, Sandy Crow, who is president of the Danville Lions Club.

Around 20 years ago, dinner funds started going to scholarships for local high school students and then switched to benefitting local citizens in need, which is the case for the family who received the proceeds this year.

This year the dinner benefited the Dalton Sheldon Fund, a fund for 2011 Danville graduate Dalton Sheldon, 29, who got a traumatic brain injury in an automobile accident in 2019. Sheldon’s mother, Jeanette Sheldon, said she was brought to tears when she found out the dinner proceeds would go to her son this year.

“People think that (because) we live in a small community like this, everybody knows your own business — yeah, they do,” Jeanette Sheldon said, “and that’s why they’re taking care of us.”

Dinner proceeds will specifically go toward the family making their house more handicap-accessible, such as widening door frames for his wheelchair, and purchasing rehabilitation equipment, such as parallel bars he can use to stand by himself, his sister Danielle Hoar said.

Attendees from near and far

Jeff and Marka Spencer from Fredericktown have been attending the raccoon dinner since 2001, with the exception of a few years during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

After Jeff first tried raccoon 21 years ago, he was hooked. Marka said she tags along but sticks with eating the alternative meat option at the dinner, ham.

They first attended the dinner after relocating from Cleveland. As they got acclimated to north central Ohio, a neighbor mentioned the raccoon dinner and as an adventurous foodie, Jeff was interested.

“It’s tradition, and I actually really like raccoon,” he said. “It tastes a little like ham. I’d say 30% ham taste and it’s got a little turkey drumstick taste. So, if you added those two together it’d probably be accurate.”

Others compared the taste of raccoon to sweet roast beef, including Lynn McCann, who serves on Centerburg’s school board.

“Well, it doesn’t taste like chicken,” McCann said.

McCann had eaten other traditional hunting animals — rabbit, pheasant, deer — before, but Danville’s dinner had been his first taste of raccoon, at least fifteen years ago, he said.

“What’d you think of the ‘coon,” McCann yelled out to a friendly face passing by, who gave a big thumbs up in response.

Kris Leiter, who attended the dinner from Lexington, said he has only ever had raccoon at Danville’s dinner, and he usually goes back for seconds and thirds.

“It’s a novelty,” Leiter said. “There’s not a whole lot of places that do this.”

While raccoon had been a new dish for Leiter, he said he has always been open to trying new foods and does Facebook food reviews for fun.

“If I had my eyes closed, I wouldn’t know it was raccoon,” Leiter said.

Jerry Scott, former law enforcement supervisor for the Ohio Division of Wildlife, first attended the dinner in 1966 shortly after starting with the division. Scott said not much has changed about the dinner over the years, although he said he thinks the cooking of the raccoon has improved.

Scott had not had raccoon before his first time at Danville’s dinner but said, “being a wildlife officer, I ate a lot of everything so I thought I’d try this one.”

While Scott enjoys the raccoon, he said the people are what keeps him coming back.

“It’s part of our community,” Scott said of the raccoon dinner. “Everyone has their own little shtick. This happens to be Danville’s. They’ve had other events, but this is the one that’s stuck the most.

“It’s just flat out unique.”

Danville’s dinner is not only attended by locals.

It’s become a tradition for Egyptian immigrant Amgad Fahmy, who said he started attending more than five years ago. Fahmy lived in Virginia for a period but settled in Columbus.

“I love the event itself and the raccoon as well,” Fahmy said.

Fahmy said throughout the different places he has lived, he has found that socio-cultural factors often influence a community’s acceptance of certain foods.

“In Egypt, we eat buffalo,” Fahmy said as an example. “It’s almost interchangeable with ham.”

Fahmy is proud to be associated with Danville’s event because it is attended by people willing to try things out of the ordinary, he said.

Pennsylvania native and now Walhonding resident Christa Ciotola has been attending the raccoon dinner for the past 10 years. The draw for Ciotola, aside from the raccoon itself, is that the dinner is cheap compared with other game dinners she has heard about.

“They’ve cornered the market on raccoon,” Ciotola said.

Ciotola is a hunter, but she had not eaten raccoon before attending Danville’s dinner, after hearing about it from long-time dinner organizers Pat and Sandy Crow.

“I’m a hunter,” Ciotola explained. “I hunt deer, so I like wild game. I’d eaten different kinds of wild game so I thought, man, a raccoon dinner, just exclusively raccoon, yeah sure. I’ll go for it.”

While the raccoon dinner is the first time some have tried the woodland fare, others who attend come because they already know they will enjoy the food, including Dan Komperda from Homerville who has been attending since the early 1990s.

Komperda first heard about the event by word-of-mouth, from his uncle, but he had already eaten raccoon growing up — raccoon, gravy and biscuits, he said.

“But they don’t have a ‘coon roast in Homerville,” Komperda said, explaining what first drew him out to Danville.

The next generation of raccoon dinner attendees is in the making.

Fredericktown native Monica Ridenbaugh, who now lives in Nashport, has been attending the raccoon dinner since she was a child, and Ridenbaugh brought her two sons, Adam Jr., 8, and Aaron, 6, to the dinner Monday.

Both Adam Jr. and Aaaron said they would eat raccoon again, and asked their mother if she could cook it for them at home.

When asked what he was going to tell his classmates about the raccoon dinner the next day, Adam Jr. said, “If I know they like roast beef, I’ll just say raccoon tastes a lot like roast beef and they should try it.”

Looking to year 80

Next year will mark 80 years of the annual Danville raccoon dinner. Longtime volunteers, such as Fred Mickely, think the dinner has sustained because of the causes it supports and the sense of tradition it provides.

“It was kind of started by a lot of the founding fathers of the town, and there is a lot of tradition there,” Mickley said.

“And I would issue a challenge to the older guys who are still there to … bring in some of their sons and grandsons and say, ‘Hey, it’s time for you to pay it forward and start thinking about picking this up – you know, carrying the torch.’”

Similarly, volunteer Duane Mickley emphasized that community involvement is needed to continue the tradition for decades to come.

“It’s a community thing, and we have fun,” he said.

Similar to much of the Mickley family, one of the dinner organizers, Pat Crow, first started volunteering for the dinner when he was a child. His later work for the Knox County Convention and Visitors Bureau required him to travel all around the state, and he came to realize that the raccoon dinner was not only well-known in his family or local community.

“In Ohio, I could almost go anywhere and sit down at a table in a banquet room with eight or 10 people, and when the conversation would come around to, ‘Where are you from?’ and I’d say, ‘I’m from Danville, Ohio,’ it almost never failed that somebody at that table would say, ‘Isn’t that where they have the raccoon dinner?’” Crow said.

“It’s very well-known around the state, and almost everybody knows somebody who’s been here.”

There have been years where the dinner almost did not happen, but without fault the community has stepped in to ensure the tradition continues.

“If it wasn’t for the 100 or so people that, at some point during the process, helped us, we couldn’t do this,” Crow said. “The Lions Club only has a few members, as many small-town clubs aren’t overwhelmed with membership, (but) it’s the volunteerism spirit in the community that makes this work.”