Growing pumpkins about heritage for Innocenzi family
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EDITOR'S NOTE: This is part of a weekly series on our region's history coordinated by the Trumbull County Historical Society.
Their paths crossed for only a fleeting moment.
He was an American soldier on leave with a camera.
She was a peasant girl working out in the field in Villa Sant'Angelo, a rural hamlet in central Italy dating back to Roman times.
He pointed the camera. She obliged him with a smile.
He clicked.
Then the young woman went back to work in the field, and the young man went on down the road. That should have been the end of it, but it wasn't.
The soldier had come to this particular village, looking for this particular road, in order to find the farm where his father had lived before coming to America. And without knowing it, he had just stumbled upon the love of his life.
Call it chance. Call it fate. Some things are just meant to be. Their paths would cross again.
It happened in 1957, two years after Henry Innocenzi returned home from the service, when Henry drove his father from Kinsman to the city of Youngstown to see his boyhood friend who had just moved with his family to America.
Henry spotted the daughter of his father's friend staring at him almost as soon as he walked through the door. Their eyes met, and in that instant, he recognized the pretty girl from Villa Sant'Angelo flashed the same alluring smile he had seen once before.
And deep inside something clicked.
Henry and Josephine Notareschi married on April 25, 1959, and for the next 62 years, they carved out their own little piece of the American Dream.
They bought a house in the tiny village of Kinsman so Henry could be close to his parents' 80-acre farm and to the metal stamping plant where Henry began working after returning from the service in 1955.
It was here that they raised two sons and two daughters, and grew pumpkins on their three-acre spread across the road from home.
And in all their years together, Henry and Josephine looked for ways to lift up the town and help make it a better place to live.
Henry became a founding member of St. Patrick Catholic Church and the Knights of Columbus. He joined the Harry Lees Legion Post No. 506 and carried the American flag each Memorial Day for more than 50 years.
Josephine's biggest joys were family, friends and food. In addition to pumpkins, she helped Henry grow garlic, Indian and sweet corn, and gourds.
She joined the Altar & Rosary Society at the church and the Kinsman Volunteer Fire Department Auxiliary, and for years, her own special sauce was the secret sauce that drove sales at the church's spaghetti dinner. For 25 years, Josephine worked as a cook in the cafeteria of the old Joseph Badger High School where she was loved by students an staff, and famous for her homemade cinnamon rolls.
Henry and Josephine are gone now, but their legacy -- and their work – still endure thanks to the commitment of a son and a grandson who have kept alive the one tradition the Innocenzi family has long been known for: Growing pumpkins.
The people of Kinsman have been buying pumpkins from the Innocenzi family longer than most of them have been alive.
In 1975, about the time Albert and his brother Henry were coming of age, the Innocenzi Family Farm officially began. Albert eventually married and moved to Cortland to raise his children, but he returns to Kinsman to work in the same stamping plant as his father, and to tend to his pumpkins.
In 2000, when his grandfather's farmhouse on the outskirts of town was sold, Albert bought from the family estate the 80 acres of farmland so he could resume growing pumpkins.
And just this year, Albert's son Anthony and his bride Marissa were married in the Catholic church that his grandfather helped to found decades before. And then they moved into the same house on Goff Center that Anthony's grandparents had moved into decades before. And across the road, they planted their first pumpkin patch.
And just a few weeks ago, on the same grounds where Henry and Josephine's children graduated from high school, the Innocenzi family supplied all the pumpkins that were needed to inaugurate the first Kinsman Pumpkin Festival.
The whole family showed up for the event, as did most of the town. And something old was begun anew.