They were applauding.

Shelley skidded to a stop, looked down at her arms, which were scratched and dirty. "It's going to take a week at Elizabeth Arden to get over this," she said.

According to the brochure that was being handed out after the reenactment, Auguste Caspar Snellen had come from Alsace-Lorraine to the Chicago area as an ambitious boy of twenty in 1875. Just north of the city, he'd claimed a large parcel of land that turned out to be one of those microclimates that were sensational for growing peas. He'd tried potatoes first, but they rotted. Rutabagas grew well, but nobody wanted them. Corn withered on the stalk. But when he tried his hands at peas, they flourished as if by magic. Being of an amateur scientific bent, Auguste started importing other varieties of peas. They turned to gold. Rather than selling the peas as food, he sold them as seed all over the country. He built a little laboratory and greenhouse and developed new strains. By the time he was fifty, Auguste Snellen was the "Pea King" and a very wealthy man.

In 1907, he used some of his wealth to endow a museum, which was named for him. He'd originally wanted the museum to be filled solely with exhibits having to do with the history and significance of peas, which he found endlessly fascinating, but he was finally persuaded that other agricultural (and eventually domestic) pursuits were also fit subjects for museum exhibits.

Auguste Snellen was responsible for the county's Pea Festival, which had taken place every August (no coincidence, that) since 1927—except in 1945, when everybody was too busy celebrating the end of the war; and in 1964, when a tornado ripped through the fairgrounds the afternoon before the opening of the festival and scattered jellies, afghans, flower exhibits, farm implements, and a few startled piglets far and wide.