Cookin’ oxen and buryin’
the hatchet for the fun of it
By Henry J. Evans Jr.
Cape Gazette staff

The uninitiated could easily come away from attending the Sussex County tradition of Return Day suffering deep, psychological trauma.

After all, it isn’t every day those more familiar with the stresses of Route 1, the Capital Beltway and outlet shopping see men standing in the street calmly roasting a few fresh oxen.

Those same men serve the usually very rare beef in the form of white bread sandwiches to a long line of the waiting hungry, none of whom could possibly be as famished as those who attended the first Return Day some 215 years ago. We’ve come a long way, baby, to get where we’ve got to today.

No one knows the cause and history, either recent or ancient, of Return Day better than Rosalie B. Walls, president of Sussex County Return Day Inc. since 1990.

Walls, on Thursday, Nov. 2, at the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce breakfast meeting at the CHEER Center on Sandhill Road, in addition to an historical timeline of Return Day, gave a linguistics lesson on proper use of the event’s name.

“You don’t returns to Georgetown, you return to Georgetown to hear the returns,” says Walls, instructing those who insist on incorrectly calling the event Returns Day.

Dressed in the attire of an era when women wore petticoats and men wore whatever they damn well pleased, Walls gave chamber members a quick, “I don’t usually talk this fast,” history of the Return Day tradition, interlaced with events more recent, and maybe more colorful, than those of years earlier.

Show goes on

Walls spoke of the year a horse dropped dead in its tracks as the parade snaked its way semi-round The Circle.

She said the equine’s untimely death held things up a bit, but the show went on.

Another scene seared into Wall’s memory is the year the ox-roasting stand caught fire and the blaze threatened to spread to nearby historical buildings.

Walls said fortunately, a piece of firefighting equipment designed to fight brush fires was passing by. The crew saw the conflagration and knocked down the flames with a special fire retardant in their vehicle’s tank. Things were under control before firefighters from the nearby firehouse arrived on scene.

“We were accused of serving that beef. But that didn’t happen,” Walls said. A front-end loader was brought in, and the well done but contaminated meat and the structure that had covered the operation were hauled off.

Within a few hours a couple of fresh oxen were soon on the spit on the way to being ready for the hungry masses.

Weather is everything

Weather is always an important participant in a successful – or perhaps more comfortable – Return Day celebration. The year the event was featured on the national television show “Good Morning America,” ABC Television sent its then-popular weatherman Spencer Christian to cover the event live. It rained.

Walls said Return Day 2004 had so much rain that of the 11 bands that came to participate, not one braved to march.

Not even the Delaware State Police band of bagpiping troopers risked having their kilts, bags and sporin ruined in a Scotland-like downpour.

Age-old tradition

Not to be forgotten is the hatchet and its ritual burial. The symbolic weapon of political warfare waged and now ended, the hatchet is placed in its very own handmade box featuring see-through tops and sides (very much unlike a coffin) and covered with sand that has always come from one place – Lewes Beach.

Walls said because Lewes was Sussex’s first county seat, sand from there has always been used.

“After the returns have been read they will bury this hatchet,” Walls said displaying the golden-headed symbol of returning peace.

“Some people call it a tomahawk and years ago they called it burying the tomahawk. This year – I put it in the back of the program – you can call it a hatchet or tomahawk, which ever you want to,” says Walls.

At the end of her presentation, Walls took a few questions from chamber members obviously looking for clues to the inner workings of an event that is absolutely unique in America. An event that Walls and scores of others continue to help orchestrate and conduct with enthusiasm and pride.
“How do you decide which candidates go into what carriage?” asked a person curious about an important detail of the Return Day tradition that requires winners and losers of election races to ride together in the same horse-drawn carriage.

“Very carefully,” says Walls.