By GEHS FFA students

As a lot of you know, the Greenbrier East FFA organization has a Ham Stand over on the West Virginia Sate Fairground property.

It’s been there for many years, and this past year, we decided it was time to renovate it. We spent around five days during the winter tearing the whole inside out basically to redo everything. We picked things back up during the summer and we spent over six weeks there. When I say we, I mean Eddie Whitt, Joe Godby, all the FFA advisors,  alumni members,  Vance family, enormous number of FFA members, and many others.

During the summer, over the six weeks, there was an average of 10 people there for over four hours a night. Some people started the Ham Stand at 7 a.m. and didn’t finish until 11  p.m. Some of the volunteers took off work at their normal job just to get the Ham Stand complete and finished.

Our new officers always go on a officer retreat and they actually spent their retreat camping at the fairgrounds so we could be able to finish just in time. If you didn’t get a chance to come by a see the ham stand  this year, when I say renovate I mean completely changed the inside and we had people donate old barn wood and we sanded and put over 10 coats of  polyurethane on in the front half. In the back half, we got a new two-door, commercial refrigerator, new hand sink, faucets, and all new wiring, drywall, insulation, flooring, everything.

Over these six weeks, if you calculate it up, we had over 1,200 volunteer hours. Overall the renovations cost about $18,000 which includes the $5,000 donated in material and equipment. By the end of the Fair week we made enough profit this year from the Ham Stand to cover all the renovation costs and still had a profit of more than $5,000 to support on FFA leadership and competition activities.

We would like to thank all of our supporters who donated their time and effort into making the ham stand a success and remodeling this historic relic of the West Virginia State Fair as well as our FFA Chapter here at Greenbrier East.