Outdoor Community Oven

Outdoor Community Oven. . One of the first projects undertaken by the Waldensians in their new settlement was building an outdoor oven. Back in the Valleys each village had a community oven constructed of field rock and families took turns using it to bake bread., The ladies wanted the men to build the oven for them, but the men were too busy trying to operate the sawmill, build homes and build incomes. So, the women devised a plan. Donning their native costumes of colorful aprons, shawls, and white lacy coiffes (bonnets), they visited churches in the area to sing French hymns and garner funds for the oven. After a short time, the ladies had raised enough money to have the oven constructed themselves., They built their oven on a site near the railroad directly across from the present-day post office, where a house later built by A.F. Sala still stands., There, three stone masons, each from a different village in the Old Country, plied their skills to shape Valdese rocks into a productive oven. On June 20, 1893, a journal entry in the colony's record book celebrated the event. "Today for the first time after several weeks of waiting, the colonists succeeded in making bread in an oven... The bread... was a great success, to everyone's satisfaction, which is considered a blessing of the Lord.", They saw it as a day of triumph. For stones of the field had, figuratively speaking, been turned into bread!, The oven on Trail of Faith is modeled after an oven still in existence in the Waldensian Valleys at Ghigo Prali.