AUSTERLITZ — Rich Mugler remembers growing up and picking blueberries on Harvey Mountain with his family.

“We’d go up there with our dishes and our dogs, and it’s about a mile and a trail, not too bad, all on this gravel trail,” he said. “When you get to the top, it’s all open. It’s beautiful. You can see out over the top of the hills, and the mountain is covered in these low bush blueberry bushes.”

They’d come back loaded with the small dark berries and bake muffins or a pie.

On Sunday, Mugler was embracing the blueberry in a different way at the foot of that mountain — scooping blueberry ice cream made fresh the night before by Golden Organics Farm. After Mugler scooped it, he handed it off to be topped with blueberry sauce made from low-bush blueberries, just like the ones he used to pick.

Mugler was volunteering at the Austerlitz Historical Society’s 25th annual blueberry festival, an all-day event at Old Austerlitz on Route 22. The weather cooperated with mostly sunny skies and highs in the 70s.

It opened with a blueberry pancake breakfast that stretched from 9 a.m. to noon, included a silent auction and a demonstration of sheep shearing by Fred DePaul of Plymouth, Vt., who said he got “huge crowds.” Back in the 1880s, sheep farming was Austerlitz’s main economic engine.

Other demonstrations included broom making, fly tying and bark basket making.

Dressed for the part, Thomas Hooker taught rounds to an audience dating from the early to mid-1800s and played "Alouette" on his fiddle.

The Ghent Band played marches and show tunes, including a medley from “My Fair Lady.”

The blacksmith shop was open and lots of vendors set up booths under tents selling baked goods, crafts and other wares.

The Austerlitz Historical Society prepared 74 pies as a group.

“You think it's going to be kooky, but it's just fun because you help each other and it goes more quickly, and you're happy to hear stories while you're rolling out the dough,” said Barbara Smith, who has been baking pies since the festival’s start. “It's just the best.”

Getting the dough right, though, took some doing.

“There have been two sort of heritage recipes, if you will, passed down through generations, really, of people involved with the organization, and we sort of alternated. I think using one or the other, depending on who was available to bake,” Smith said. “We started out with one of the recipes, and we decided the crust was difficult to handle, so we switched to the other heritage recipe and used that. And it was smooth sailing.”

The recipe that won this year used Crisco in solid form. The other recipe called for Crisco-brand oil.

Joel Dyslin, 88, has been on the Spencertown Volunteer Fire Department for 58 years. While he’s technically retired, he comes out of retirement to help out for barbecues. This year was his third supervising the pie-baking operation at the fire department.

“Well, you got to get all these women and whip them all into shape; teach them how to bake pies,” he said to some laughs at the pie tent, where he was also making change for sales.

“It was spread out a little bit,” he said. “We baked 74 pies at the firehouse Friday, and that worked out very nicely. We started at 9, and we were done by 3.”

He said the exhaust fan in the kitchen kept the kitchen comfortable.

Margaret Hover is the administrator for the Austerlitz Historical Society. She came to the paid position as a volunteer and handed off the blueberry sauce preparation this year to her sister, Dodie Wheeler, who said the recipe includes blueberries, water, sugar and vanilla.

The blueberry festival is the historical society’s biggest fundraiser of the year, supporting a $100,000 annual budget that goes toward historical programming and tours of the church and school across the street as well as on the main grounds of Old Austerlitz.

Its other key fundraiser is called Holiday House, and takes place in November and entails decorating buildings on the campus for Christmas, opening the gift shop and serving soup and sandwiches.

Hover was pleased with the attendance and the weather. She predicted it might top last year’s which raised $47,000, netting $27,000 for the historical society.

Pies sold for $22.

“I’m going home with a blueberry pie, come hell or high water,” said Julie Foehrenbach, one of the bakers.

She had no question that the pie was worth its price.

"Absolutely," she said. “The love and the craftsmanship.”