For the first forty-plus years of the twentieth century, making apple butter in the autumn was a Green Tree tradition. For twenty-nine years, women of Greentree Borough gathered in the yard of Casper Paul on Washington Road, jointly making fifty-five gallons at a time from Baldwin apples, sugar, cinnamon, elderberry juice, and grape juice, boiling the mixture until it was judged done and then putting it up in jars and crocks. Mrs. Paul bought the apples, and the women pared, cored, and stirred in turn throughout the day. Apple butter, an American invention attributed to Pennsylvania German settlers and dating back to at least the mid-eighteenth century, was valued because its higher sugar concentration gave it a longer shelf life than applesauce and helped it last through the winter. In Green Tree, where farmers raised fruit and vegetables for sale downtown by horse and wagon, apples were an essential crop and were eaten at most meals. A play titled Apple Butter, written by Margaret Paul for a nineteen sixty-nine to nineteen seventy Pennsylvania Federation of Women's Clubs contest and set in the early twentieth century, preserved memories of the communal process, including the all-day stirring, the gradual darkening of the mixture as it cooked, and the addition of spices, grape juice, and elderberry juice. Margaret Paul later recalled that Mother Paul's secret was the grape juice and elderberry juice, and that the tradition had to be given up during the war when sugar was scarce and expensive. As far as is known, the last outdoor large-kettle apple butter making in Green Tree took place during the Bicentennial in nineteen seventy-six, when the Women's Club of Green Tree, assisted by a Boy Scout troop from Saint Margaret's Church, made and sold one hundred seventy pints.