Minnetrista continued their celebration of 125 years of the Ball Jar with their Can You Can It? competition last Saturday.
Competitors entered in three categories - fruits, vegetables and spreads - and were judged on presentation, not taste. All entries had to be canned in a Ball Jar.
"What better way to celebrate canning than with canning?" Tanya Brock, a visitor service manager for Minnetrista and organizer of the event, said.
Joshua Burton, a Muncie native who has been canning for 5 years, won both the spread and fruit categories for his peach jelly and peach conserve.
Holly Henderson won the vegetable category with her pickled green tomatoes.
The competition was part of the Can It! exhibit at Minnetrista. The exhibit explores the history of the Ball brothers in Muncie and their impact on East Central Indiana's economy.
"[The exhibit] shows how the Ball Jar has intersected the personal lives of people around here," Brock said. "From now, all the way back through history."
The Ball brothers moved from Buffalo, N.Y., to Muncie in the mid-1880s due to the discovery of natural gas in East Central Indiana.
Cheap energy combined with an abundance of sand in Northern Indiana made the area a perfect spot for the Ball brothers to launch their Ball Glass Works factory.
This transformed Muncie, then an almost exclusively agricultural town, into an industrial hot spot.
Admission for the Can It! exhibit, which runs until August 23, is $4 for students.
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