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ORAL HISTORY

Evva Hanes

Mrs. Hanes' Moravian Cookies

The youngest of seven, Evva Foltz Hanes was born in 1932 in Clemmons, North Carolina in a house that has seen the birth of several generations of the family.  Hanes’ lineage can be traced back to the 1700s, when Moravians settled western North Carolina.  Her father, Alva Foltz was a dairy farmer and her mother, Bertha helped supplement their income making Moravian cookies.  Hanes learned to cook as a child by helping her mother, and later took over the cookie-making in the 1960s, teaching her own children the tradition.

Throughout the years, the cookies have always remained hand-rolled and hand-cut, despite having grown from the fifty pounds of dough made in her mother’s kitchen in the 1920s to over 100,000 pounds produced from their commercial bakery located next to the home in which she was raised.