Lawrence's Ox Roast: free beef since 1921

The sandwich is free. That is the whole pitch of Lawrence’s Ox Roast, and it has been the whole pitch for more than a century: roast a great pile of beef over Labor Day weekend and hand it out to anyone who walks up, no charge, until it runs out.

It started in 1921, when a handful of Lawrence businessmen put on a one-day blowout — a parade, a band, a baseball game, and by the early tellings thousands of free ox roast sandwiches carried out to the crowd. The thing had legs. It ran through the 1920s and 1930s, went quiet during World War II, came roaring back in the 1950s and 1960s, then drifted off again the way small-town festivals do when the people who built them get tired. In 1985 the village brought it back for good, timed to its sesquicentennial — the 150th birthday of the town — and stretched it from one day into a long weekend. It has landed on Labor Day weekend every year since.

The “Homecoming” half of the name is the part that actually explains it. Lawrence is the kind of place people leave for jobs and come back to for weddings and funerals, and the Ox Roast is the third reason — the weekend the kids who grew up here drift back into town, find their cousins, and stand around the same village park their grandparents stood in. The parade usually closes things out, rolling down the main drag past the same storefronts.

It is a small festival in a small town, and it knows it. There is no admission gate, no headliner act, no reason to come except that the beef is good, it is free, and somebody you know will be there.