During the dark days of World War II, when the local term for German toast, “Oyer Brode” was changed to “French toast,” and the Pennsylvania German dialect tongue was silent in U.S. public buildings, there emerged a dynamic Pennsylvania German scholar, Alfred L. Shoemaker, a son of a farmer from Schnecksville, Lehigh County. He eventually became the nation’s leading ethnologist, and founder of the first Department of Folklore in America in 1948.
Alfred earned his Ph.D. researching the Pennsylvania German language and folklore among the Amish of Arthur, Illinois and received his degree at the University of Illinois in 1940. Coming back to Pennsylvania he joined the staff of Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania where he founded America’s first Department of Folklore.
During the post war period, he had compiled a checklist of Pennsylvania German imprints (books) for both the Lehigh and Northampton County Historical Societies. While at Franklin and Marshall College, Dr. Shoemaker’s Folklore Department published an eight-page academic newspaper entitled, The Pennsylvania Dutchman, with his folklore colleagues, Dr. J. William Frey and Dr. Don Yoder. The Dutchman with a biweekly circulation of 12,500 was widely read by citizens in southeastern Pennsylvania, and later a national audience, who wanted to learn about Pennsylvania Dutch culture as Dr. Shoemaker’s scholars researched it. Reading about their ethnic heritage in an academic context, Pennsylvania German people gained great esteem for their American accomplishments and overcame anti-German embarrassment cast upon them during the WWII years.
Later when Dr. Shoemaker published his folk cultural studies, Eastertide in Pennsylvania and Christmas in Pennsylvania, the public realized the degree to which America has assimilated Pennsylvania German folk customs, crafts, and culinary arts but wanted to learn more. However, Dr. Shoemaker went beyond academic studies when joined by his two F&M folklore colleagues, Yoder and Frey, their love of country and native heritage brought about the founding of the Kutztown Folk Festival in 1950 at the Kutztown Fairgrounds in Berks County, Pennsylvania.
Dr. Shoemaker’s Folklore Center at Franklin and Marshall College used proceeds of the first Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Festival in 1950, which ran for four days ending on the patriotic 4th of July, for further folklore publications. Various folklorists and Pennsylvania Dutch humorists shared the unique outing at the Kutztown Fairgrounds with demonstrations, folk games, seminars, and dialect storytelling. Obviously, the public came to see the three doctors of folklore they had read about in The Dutchman newspaper, and the folk festival attendance swelled to 30,000 people the very first year.
The timing of the folk festival coincided not only with the patriotic 4th of July but with the grain harvest season for the vast number of Pennsylvania German farmers, who also participated at the folk festival, harvesting a four-acre wheat field adjacent to the fairgrounds, demonstrating with old-fashioned grain cradles. The festival celebration was greatly enhanced by farmwomen wearing their usual “Dutch” bonnets and men their big brimmed straw hats under the sweltering summer sun. This traditional dress has continued to be in vogue at the Kutztown event even up to the present.
As the folk festival developed, one of Dr. Shoemaker’s greatest assets was the Herbert Miller family who lived near Kutztown. Herb’s sons, who understood and spoke the dialect, had a working knowledge about farm activities Dr. Shoemaker planned for the folk festival. Today, Herbert Miller’s son Lester still provides hoe-downing groups to entertain the public at the current Kutztown Pennsylvania German Festival.
It was perhaps the overwhelming readership of their bi-weekly newspaper among the ten counties of Pennsylvania German people, which convinced Dr. Shoemaker and his staff that such a festival showcasing folklore and folklife practices would be received favorably by the American public. The open-air museum activity was not popular among all the academic community, but from its very first inception the public was excited about the Dutch food, seminars, and rural activities which made it a wonderful experience.
The time was right: the decade of the 1950’s was the booming modern age of push button living, television, and urban high rises. People caught up in cultural shock were yearning to get away from TV dinners and rediscover home cooking and country life. Year after year, the Annual Kutztown Folk Festival sponsored by Dr. Shoemaker’s F & M Folklore Department at the Kutztown Fairgrounds grew larger, and his bi-weekly newspaper became a successful quarterly magazine. The large tourist trade of Lancaster County also benefited from guidebooks and booklets published by the Folklore Center on Pennsylvania German dialect and short subjects.
Always concerned with academic excellence, the material Dr. Shoemaker published was well received by the public. Meanwhile, the week long Kutztown Folk Festival had become a major tourist attraction drawing beyond a hundred thousand people annually by 1955. Having been able to travel abroad and observe the folklife studies movement in the British Isles and on the Continent of Europe, Dr. Shoemaker updated the name of the Dutchman magazine in 1958 to become Pennsylvania Folklife, which expanded its scope to include all folklife practices.
By the decade of the 1960’s, the Kutztown Folk Festival encompassed many more surviving folklife craftsmen and practitioners in the contemporary local culture, but foremost interest for tourists was the family styled eating tents featuring homemade Pennsylvania German food. Admired for his academic dedication, “Doc” was joined by many folklife researchers like Vincent Tortora, Robert Bucher, Clarence Kulp Jr., Alan G. Keyser, Donald Roan, and Russell and Florence Baver. All of whom wrote articles for the Pennsylvania Folklife magazine, including myself.
The Kutztown Folk Festival had now become the largest in America and an American tourist institution whose open-air seminar tents provided amusement and education to tens of thousands of people who wanted to enjoy and understand this colorful rural culture. A man of the people, Dr. Shoemaker never endorsed the bookish term “Pennsylvania German.” He referred to it as foreign to the culture and used only the term Pennsylvania Dutch which is the only way natives speak of themselves, because it is a time honored colloquialism in the Pennsylvania Dutch psyche.
Revenue from his successful folk festival allowed Dr. Shoemaker to establish a Pennsylvania Folklife Society office on the Main Street of Kutztown. In the modern age of the 1960’s folklife studies were relatively unheard of in America and some elitist Pennsylvania Germans were fearful that Dr. Shoemaker might expose the backwards side of the “dumb Dutch” to the American public. Nevertheless, the public was delighted to share our home cooking recipes, quaint customs, unique craftsmanship, folk music and dancing, and did not find any dumb Dutch people!
A graduate of Kutztown State College, I met Dr. Shoemaker in 1960 and began researching Berks County folklife for his Pennsylvania Folklife magazine. This was at the height of the magazine’s popularity, and I considered myself very fortunate to have him as a mentor. I introduced Dr. Shoemaker to my eccentric uncle, Freddie Bieber, who made a living making split oak baskets on a “schnitzelbank.” Dutch as sauerkraut, and a good basketmaker, Freddie was featured in Pennsylvania Folklife in 1964. If it were not for Dr. Shoemaker’s excellent command of the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect this Pennsylvania German recluse would never have left the hills of the Oley Valley to demonstrate at the folk festival that year.
Dr. Shoemaker’s secretary in his Kutztown Main Street office was Herb Miller’s wife, Viola, from a farm North of town. When the New York Times editor verified the annual festival dates by phone and would ask her to speak Pennsylvania Dutch, she obliged him in the dialect that he had indeed communicated with the heart of the “Dutch Country.” The outstanding feature of the Kutztown event was the fact that these people were not portraying a pageant of America, but were portraying themselves in everyday life!
The early success of the folk festival had a lot to do with Alfred Shoemaker’s amicable personality. He wanted to share with America not the fact that the Pennsylvania Germans are different, but in our diversity, we remain a unique part of American versatility.
Having witnessed the holocaust in Nazi Germany, Dr. Shoemaker established a meaningful relationship with Louis Schlosberg, a Jewish wire editor on the staff of the Reading Eagle newspaper. Louis was a key advisor, who assisted the folklife society in advertising their folk festival in important metropolitan newspapers, and made sure the wire service carried the event over the week of the 4th of July.
Paul R. Wieand, a folklorist from Lehigh County, brought his exceptional dialect singing group to perform at the folk festival. He also created a large general store in one of the Fairgrounds exhibit buildings, complete with a potbelly stove and a cat in the cracker barrel! Educational photographic display boards were produced by Olive Zehner-Merritt, an art teacher from the Reading School District, which accompanied several folklife exhibits for visiting tourists to learn at a glance the local Pennsylvania German culture in-depth. If the tourists got a laugh out of the Dutchified Kutztownian, the opposite was true, too. Some urbanites did not know the difference between straw and hay nor a mule and a horse, but everyone laughed together, and the world became smaller.
A feature of the Folk Festival for which Dr. Shoemaker was immensely proud was a huge 18th Century two-screw wooden cider press, which was turned by hand. This farm apparatus stood ten feet tall and about twelve-foot long. The roof of the press was thatched with rye straw, which added to the crushing weight of the apple pomace. The rustic press was the property of the Berks County Historical Society, where Dr. Shoemaker served as curator from 1947 to 1948. Among the Berks County farmers who made the Folk Festival come alive was John Fox from Bernville, who still farmed with horses, and brought a six horse team to the festival to drive his Conestoga wagon around with a jerkline tied to the lead horse.
Ellsworth Bieber, a Lions Club member, remembers how “Alfred” did not want commercial french fries on the fairgrounds and told them about the good old days when mother cut slices from a potato and fried them on the stove top of an old cast iron kitchen stove. One of the men figured out how to make a machine to slice the potatoes and the Lions Club has been selling “Dutch Fries” ever since.
Each 4th of July, the week of the summer that the Annual Folk Festival is held, George Adam one of our local farm participants threshes rye and builds a tall grain stack in the middle of the grass commons, which after the traditional 4th of July parade of festival craftsmen is topped with a United States flag. Some years the grain stack consists of 600 sheaves of rye reaching a height of near twenty-feet which Howard Geisinger and family helped thresh.
Over the years many of Dr. Shoemaker’s original folklife demonstrations continued even though the Kutztown Folk Festival was acquired by Ursinus College, Collegeville, Pennsylvania and operated as late as 1995 under their sponsorship. His 18th Century fieldstone bakeoven at the fairgrounds still fills the air with the aroma of fresh baked bread since the Folk Festival at Kutztown was acquired by a joint committee of the Kutztown University Foundation and Kutztown Fair Board in 1996.
Although the original Pennsylvania Folklife Society no longer exists, folklife practitioners around Kutztown continue to paint hex signs on their Swiss bank barns, and the churches and farm granges still serve large family styled dinners of Pennsylvania German food. Since the 1950’s, eighty-five Old Order Mennonite families have settled in the Kutztown area from Lancaster County and drive to market with their wagons and buggies. Their presence portrays Kutztown as a model Pennsylvania German community. It hardly seems like folklife practices in this historic community have changed, as we continue into the twenty-first century.
Dr. Shoemaker’s crowning achievement in his lifetime was hosting the nation’s people at the highly successful Annual Kutztown Folk Festival to dance, sing, and taste our mouth watering country food. His desire later to establish a permanent ethnic Pennsylvania German open-air museum in the heart of Lancaster County’s Amish territory in the 1960’s caused the bankruptcy in 1963 of the Pennsylvania Folklife Society and eventually the loss of his leadership. The foremost researcher of Pennsylvania German folklife, his excellent scholarship still inspires others to observe the diversity of American lifestyles.
Although Pennsylvania Folklife paid off its bankruptcy debts honorably, the loss of Alfred Shoemaker’s leadership of the Kutztown Folk Festival during bankruptcy receivership brought about his mental depression. Forced into early retirement at age fifty during these years, attorney Mark R. Eaby ran the Pennsylvania Folklife Society to pay off creditors. Dr. Shoemaker was at first put up in the Hotel Brunswick in Lancaster City, then later transferred to the state hospital at Allentown, Pennsylvania for treatment of his mental depression.
Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania Folklife Society open-air museum on route thirty, east of Lancaster City, with a plain Dutch farmstead in place and a model “fancy Dutch” farmstead just begun, fell into ruin. However, its real estate was quite valuable.
Not quite able to come to grips with himself, Alfred wondered aimlessly to the City of New York looking for a folklife benefactor, where it is presumed he died in spite of friends who tried to reach out for him. On occasion, he did make a bus trip back to Berks County and visit Viola Miller, who now lived in Lenhartsville.
Today, Dr. Shoemaker’s academic monument consists of more than a hundred field research folklife articles, and the Pennsylvania Folklife Index of Pennsylvania German Culture comprised by him over the years which consists of over 50,000 entries.
(Post script)
The late Dr. Don Yoder, author and retired professor of the University of Pennsylvania, whose dedication to the American folklife studies movement has never wavered over the years, continued to provide new insight for Stackpole Books who had reprinted some of Dr. Shoemaker’s books.
FOR FURTHER READING
Bronner, Simon J. “Shoemaker vs Shoemaker” Der Reggeboge, Volume XXX Nos. 1&2. Pennsylvania German Society, Birdsboro, Pennsylvania, 1996.
Hamilton, Dr. Milton W. “ Dr. Alfred L. Shoemaker New Curator of The Historical Society of Berks County,” The Historical Review of Berks County, Volume XIII No.1, October, 1947
Klees, Frederic, The Pennsylvania Dutch. Macmillan Company, 1950.
DeChant, Alliene S. Of The Dutch I Sing. Kutztown Publishing, Kutztown, Pennsylvania, 1951.
Yoder, Dr. Don, “Twenty-five Years of the Folk Festival,” Pennsylvania Folklife, Folk Festival program for 1974.
Shoemaker, Dr. Alfred L. Pennsylvania Dutch Hex Marks. Intelligencer Printing Company, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1950.
Shaner, Richard H. “The Oley Valley Basketmaker,” Pennsylvania Folklife, Volume XIV No. 1, 1964.
Yoder, Dr. Don, “Kutztown in America,” Pennsylvania Folklife, Volume XIV No. 4, 1965.
Shoemaker, Dr. Alfred L. Three Myths About The Pennsylvania Dutch Country. Intelligencer Printing Company, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1951.
Shoemaker, Dr. Alfred L. Checklist of Pennsylvania Dutch Printed Taufscheins. Intelligencer Printing Company, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1952.