MISSION STATEMENT:
American Folklife Institute founded in 1972 in the Oley Valley of Pennsylvania is celebrating its 36th anniversary of researching American folk culture among the Pennsylvania Dutch people of southeastern, Pennsylvania. Our institute records their architecture, antiques, craftsmanship, customs, and religious folklife.
Our Folklife staff at its new Kutztown office records changes in this 17th and 18th century born early American culture, as modern assimilation infiltrates the Pennsylvania Dutch way of life.
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SPECIAL COMMEMORATION BY THE
AMERICAN FOLKLIFE INSTITUTE 2008 This year commemorates the 50th Anniversary of the American Folklife Studies Movement begun by professors Alfred L. Shoemaker and Dr. Don Yoder (1958), editors and writers of the Pennsylvania Folklife magazine, with headquarters in Kutztown, PA, where they showcased the native Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Festival for many years. Lest we forget our roots and friends in an ever changing world.
American Folklife has erected a brass plaque in their Honor at our headquarters on the Main Street of Kutztown at the Old Town Criers House, 360 West Main Street that was dedicated on Sunday, April 13th at Trinity Lutheran Church followed by an open house. This year also marks the 95th Birthday of the late Pennsylvania Folklorist Dr. Alfred L. Shoemaker, born on a farm near Saegersville, Lehigh County.
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Dr. Alfred L. Shoemaker (left) with friend, Gilbert Snyder from Reading radio station WEEU, performing Pennsylvania Dutch dialect humor on the main stage at the first ever Pennsylvania Dutch Kutztown Folk Festival in 1950. Shoemaker would later televise (1953) the first half hour of an all dialect Pennsylvania Dutch program on WEEU-TV, channel 33.
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The growing Plain Dutch culture of Team Mennonites living around Kutztown in the East Penn Valley; Wenger Old Order Mennonites from Hinkletown, Lancaster County have their central meeting house south of Kutztown with a new Old Order meeting house near Fleetwood. Old Order Mennonites have large farms east of Reading, along the Great Valley, and as far east as Trexlertown, near Allentown.
A self-sustained community of farmers and craftsmen, they do not participate driving cars or using modern electric automation in their daily lives. Since 2006, Mennonite farm families have settled as far south from Kutztown as the Oley Hills and Valley of Historic Berks County.
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Dr. Shoemaker cutting his 40th Birthday Cake at his Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center at Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA in 1953. Courtesy: The Pennsylvania Dutchman
Following in the steps of Dr. Alfred L. Shoemaker, Pennsylvania's foremost Folklorist, our Institute will research native folklife of the Pennsylvania Dutch (German) whose Plain people in Lancaster and Berks Counties have been acclaimed for continuing their native American folklife. Special attention will be given to the Amish and Old Order Mennonites, although the folk activities of the Worldly Pennsylvania Dutch of southeastern Pennsylvania will continue to be researched as well.
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DR. ALFRED SHOEMAKER’S COUNTRY NEIGHBOR REMEMBERS HIM AT MEMORIAL SERVICE
Violet “Moyer” Dolliver, a country neighbor of Dr. Shoemaker’s father’s farm along Bakeoven Road near Saegersville, Lehigh County (North of Allentown) remembers his family, and attended the Sunday afternoon service at Kutztown’s Trinity Lutheran Church on the 13th of April. A graduate of Kutztown State Teachers College in 1937, Violet was a teacher in a Lehigh County one-room schoolhouse.
Like farming neighbors Carl Snyder and Sterling Zimmerman, who also knew Alfred Shoemaker, Violet, a Pennsylvania Dutch woman had compassion for the local Pennsylvania German Dialect speaking children who attended her country school. In order to assist these children in speaking English, she printed a Dialect-English word list to allow them to make the transition from their spoken Dialect to the English language in which school lessons and modern books were compiled.
A loving teacher and proud Dutch woman, she was more than willing to help her children prepare for the modern world, far from cornfields and farmsteads of the Schnecksville area of Lehigh County. In her retirement years she became a Pennsylvania Dutch folk artist in water color medium. Now living in Allentown she heard about Dr. Shoemaker’s Memorial Service from Sylvia Mayo of Orefield, Lehigh County, where some of Alfred’s relatives still live.
Still proficient in the German Dialect, like Shoemaker, Violet enjoys attending programs where the Pennsylvania Dutch Dialect is still used. She cherishes speaking the native Dialect with the few countrymen she meets.
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THE AMERICANISM: PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH
The term Pennsylvania Dutch to indicate the broad group of immigrants who came to America in the pre-American Revolutionary period from Europe's Rhine Valley, is preferred over the term Pennsylvania German or German-American, the latter are not Americanisms. Pennsylvania Dutch is the original term used by English Colonists referring to the Rhenish German Civilization of native Palantines; including French Huguenots, Swiss Amish and Mennonites, Holland Dutch Mennonites, and Moravians who collectively shared the German language together, in large numbers seeking farms in Pennsylvania almost outnumbering Penn's English immigrants.
This early American cultural melting pot mainly in southeastern Pennsylvania was made up of naturalized Rhineland citizens who swore allegiance to the United States assimilating with English laws and standards, but their everyday work habits and living customs, they followed in their native Rhineland fashion, continuing German dialect in America, which soon became known as Pennsylvania Dutch rather than formal High German. Dr. Alfred L. Shoemaker, founder of the Folklife Movement preferred the native American term, Pennsylvania Dutch, rather than the misnomer term, Pennsylvania German.
An ethnologist, Shoemaker believed that the older term, Pennsylvania Dutch, was more precise in describing these people with pre-Revolutionary Rhineland roots rather than the latter terms that were not as accurate, especially because most of the Amish and Mennonites were not German but Swiss. Only because of varying editorial policies in America, the American Folklife Institute will use both terms.
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