The importance of Oley Valley’s industrious Pennsylvania Dutch farmers as the “granary of the American Revolution” can be observed by the colonial drop in wheat production, and their nearness to the port of Philadelphia. On the soil-depleted farms around Philadelphia, the production of wheat dropped from 30 bushel per acre in 1730 to 5 or 10-bushel by 1791, whereas Oley Valley Rhineland farmers practiced manuring for fertilizer, and rotating crops with lime, their yields became significantly larger.
The “PA Dutchmen” in the Oley Valley, who permitted their land to lie fallow by turning it into pasture regularly, were rewarded with great harvests of wheat, which was well worth their grain trips to prosperous Philadelphia. While other ethnic groups sought to increase their farm acreage to offset poor crop yields with deteriorated seed, by 1776, it too was in a decline. But the Oley Valley farm plantations with improved soil and grain harvests, judged by the many local gristmills built in the pre-Revolutionary period, were in a favorable trading position.
In early Colonial days, the vast storm swept Lancaster plain was no match for the productively sheltered Oley Valley farms located along the Schuylkill River leading to the port City of Philadelphia. By the mid-1700’s when immigrant Colonial wagon trains passed through the beautiful Oley Valley from Philadelphia en route to frontier lands Northeast of Kempton, the Germans called this new territory “Allemangel,” meaning all wants, for its lack of fertility and farmable land. A rugged terrain, which was eventually tamed, the land did not match the rich Oley Valley bottomlands or its rate of productivity.
Philadelphia’s export trade of wheat and flour, oats, maize, beans, flaxseed, beeswax, and salt beef, together with cheese, butter, and bacon were Colonial goods in great demand by Boston, the Carolina lowlands, Georgia, and the West Indies.
In 1775, farmers of the Oley Valley participated in Philadelphia’s export of goods worth 705,000 pounds sterling by which flour accounted for 350,000 pounds and wheat 100,000 pounds. By 1791 the state of Pennsylvania led all the United States with an aggregate of imports and exports which equaled one-third of the Republic’s total foreign trade. Certainly the Oley Valley’s iron industry with furnaces, forges, and blacksmiths greatly enhanced our agrarian economy making trade with Philadelphia possible by horse and wagon during the golden age of the Republic.
Millers and the farming class in the Oley Valley were able to invest farm market revenues into substantial early American farm structures, which are today national treasures, now listed as a National Historic Registered District by the U.S. Department of the Interior. Evidence of Oley Valley’s early agrarian participation with Colonial bread production is revealed by the overwhelming number of 18th Century bakeovens built in the age when “Wheat was King,” just before 1800 at the turn of the century.
Well-constructed bake ovens seldom collapsed, and a number of valley homesteads have more than one, thereby, leading to the conclusion that a tremendous home industry of baked goods or bread existed between Philadelphia’s markets and Oley Valley farm families far more than could have been sustained in local trade or with the town of Reading founded in 1748. On the Isaac Deturk Homestead built circa 1740 there is a companion outbuilding to the small 1767 Deturk house, which serves as cold storage compartment and bakery. The very unusual feature of this building is its “double” bakeovens.
Richard L.T. Orth is assistant director of the American Folklife Institute in Kutztown.
