Having graduated Kutztown State in 1960, I did not fully understand how lucky I was meeting professors who taught me the uniqueness of the Americana culture of the Pennsylvania Dutch people. Their true-grit livelihood stood for our Americana civilization, in art, education and American agriculture, as well as religion.
Having grown up in the progressive city of Allentown, I commuted to Kutztown where I earned a Bachelor of Science degree at Kutztown State Teachers College. But, being a descendant from the Jacob Bieber clan, I was at home with the natives of Kutztown who spoke the German dialect, just like my uncle Freddie Bieber who owned a large farm in Rockland Township and made old-fashioned split oak baskets.
However, my academic scholarship began when I met Dr. Alfred L. Shoemaker, whose Pennsylvania Folklife Society office was on West Main Street. He was the editor of the quarterly magazine, Pennsylvania Folklife. A Pennsylvania historian and social science major, I befriended Alfred Shoemaker and visited his academic office, which was full of PA German records and native artifacts that were displayed in his office window.
Upon graduating from Kutztown State College in 1960, I became a folklorist and wrote for Shoemaker’s magazine (Pennsylvania Folklife). I also became a demonstrator at the Kutztown Folk Festival. When I later became a history teacher in Allentown, I continued to assist Alfred Shoemaker in operating the Kutztown Folk Festival and recording our native Pennsylvania German folk culture, and I became a regular writer for his Pennsylvania Folklife magazine.
Eventually, as a loyal folklorist, I assisted Doc Shoemaker in an attempt to reestablish a folklife magazine on Route 30 in Lancaster County, which went bankrupt due to stormy weather that year. However, while working with the iconic Shoemaker, I was privileged to personally become friends with Dr. Arthur D. Graef and his wife, Marie, as well as Dr. John Joseph Stoudt, the author of several native books on the Pennsylvania Dutch people. However, realizing my good fortune to have personally known these iconic historians and folklorists, I must honestly say that the writings of Alfred Shoemaker’s publications immortalized our native PA Dutch people far more than any other American.
Like Lester Breininger, Robert Bucher and Clarence Kulp, who also became disciples of Shoemaker’s Americana school of local German Dialect and American Civilization, I bought my uncle’s farm near Lobachsville and later purchased the historic Colonial Lobachsville gristmill from Clarence Yoder. Eventually, Doc Shoemaker came to see my Lobachsville Gristmill farmstead in the historic Oley Valley, where I taught in the Oley Valley High School.
Pleased to visit this Americana grist mill operating with a water wheel on the Pike Township water-way, I decided to create the American Folklife Society to record the Oley Valley heritage of the Pennsylvania Dutch where Abraham Lincoln’s ancestors and Daniel Boone’s family were born. It’s an ideal American folk culture, where the Jacob Bieber ancestors built a sawmill on the Bieber Creek in 1744. Our American Folklife journal was printed from 1972 to 1975 for a select number of Native Americans who enjoyed reading about the Pennsylvania Dutch people.
Richard H. Shaner is director of the American Folklife Institute in Kutztown.
