Part 2
Quite often when a home was being built for a young PA Dutch farming couple, cabinet makers like Jacob and John Bieber were also busy designing and making the household furniture that would make their abode a functional and loving home. Parents sometimes assisted the newlyweds in building (or buying) furniture which represented the love and respect of their ethnic clan. Thus, master cabinetmakers in Colonial times prided themselves in creating unusual works of art that were the envy of that nationality, as apprentices in the rural community worked on these spectacular crafted works of art. Inspired by Biblical motifs, 18th Century PA Dutch folk art decorated furniture made each wedding couple’s household unique.
Researchers may find several examples of Bieber antique dower chests found in the Oley Valley with a two flat heart motif design, but can simply be explained by the nature of this Guild System (apprenticeship). Although the Jacob Bieber family was large, only his son, John can definitely be attributed to these historic motif designs, but since these dower chests were painted in the Colonial Period, a variation of motifs can be explained by this notion that in the early American period Master artists in the Guild System often had several apprentices and Journeymen assist them while they completed their custom pieces. This may have resulted in the master carpenter’s designs being reproduced, and there have been several PA Dutch apprentices who worked with the Jacob Bieber family.
In 1909, Historian Morton Montgomery reported seeing the beautiful 1792 Jacob Bieber wardrobe in the home of an heir at the village of Oley Line, and stated Jacob Bieber was a talented woodworker. However, the Magdalena Leibelsperger dower chest attributed to his son, John, housed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was given to her at age twenty right before she married John Kemmerer, a neighboring farmer in Salisbury Township, where John and his father had set up shop in 1786 when they left Berks County. John Bieber married Catherine Holland in 1795, three years after making this beautiful Leibelsperger chest, upon which he drew a “lover’s knot” on its lid.
Whether the surviving 1792 wardrobe was the personal property of Jacob Bieber, Sr. or is one specifically made for Jacob Bieber, Jr., the signature use of a folk art carnation in the inscription tells us that John Bieber, the folk artist, decorated it. Coincidence, or not, these compass talented Biebers expressed their love of the New World most famously with huge hearts on their dower chests. While Bieber joiners were creating handcrafted furniture in 1792 and earlier, thousands of their fellow expatriated Huguenots were establishing a new life free of religious persecution in Pennsylvania. The French Revolution around this time plunged into a Reign of Terror in 1793 with the beheading of Louis the XIV.
According to the Bieber family genealogy, written by Reverend I.M. Beaver, John and his father left their Oley Valley plantation to seek land opportunities east of there in Lehigh County where John eventually purchased a plantation in Salisbury Township around 1786, containing 460 acres, and Beaver recorded that John continued to be a woodworker in Berks County and Lehigh Counties evidenced by surviving examples of his artistry. Since the Great Road connected Reading to Allentown and bustled with commerce during those early years, it is very likely that John traveled back and forth to the family sawmill in the Oley Valley for lumber supplies and wisely solicited customers for his craft in both counties.
These religious people from the Rhine Valley wasted no time timbering William Penn’s woods and raising large farming families whose offspring were proudly documented with the baptism of each child; proclaimed by a hand-done illuminated Fraktur that proudly announced their birth in a township within the New World. In gratitude to God, many of the Church Dutch decorated each child’s “Tauf Schein” (baptism certificate) with glorious folk art images that sometimes included mermaids or naval compass designs that came to be associated, in my opinion, with sunbursts, hex signs, or barn stars on the voyage to the New World.
Victims of religious persecution in Europe and emigrating here in 1744, the Bieber family were devout Huguenots in America, baptizing their children in Protestant churches in the area. Oppressed in France by King Louis XIV for their Calvinist Protestant religion, and keen not to draw attention to their faith, the devout and creative Biebers did not use Christian crosses in their artwork. However, the compass shape of “Jesus fish” suggested in John Bieber’s busy compass artwork on the frieze and columns of Michael Finck’s 1789 dower chest is a subtle affirmation. Furthermore, the early Christian symbol of the fish, perhaps a secret intellectual sign, was artistically designed in the central cartouche of Bieber’s chest for Eva Beier in 1786, with six stylized ovoid compass fish outlines down each corner.
Ultimately though, it was the discovery and subsequent purchase of the 1792 Jacob Bieber wardrobe by Chris Machmer in the early 1980s that led to this resurgence in research and appreciation of this fine craftsmanship. Stored by an itinerant antique dealer at a country store below the Mason-Dixon Line, the Bieber hand-carved cornice displayed evidence that its makers were also the craftsmen who created the Hottenstein Mansion interior at Kutztown. Identical in “technique” are the two unusual Wall of Troy carved moldings on this wardrobe that are found throughout the 1783 David Hottenstein Mansion, as are the interlocking egg and dart design cut into the frieze above the door. Reminiscent of the Huguenot “Jesus Fish” folk art form, which the Biebers were, along with many early Oley Valley pioneer families of historical importance.
The Bieber sawmill and farm were just a few miles from Kutztown, and by 1783 master carpenter Jacob Bieber was 52 years of age and his carpentry family at the time consisted of three able-bodied boys in their 20s, including John, the famed folk-artist painter. Most dynamic, the colorful paint-decorated Fraktur chamber room removed from this exquisite Mansion and installed at Henry Francis DuPont’s Winterthur Museum in Delaware, easily be the product of this Bieber family. Another of John Bieber’s signature designs mentioned before (a variation of egg and dart) was carved on the pedimented doorways in the central hallway of the Mansion showed the proficient compass skills John possessed. However, to an early Huguenot, the idea of carving five abstract Jesus fish shapes over the threshold to a doorway of a Christian Rhinelander obviously had religious significance. Furthermore, the stylized Bieber flat hearts — an Alsatian design from Europe, remind one of the demure twin flat hearts inscribed at the bottom of the Hottenstein mansion date stones, just outside Kutztown on route 222.
John, however, would eventually relocate to Wayne Township, Butler County, Ohio, where he raised a family under the guaranty of religious freedom promised to pioneers in the Northwest Land Ordinance of 1787. In John Bieber’s obituary of 1825, he is reported as being an exceptional dovetail carpenter raising his family (four sons and one daughter) in that community. A critical shortage of carpenters in the Northwest Territory may have lured him out there, and he may not have taken time to decorate his chests with his unusual folk art motifs as extravagant as he once did, but up to present day, there has not been a John or Jacob Bieber signature ever found in a dower chest or piece of their Americana furniture. Most likely, because these early humble French Huguenots were not vain.
In trying to understand the American folk art of our 17th and 18th century PA German immigrants to the New World, it is of the essence to not forget how much a religious backlash these Pilgrims were a product of during medieval times and the impact in creating their unique folk art, when scribes of the Middle Ages eliminated religious texts and a stylish lettering form, known as this Fraktur, among religious persecution. These Rhineland natives who were lucky to reach America in primitive sea vessels after a death defying crossing of the terrible Atlantic Ocean were very much beholding to a benevolent God! Not only for their safe passage to this promised “Land of Milk and Honey” in the New World by William Penn, but for also surviving cruel European wars in which their ancestors were fortunate enough to survive this gross treatment in the Old World.
