The dual magnetism, which drew many Pennsylvania Dutch farmers to Philadelphia, was not only to sell at high prices and purchase imports, but also to obtain religious books printed in their native tongue at Germantown, adjacent to Philadelphia. In fact, Benjamin Franklin himself printed in the German language, and was responsible for the third Moravian Synod pamphlet for Oley’s 1742 Colonial Conference held at the Johann “De Turks Haus.”
In the 17th Century, the magnitude of William Penn’s Christian principles was not lost among Oley Valley’s Rhineland immigrants, who accepted Penn’s invitation to join him in establishing a Holy Experiment in the American wilderness. Immigrants who entered his proprietary lands by way of Philadelphia, “City of Brotherly Love,” were assimilated into his living doctrine, which stirred Germanic Colonial interests in all types of religious dogma. It is thereby impossible to separate religious zeal from native drive to achieve agricultural success in the fertile Oley Valley basin and East Penn Valley.
The fact that all roads led to Philadelphia in the first 100 years of the Commonwealth is not only an economic statement for Oley Valley and surrounding natives, but an admission to the religious interaction that continued with Philadelphia, long after the death of the Colony’s proprietor. Ludwig Wollenweber’s 1882 romantic novelette about the pious faith healer Mountain Mary (Anna Maria Young), who was a historical figure that retreated to the Oley Mountains, is a classic period piece of American literature published in Philadelphia by its German press.
This literature describes Oley’s integral social interaction with the City of Brotherly Love. Die Berg Maria, written by a Palatine born in 1807, captures the religious soul of Philadelphia still revered today by Oley’s oldest generation. A fusion of Quaker English settlers who came to the Oley Valley, where Calvinist followers as Mennonites and French Huguenots intermingled during the 18th Century, developed a unique sociological base that distinguished their social climate in years to come from all other stringent Pennsylvania German communities.
However, it was the hard-working German wife who worked the fields alongside her husband rather than the English women whose roll in marriage was quite different, that spurred agriculture in the Oley Valley. 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 that were 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 for needs of the family farm and literature in their native tongue.
Richard L.T. Orth is assistant director of the American Folklife Institute in Kutztown.
