Last year’s recent attack on the people of France has reminded PA Dutch ancestors of their French Huguenot ethnology. Although the PA Dutch people speak in German dialect, my wife and I are actually French Huguenots, but very much considered PA Dutch, whose ancestors arrived in America to escape religious persecution in Europe. Thus, the horrible killing of peaceful Parisians by militant Islamic terrorists made American citizens realize that France was our political ally whose ancestors pioneered the United States during the American Revolution with England.
Colonel John Lesher’s Oley Forge supplied George Washington’s troops with guns and equipment to win our Independence in 1776. In Colonial days, the village of Pleasantville was referred to as being Yottersville for its founders, Hans and Johannes Yoder, Huguenots, who founded the Village in 1714, where the Yoder cemetery is located, along Covered Bridge Road. The French Lesher family also founded their Christian Salem Church in 1754, just southwest from there.
According to Dr. Don Yoder’s new forward to Rev. Philip Croll’s Annals of the Oley Valley, recently reprinted by the Oley Valley Heritage Association, his widely acclaimed book on natives who pioneered the historic Oley Valley (to escape religious persecution), many of which were French Huguenots, earned him an obituary in the New York Times when he died in 1949. An outstanding protestant minister who included several families of French Huguenot lineage in the Oley Valley, as well as PA Dutch Swiss Protestants like Hoch and Yoder, his book was a classic example of America’s melting pot ethnic society.
In demand since 1926, when the Kutztown born author first published 25 installments in the Reading Eagle newspaper, it had been reproduced by the Oley Valley Woman’s Club in a limited edition of a thousand copies in 1972. The current 154-page reprint of the Annals of the Oley Valley not only includes an academic forward by Dr. Don Yoder of the University of Pennsylvania, but has an index supplied by George Meiser IX, former President of the Berks County Historical Society, at the end of the book. Among the genealogy of the early settlers included in the Oley Annals are: Baumann, Boone, Lee, Fisher, Lincoln, Deturk, Levan, Keim, Guldin, Yoder, Kaufman, Lesher, Hunter, Udree, Hoch, Herbein, DeBenneville, Griesemer and Leinbach.
Born in 1852 of PA Dutch lineage on a farm a mile east of Kutztown, Reverend Croll’s mother was a member of the Delong family and he grew up at a time that the citizens of the Oley Valley were in their prime to record local history. Familiar with the German language and able to interview natives of the Oley Valley in their PA Dutch dialect, his Annals of the Oley Valley was an accurate recording of these ethnic farming people and their historic ancestors, amid some of the most beautiful rural architecture of America.
Realizing that the early iron industry of the Oley Valley was important for our nation to win its freedom from England, his sketches of early iron masters and this important commodity were important for American historians. Many of our important architectural homes and buildings have survived in the Oley Valley because of the importance he has drawn to them in his Annals.
Much of the Oley Valley’s historic infrastructure owes its survival to the importance and prestige he has given these early Americana buildings through publishing the Oley Annals so our nation’s historic past could be told and appreciated, until the Historic Preservation Trust of the United States was able to designate Oley Township a Historic District in 1983 to be preserved for posterity.
Although Abraham Lincoln’s great, great grandfather Mardcai Lincoln had roots in the Oley Valley together with Daniel Boone’s family homestead, the American public is more interested in the colorful PA Dutch Homesteads that abound here, where during the grain rush of the 18th century, Conestoga wagons brimming with grain by the hundreds lined up on major arteries taking Oley Valley grain and distilled products to the nation’s major port at Philadelphia, besides iron exports and hearth bread to feed the world’s people.
Richard H. Shaner is director of the American Folklife Institute in Kutztown.
