In continuing with additional thoughts on last week’s column, many wise Oley Valley Pennsylvanish Deitsch farm women saved their valuable “wheat” flour to be baked into bread they sold at town markets like Philadelphia for the hard cash it would bring to sustain their families. The pioneer immigrant “Haus Frau” used her less-valuable rye flour to bake hearth bread, which was consumed by her own family, indentured servants and hired hands in order to sell the more valuable wheat bread products at town markets. Baking day in the East Penn Valley, as elsewhere in the “PA Dutch Country,” was on Friday (except for Good Friday); the entire week’s supply of bread was often baked in an outdoor, Colonial stone and brick bake oven.
Furthermore, a still used to make rye whiskey was found in the Kutztown area some years back now was identical to the plastered whiskey still featured in Eleanor Raymond’s 1930 Domestic Architecture book (shown here), which may even be the same one as it had the same flushing spigot down to scale. The condensing coil (worm) that was with it could have been in a large wooden tub that stood alongside the plastered still into which cold spring water ran to condense the steam from boiling the rye mash. The Stein Whiskey house (Greenwich Township) has since been demolished, and even though it may have operated with an 18th century distillation pot in its early years, the business was still very productive in distilling both apple and rye whiskey well into the 19th Century.
Many Berks County plantations, including those owned by land baron Colonel Lesher in the Oley Valley, had an apple orchard or two. This necessary staple was harvested in the autumn of the year and pressed on their farms by giant hand-hewn wooden cider presses, whether one-screw or two. These Germanic apparatuses, like those found on the Continent of Europe, operated on a fulcrum lever principle and were capable of producing an unbelievable amount of cider, including hard, and prodigious wooden beam that did the squeezing was almost as large as a tree. Around 1970 when American Folklife Director, Richard Shaner, and a select number of students began the mass restoration and excavation at Colonel John Lesher’s abandoned 1750 Oley Forge Mansion in Oley Township, a fellow historian and avid book collector gave him a glimpse at one of his rare Colonial Oley Forge Ledgers.
Interestingly, “Cider Twice” was listed as well as bar iron, rye flour and wheat flour among the Colonial commodities sent to Philadelphia by its owner, Ironmaster John Lesher. The ledger, written in English, was scribed by a meticulous Colonial clerk and listed this ambiguous “cider twice” several times. Curiously, it’s a wonderment what the ledger writer meant by Cider twice, since there were no other notations. The clerk obviously was English in ethnicity since he did not use the native German term known to bilingual John Lesher, a prosperous Pennsylvania Dutchman. Perhaps it was a trade term possibly used at the port of Philadelphia, and this “Cider twice” has lost its meaning in antiquity.
Ironmaster Lesher, who had as many as 15 slaves in 1780 helping at the forge, could perhaps had the largest wine or cold storage cellar in the entire Oley Valley, capable of storing 60 barrels, but far from what his commanding officer Gen. George Washington had amassed. But Lesher’s brick-arched vaulted chamber was under his 1750 mansion that was cut into a limestone cliff, and the sweet cider also made was consumed as a drink. Together with, a good portion of apple manufactured by the Pennsylvania Dutch into apple butter that sustained the household throughout the year, and a number of barrels in storage aged to be turned into vinegar for sweet and sour food dishes at home and to be sold at market.
Richard L.T. Orth is assistant director of the American Folklife Institute in Kutztown.
