Indigenous PA Dutch people thrived on homemade Pennsylvania German cuisine for well over 300 years, and notably, this was a beer and pretzel culture celebrated by taverns and wayside inns in the historic Valleys of Southeastern PA. Regional pocket cultures found throughout the Pennsylvania Dutch Country, where Rhineland natives continued to produce gingerbread cookies and pretzels in their East Penn and Oley Valley bake ovens, may also be the reason why certain homesteads had more than one bake oven in the 18th century – serving the additional ethnic needs of the immediate community. Certainly, women who excelled in baking for the local market wore out more than one outdoor primitive bake oven.
Numerous 19th century trade fairs during our Federal years as a thriving nation could not forsake their grass roots culture even after the industrial revolution made it possible for new methods in farming to update the newer products demanded of in the latter 19th century Civil War period, even replacing homespun cloth from flaxseed used to cover their Conestoga wagons of the bygone pioneer days. But, the historic Keim family of the area, the last of their kind, still hung on ancient folkways and wove homespun flax cloth as late as 1910.
Long before villages, and towns like Reading, developed their pretzel and cookie industries, these baked goods were part of a home industry engaged in by numerous Valley farm plantations. For example, Rhinelanders of the Oley Valley continued their Old World specialty products to sell on the streets of Philadelphia, in the early years, together with their unique shoo-fly pie, pretzels and scrapple. One can only imagine how bake ovens fired in the 1700s influenced the Valleys’ early destiny.
Well-constructed bake ovens seldom collapsed, and a number of Valley homesteads had more than one, thereby leading to the conclusion that a tremendous home industry of baked goods and bread existed between Philadelphia’s markets and nearby Oley Valley farm families – far more than could have been sustained in local trade or with the town of Reading, founded in 1748. On the Isaac Deturk Homestead, built circa 1740, there is a companion outbuilding to the small 1767 Deturk house that served as cold storage compartment and bakery. The very unusual feature of this building is “double” bake ovens.
Additionally, the 1772 John Bertolet house, with an earlier 1736 Abraham Bertolet stone cabin with bakery addition, also includes the remains of two bake ovens. These frontier ovens remind of the presence of our indigenous natives and the Deturk baptism of Indians in 1742, and Peter Trexler’s wife who baked bread in Colonial days at Trexlertown, Lehigh County. Oral history records that whenever Mrs. Trexler fired up her bake oven (which took four to five hours) at the end of the week (Fridays), the smoke lingered in the air, near and far. Thus, when the oven was hot enough for baking Mrs. Trexler would come out of the house with dough, only to see a dozen or so Indians eagerly sitting around the bake oven.
In examining the remains of Colonial Oley Valley plantations thoroughly, there are a multiple number of surviving l8th century bake ovens and gristmills of this rich limestone valley, evidence to the significant participation in the export trade of Philadelphia’s Colonial grain, flour and bread commerce by area farmers. Our indigenous PA Dutch also proved that bread baking and baked goods also never called for the finest milled flour. But that fresh, medium stone ground flour will surpass the more expensive one, and indeed, a number of local mills in Southeastern Pennsylvania of years past were easily able to hold their own in competition with the popular commercial mills of the Midwest.
Richard L.T. Orth is assistant director of the American Folklife Institute in Kutztown.
