Although the Pennsylvania Dutch were consumed with the love of their homeland in the Rhine Valley of Europe, with their Germanic folk art seen in fraktur illumination in America and paint-decorated dower chests, these prosperous farmers became Americanized with the English formal architecture they witnessed in Philadelphia. Characterized as smart English-style with wooden keystones over the windows and doors named after King George, it was called Georgian architecture. And ironically, there was no better an example than the state house of the Commonwealth, known as Independence Hall; after the signing the Declaration of Independence, this public building with the Liberty Bell became a fashionable part of their American lives.
Likewise, Thomas Jefferson, a true-grit Colonial American statesman and author of the Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776), shared the feelings of many English and Pennsylvania Dutch when he wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, they are endowed by their creator,” and especially the large number of Colonial Plain Pennsylvania Dutch and Quaker English immigrants who immigrated to William Penn’s colony for religious and economic freedom. Like Jefferson, upcountry Dutchmen of namely the Oley Valley had become prosperous American farmers importing domestic English goods but exporting American pig iron and mass foodstuffs from plantations and farms that fed a starving and ill-clothed world population.
So when President Jefferson signed the Louisiana Purchase with France, the sale doubled the size of the United States, and all American farmers realized that our Republic would continue to be one of the outstanding agricultural and prosperous nations that would feed the world. Oley Valley farmers, who were already the breadbasket to Philadelphia, had developed Conestoga wagon trade routes west to Pittsburgh and the Ohio River Valley where our Westward expansion of the United States now included the agrarian commerce that would lead into new lands that the Great Louisiana Purchase in 1803 encompassed. Therefore, these dynamic Oley Valley plantations became iconic farms in which farmers built large, prestigious Georgian and Federal mansions to show off their wealth into the Federal years of the early 19th century; perhaps none is better than the exquisite 1801 Henry Fisher Mansion.
In fact, farming was so prosperous in Colonial times, Oley and area farmers would store their valuable wheat in the spacious attics of these large manor homes, a practice that the Henry Fisher family followed until they either were going to mill the wheat into flour or export it at the port of Philadelphia. Here, these upcountry Dutchmen admired the English buildings of Colonial Philadelphia, their early capitol, on their port trips. One of the nation’s most dramatic Georgian style homes, it was done by master architect, Gottlieb Drexel, and with a central hallway leading to several formal rooms.
With carved ornate interiors and several fireplaces in addition to a kitchen wing with a walk-in fireplace hearth, the hallmark of the Fisher mansion is its trademark wooden keystones over each window and the central hallway front door with pedimented roof and fanlight. It was very much a fashionable abode for its time, which almost every local farmer wanted to duplicate as our nation became the great agrarian Republic when Thomas Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 in our nation’s early Federal years!
Of the numerous Oley Valley pioneer estates with a remarkable architectural mansion, the 1801 Henry Fisher mansion followed the exquisite Georgian English architectural-style of Colonial Philadelphia, which must have lured these humble upcountry farmers to imitate the nation’s formal English-style these farmers saw each time they drove their Conestoga wagons to the port of Philadelphia, laden with precious bags of wheat at harvest time.
Richard L.T. Orth is assistant director of the American Folklife Institute in Kutztown.
