The American Folklife Institute, located in Kutztown, became the idea of Richard H. Shaner, only after talking with his friend and mentor, Dr. Alfred L. Shoemaker, who along with Dr. Don Yoder and J. William Frey, created a Folklore Center in the 1950s and Pennsylvania Folklife, the successor of The Dutchman magazine, printed at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster County. While participating with Dr. Shoemaker’s Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Festival at Kutztown in 1960, and eventually writing folklife articles for his Pennsylvania Folklife periodical, Shaner spent a substantial amount of time learning his principles and working under Dr. Shoemaker’s direction.
In the 1960s when “Dick” Shaner was teaching U.S. History in the Allentown School District, while living on his parent’s farm near Macungie, he purchased his uncle Freddie Bieber’s Farm near Lobachsville, Berks County. Bieber was an outstanding early American oak basketmaker. Concerned with the historic Americana buildings in the beautiful Oley Valley, Dick sold his uncle Bieber’s mountainous farm, and purchased Clarence Yoder’s historic Lobachsville gristmill-farm for a summer place.
While restoring these Oley Valley buildings and still teaching in Allentown, Dr. Shoemaker, meanwhile convalescing from severe depression in the early 1960s, would hitch a ride down to Lobachsville to discuss Shaner’s plans for the historic Yoder mill-farm, where on weekends they would bake bread in an 18th century brick bake oven. In several instances when Dr. Shoemaker talked with Dick about PA Dutch folklore, he referred to the idea of holding a “Colonial American Cherry Fair.” The basis was to develop a theme around cherries that would be synonymous with the term, Americana, and would revolve around the New World inventions and Americanisms such as the PA Dutch Conestoga wagon, Pennsylvania long rifle, cherry pie, native molded waffles and other PA Dutch culinary new foods.
Our PA Dutch people who had immigrated to the American frontier were on the cutting edge of discovering New World goods and opportunities to create new Americana ways of life, not just simply copying their Old World ways, but creating exciting hybrid ones like our barns, hex signs and rural folk art. Sitting on the Lobachsville gristmill house porch with “Doc” Shoemaker amid the towering gristmill, ice house, bake oven and Swiss bank barn; it must have been an ideal setting.
But most picturesque, then, as now, was the 1745 grassy commons that separated the gristmill from the western portion of the village where the general store and village tavern were located. Founded by Peter Lobach, a French Huguenot Pennsylvania Dutchman, the village mill was originally built by Wilhelm Pott whose 1755 home was just down the road, across the Pine Creek. Dick eventually realized the wisdom of Doc Shoemaker’s idea to hold a “Colonial American Cherry Fair” right here in Lobachsville, but not until he applied for a teaching position at Oley Valley High School in 1967 was he ready to follow this idea in earnest and take the gamble.
So in 1972, with the support of local folklorists, teachers and his Oley Valley High School students, he held the 1st Annual American Cherry Fair with colorful waving pendants and Colonial type U.S. flags posted all over the Lobachsville commons, owned by his neighbors John and Minnie Levengood. Furthermore, a colleague, an Oley Valley English teacher who had been a metropolitan newspaper reporter, taught Dick how to write a newspaper news release, and thanks to good spring weather, Alfred L. Shoemaker’s dream became a reality. Complete with a Scottish Colonial bagpipe group on the village commons, tours in the gristmill, food by the local Church, several vendors and old-time craftsmen, the inaugural event was quite the success!
Richard L.T. Orth is assistant director of the American Folklife Institute in Kutztown.
