Although not as common as the tulip, heart and distelfink, the image of the flamboyant peacock is commonly found in Pennsylvania Dutch folk culture.
The question that arises is, what did the 18th century German immigrants, mostly of farming origin, know of the lordly peacock which the English nobility served up roasted and re-encased in his own feathers?
In German Southeastern Pennsylvania, the peacock motif is found on spatter ware, cookie cutters, cake molds, show towels that were hung on bedroom doors, slip decorated red ware and sgraffito pottery, frakturs of all sorts, samplers, decorated Easter eggs, reverse glass paintings and more.
Interestingly, there are two excellent peacock images that were inscribed, sgraffito style, in the wet mortar of the farmhouse at the intersection of Romig Road and Swamp Pike. When the lime plaster of the attic gables of that house was still wet, someone inscribed into it “A. ST 1811,” also an 8-foot-high owl seated on vines and two graceful peacocks. “A. ST” perhaps refers to Andrew Stauffer, who is listed as a “single man” in township tax records of that time and may have been the mason or his helper.
Usually the peacock was drawn looking back, perhaps at the magnificence of its own tail. In fact, there was a saying about bird images: “If it looks back, it’s a peacock; if it doesn’t, it isn’t.” But like anything else, one should never say “never” and never say “always.” There are plenty of birds which are clearly meant to be peacocks depicted on cookie cutters and coverlets and such looking every which way.
It might seem unlikely that this vain bird usually associated with lordly estates would appeal to the practical Dutchmen. But according to prolific author Cornelius Weygant in his book “The Red Hills”: “[In the 19th century] the peacock had been as widely distributed throughout Eastern Pennsylvania as the guinea hen is today [1929]. …The peacock was regarded as the foreteller of a storm …. There was a saying in Pennsylvania Dutch – Wann der po-hahne greischt gebts raya (When the peacock cries it’s going to rain). He was much more, however, than just a weathercock. Who owned a peacock had a sense of richness in his possession. One went warm about the heart as one saw him strutting in his iridescence of greens and blues. One said to himself, ‘I have a share of the magnificence of the world in that royal fowl.'”
It was noted that peafowl were usually found on the larger farms where the Germans’ love of color and decoration found expression in such things as barn stars, but even the poorest farmer with a few acres of stony soil would often have a few iridescent bandy cocks and hens strutting on the barnyard fence or manure pile for no other purpose than the show of their brilliant plumage. The bandy rooster was the poor man’s peacock.
Perhaps it’s the weird nightly screams that seem to come from beyond the quotidian earth that arouse some suspicion about the bird. Legend holds that the peacock was the vain creature that let the snake into the Garden of Eden.
Weygant continues: “Old German prints tell us that there were peacocks in the Garden of Eden. We all know they must have been there, for it was the peacock, the old tradition has it, that let the snake into the garden. I came on one such print in an auction in the hills above the Perkiomen. It was the front piece in a book of bible stories printed in the old country in 1785 … The peacock was perched on a bare bough, perhaps a bough of the aboriginal apple tree.
“I have seen the peacock, too, on representations of the Ark in old books of Pennsylvania Germany. I recall him looming large on the ridgepole, side by side with dove and pelican.”
Sometimes it is hard to decide just which bird the folk artist was trying to reproduce in his creation, and what we now interpret as a pelican (a common symbol of self sacrifice) or turkey or parrot or crane may have started out as a peacock in the artists eye. Few people other than trained artists can make a peacock look like a peacock. Too, some materials such as slip decorated red ware or carved wooden molds are difficult to work, and the creators intent may not be obvious.
Especially difficult to interpret are peacock designs in homespun fabrics and woven coverlets. Stitched samplers and loom woven coverlets are created with squares and straight lines and so the researcher knows it’s a bird, but not always which kind the artist had in mind.
