As American as Shoofly Pie: The Foodlore and Fakelore of Pennsylvania Dutch Cuisine

Chapter 11. The Kutztown Folk Festival

CHAPTER 11 The Kutztown Folk Festival The origin of the Kutztown Folk Festival is fairly straightforward, and I was fortunate to interview one of its cofounders, Dr. Don Yoder, who revealed much about the way in which Pennsylvania Dutch food was brought into that event. In a sense the festival was born out of necessity because in 1949 Professors Alfred L. Shoemaker , J. William Frey, and Don Yoder joined forces to establish the Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In order to fulfill the educational mandate of their newly formed center, they realized that they would need a venue to promote Pennsylvania Dutch culture as well as a plan for raising money to further research. Thus in 1950 the Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Festival was born. Not only was it the first folklife festival in the United States, but it has also taken on a life of its own by surviving a bankruptcy and several managerial upheavals over the course of the past sixty years. If its positive long-term contributions can be described as spotty, its overall effect on Pennsylvania Dutch culture was earth-shifting, although for the most part those results were unintended. The key difference between the Kutztown festival and other American folk festivals held before 1950 was that the earlier festivals were mostly stage performances of folk dance and music with little emphasis on folklife. The Kutztown festival focused on one single American regional culture, the Pennsylvania Dutch, in all of its as- 150 Chapter 11 pects, from religious diversity to food. Furthermore the purpose of the folk festival was to bring this culture before the American public in ways that could not be explained through books or museum exhibits . This new concept emphasized living history using real people from the culture, including farmers and their wives, craftsmen, and cooking demonstrators, to illustrate their cultural origins and way of life. In this respect the Kutztown Folk Festival was visionary with no real counterparts even in Europe. The festival was established at a time when there was a growing local and national interest in Pennsylvania Dutch culture; even the label “Pennsylvania Dutch” had been rehabilitated as a positive antidote to the old “dumb Dutch” prejudices of the past.1 Nationally much had already been written about Pennsylvania Dutch decorative arts, and the well-known Water Gate Inn in Washington, D.C., had been showcasing an upscale form of Pennsylvania Dutch cookery throughout the 1940s; it was heavily patronized by wartime government officials. Thus the time was ripe for creating a venue where the public could come face-to-face with the Pennsylvania Dutch themselves. Furthermore the opening of the eastern portion of the Pennsylvania Turnpike in 1950 not only provided motorists with a novel driving experience (it was the first major highway of its kind in the United States); it allowed them to reach Kutztown without the inconvenience of long drives and backcountry roads. This new highway and the unusual concepts featured at the festival provided the right mix of elements to give the festival the initial financial boost it needed to succeed. The choice of Kutztown, Pennsylvania, was Alfred L. Shoemaker ’s and was based on his long-term plans to create an open-air museum on the Swedish Skansen model to showcase Pennsylvania Dutch culture. Shoemaker’s peasant village never materialized, but the choice of Kutztown proved fortuitous because of accessibility, available fairgrounds, and the cooperation of several local organizations with previous experience in organizing similar, although much smaller, events. The apple-butter festival organized by William Troxell at Dorney Park near Allentown and held throughout The Kutztown Folk Festival 151 the 1930s and 1940s may be viewed as a direct antecedent of the Kutztown festival. The old hotel in Dorney Park had been one of the famous dining spots for Pennsylvania Dutch cookery in the early 1900s, so food and regional cooking were destined from the start to become important components of the Kutztown experience. Standing behind the local festivals and the sponsorship of their activities was the Lehigh Valley Grundsau Lodge. It was one of the strongest of the lodges, and many of its members collaborated with the festival to help launch it. The lodge exhibit, with its giant effigy of a groundhog, has been a feature of the festival since the beginning . Lodge member Carl Snyder explained to me that one reason the lodge exhibit...