Architecture and Landscape of the Pennsylvania Germans, 1720–1920 ed. by Sally McMurry, Nancy Van Dolsen (review)

Originating with the Vernacular Architecture Forum’s 2004 meeting and its study tours into Pennsylvania’s Lancaster, Berks, Lebanon, and Cumberland counties, Architecture and Landscape of the Pennsylvania Germans, 1720–1920 examines a representative region with a notable concentration of German settlement and cultural influence. Building upon recent scholarship on Pennsylvania German ethnicity, the authors collectively argue that architecture expressed that developing ethnicity. Germans in Pennsylvania blended European traditions with American values, shifting their architectural styles toward mainstream conventions as they began to think of themselves as Pennsylvanians with German heritage. Perceptions of a distinct Pennsylvania German landscape thus indicate Pennsylvania German self-consciousness and observers’ cultural stereotypes more than vast differences in material practice.

German-speakers with diverse backgrounds began arriving in Pennsylvania by 1683, but the period from 1720 to 1783 produced an accelerated migration, mostly from the Rhine Valley, as well as the earliest extant buildings. Pennsylvania’s Germans gradually evolved more self-conscious identities, inventing a “Pennsylvania German” community that shared general geographic and cultural dimensions, including some architectural patterns, by the late nineteenth century. As the Pennsylvania German majority assimilated into the American mainstream and abandoned many distinctive visual and oral cues by the twentieth century, minority Plain Sects that carried on Pennsylvania building and agricultural traditions assumed predominance in popular perceptions.

Until the mid-twentieth century, that distortion shaped scholarly and popular literature that celebrated the achievements and customs of a rural and supposedly “authentic” Pennsylvania German culture. This volume, however, acknowledges the more critical historiographic trends initiated in the 1950s and 1960s. The authors consider how the continual interaction of social groups in Pennsylvania contributed to the complex nature of Pennsylvania German ethnicity and architecture. They also address how Pennsylvania Germans modified architectural forms for American environments, including nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban spaces.

The resulting essays draw on travelers’ descriptions and extant buildings to consider how landscapes and a range of building types manifested evolving ethnic characteristics. The opening chapter considers nineteenth-century folk paintings and photographs to argue that it was the tension between traditional and modern elements, rather than material features, that defined the Pennsylvania German landscape. Similarly, a chapter on rural houses argues that even as traditional German tenancy practices produced farmsteads with multiple homes, the buildings themselves utilized floor plans rare in Europe’s German-speaking regions while adding American characteristics to traditional features, a blending that mirrored the emergence of a self-conscious ethnic community.

Chapters on domestic outbuildings identify construction patterns with European origins that nonetheless fit emerging post-1780 American architectural trends. Common in the Rhine Valley, outbuildings such as spring-houses, bake-houses, and dairies grew in popularity at the same time as mainstream America increasingly separated productive and domestic spaces. During the same period, Swiss-style barns in Pennsylvania expanded in popularity due to a flexible interior workspace and storage capacity, traits suiting them to increased grain and livestock production for urban markets. Numerous in areas dominated by Pennsylvania German populations and often retaining ethnic markers such as hex signs and date stones, these outbuildings were adopted by non-Germans and also used in other regions, suggesting their economic and regional rather than ethnic basis.

Scholarship frequently overlooks urban areas atypical of perceptions of Pennsylvania German culture and lacking extant buildings. However, the authors of chapters devoted to town houses and commercial buildings point out that urban Pennsylvania Germans mirrored their rural counterparts in preserving ethnic furnishings—particularly woodstoves and painted furniture—even as their architectural decisions were determined less by ethnicity than by economic and civic trends. Amid industrialization and increased population density, town-dwellers moved from houses built on rural plans to brick rowhouses, while business owners migrated from traditional arrangements mingling domestic and commercial zones toward purpose-built spaces that more readily advertised their functions or served specialized production strategies. A...