Stoudt’s work on native rural folk speaks volumes
As a Fleetwood kid and later folklorist living a town over from the historic Oley Valley, I was proud to have read the “PA Dutch Cultural Histories,” written by the articulate Professor-Clergyman, John Joseph Stoudt, a Dutchman who lived on the Fleetwood-Lyons Road in a very historic Georgian mansion, just outside Fleetwood Borough limits.
An expert of PA Dutch antiques and folk art, his home was a museum of native PA Dutch furniture and artifacts. Anyone who has ever wondered about the PA Dutch people and their culture should read his 1948 volume: “Pennsylvania Folk Art, An Interpretation,” published by the PA German Society with rare illustrations and an excellent interpretation of their folk meaning, two years before Dr. Shoemaker founded the nearby Kutztown Folk Festival in 1950.
This academic volume was matched later by his illustrated publication with many visual samples of rare antiques and native furniture called “Early Pennsylvania Arts and Crafts” (1964), where many of the items in this illustrated work were from southeastern Pennsylvania, and basically, PA Dutch masterpieces. Born in Northampton, PA of native PA Dutch parents, John Joseph Stoudt’s birth year was 1911. The son of a PA Dutch Historian and Clergyman, John Baer Stoudt, he grew up among the Pennsylvania Dutch people, whom he affectionately wrote about. A colleague of my Director at the American Folklife Institute, Richard Shaner, the two of them enjoyed many academic conversations when “Dick” would stop by his house in Fleetwood when Shaner lived in his restored log home at nearby Boyer’s Junction, where he too collected PA Dutch folk art objects and furniture after he moved from the 1750 Oley Forge.
Both of them enjoyed comparing notes on our unique Dutch culture, and Dr. Stoudt being the older, more experienced scholar had a lot to teach Dick, who was a fellow member of the PA German Society and knew the publisher of Stoudt’s books, Ed Schlechter of Allentown, PA. A veteran scholar of the PA Dutch Culture, perhaps the best folk cultural book written by Dr. Stoudt was “Sunbonnets and Shoofly Pies,” published in 1973. The title had a gut feeling for the way local Dutch people looked at themselves. A comprehensive work on our native rural people, from powwowing to architecture and rare antiques found in national museums, this 1973 volume was well-received by the academic community. An uplifting historian and clergyman, Stoudt was very proud at this rural community and his background. In fact, in 1948, he dedicated his first volume to his PA Dutch father.
Of this rural community Stoudt and others aforementioned in previous columns had cherished so much, prior to the 20th Century, there had only been one substantial migration of Plain Dutch within the Commonwealth since Colonial times, and that was to the Big Valley of Central Pennsylvania. Relocating specifically in Mifflin County as early as 1791, this group of Plain People (Amish) consisted of nine distinct religious groups. Since their migration to Pennsylvania in the 17th and 18th Centuries, and being among the first people to settle Pennsylvania, the Plain Dutch (Swiss) built their homesteads on the fertile Lancaster Plain, and the Worldly Dutch (Germans, French Huguenots) in the fertile Oley and Penn Valley. The Plain People have continued to center around Lancaster, and the Worldly people the width and breadth of the Oley Valley and East Penn Valleys with their center at Kutztown.