A LOOKBACK IN HISTORY The American Folklife Journal provided invaluable insight into Americana achievements & agrarian life
In receiving periodic e-mails and questions over the years concerning the little known American Folklife Newsletters/ Journal and lesser known Colonial Cherry Fair, both of the 1970s, compared to the nationally recognized Kutztown Folk Festival since 1950, and more readily Pennsylvania Folklife magazine evolving from the PA Dutchman and earlier newspaper and special summer issue folk festival programs, I hope to address some questions from my previous column. The original Keim barn was torn down years earlier when Dick Boyer’s father timbered the virgin land, whom Mr. Boyer inherited the Keim Homestead and acreage from and land that soon became the backdrop for Shaner’s second Lobachsville Cherry Fair.
But in November of 1972 after the success of the first springtime Cherry Fair (held at the 1745 Lobachsville Grist Mill for just that one year-1972), the newly formed Board of Shaner’s sponsoring American Folklife Society published their first multipage issue of the American Folklife Journal (19721975) with Richard Shaner as its editor. A newsletter approximately 12” X 17” with large photos in large part to fellow board member, Robert S. Walch, a Life-Time photographer and Shaner’s colleague, new membership was key to its longevity. However, this newsletter concluded with four magazine type issues that continued this journal for two more years until 1977.
Subsequently, operating American Folklife on a shoe-string budget, as a teacher at Oley High School, Dick received fliers from school printing houses and approached a company out near Pittsburgh and asked them if they would give his American Folklife Board the same financial break they gave to public school newspaper publications. Realizing they were a nonprofit corporation, the company agreed and continued to print their local historic American Folklife Journal for seven years with outstanding quality photos.
The American Folklife Institute journal, published in the 1970s, was enamored in the field research of United States folk culture, architecture, and antiques, and mainly recorded throughout the greater Delaware Valley with areas of expertise in Americana achievements and agrarian life, past and present, in its early years. Hence, in 1972, months before the journal’s first publication, with the support of local folklorists, teachers, and his Oley Valley High School students, Dick Shaner 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.
Dick eventually had realized the wisdom of Doc Shoemaker’s idea to hold a “Colonial American Cherry Fair” right here in Lobachsville and with great success that the fair would be moved to a larger venue. This annual Americana event would now feature folklife staff members feeding apples into the hopper of an ancient Appalachian pomace mill, while another worker turned the boom, crushing apples as they passed between two giant gears. Housed in a rustic building, the 18th Century Hartman cider press, where the pomace (crushed apples), was squeezed to render cider was at the historic 1753 Jacob Keim Homestead, relocated there, and new sight of Cherry Fair. The crude mill and press was a rare attraction, one of only among a few surviving specimens of the early Appalachian cider industry that once extended from Maine to Georgia.
A colleague of Dick’s, an Oley Valley English teacher who had been a metropolitan newspaper reporter, taught Shaner how to write a newspaper news release. And thanks to good spring weather, Alfred L. Shoemaker’s dream became a reality as on several occasions Shoemaker talked with Dick about PA Dutch folklore and referred to the idea of holding a “Colonial American Cherry Fair,” the basis of which to develop a theme around cherries that would be synonymous with the term, Americana, and revolve around the New World inventions and Americanisms. Complete with a Scottish Colonial bagpipe group on the village commons, tours in the gristmill, food by the local Church, several vendors, as well as old-time craftsmen, the annual event was quite the success!