To Allemangel and Westward: Travels by a PA Dutch Conestoga Wagon …
By the mid-1700’s, when immigrant Colonial wagon trains passed through the beautiful Oley Valley and East Penn region from Philadelphia en route to frontier lands northeast of Kempton (upper part of county), the Germans called this new territory “Allemangel,” meaning all wants, for its lack of fertility and farmable land. A rugged terrain, that was eventually tamed, the land did not match the rich Oley Valley bottomlands or its rate of productivity. The Pennsylvania Dutch, though, were masters at farming wheat, and their overbrimming granaries resulted in an excellence at bread-baking unequalled in early America.
Even today, among the Plain Pennsylvania Dutch, bread is baked in quantities for home use and the surplus sold at roadside stands. For them, it may still be cheaper to bake their own bread than to buy a commercial product not to mention the sense of pride in doing so. However, the preference is not one solely of economy or even tradition, but a perseverance of goodness and quality. Home-baked bread, void of modern mechanical and chemical preparation, has a unique texture and moist yeasty taste that enhances every meal as a culinary delight.
Many old-time Dutchmen can fondly recall eating slices of thick warm bread spread with butter and topped with molasses, apple butter, or strawberry jam. A simple teaser of appetite, bread eaten this way, has no counterpart among the bland commercial store-bought breads of the secular world. Any Plain Pennsylvania Dutch woman will tell you that the first step in baking good bread is in the selection of the wheat flour. For modern Pennsylvania Dutch people, it is very easy for us to recall our nation’s celebrated history, for in large part of American Civilization, our ethnicity has always been interwoven with the pride that Patriotic citizens have felt.
Take for instance the United States flag of this agrarian Republic that was born in Philadelphia, the cradle of Liberty founded by William Penn, who personally invited German Palatines to help found Pennsylvania. Our PA Dutch in the 17th and 18th Century, not only flocked to America, but soon outnumbered the Quaker English settlers, who like them, embraced Penn’s idea of beginning a Holy experiment. One only needs to examine the Lancaster Plain today with its peace loving Old Order Amish and Palatinate Mennonites, who we often call “the Horse and Buggy Dutch,” the essence of Freedom of Religion. The thousands of Pennsylvania Dutch, who arrived during the American Revolution, endorsed the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and the United States Constitution that followed.
And while the Continental Congress was meeting in Philadelphia every year during the harvest season, hundreds of Conestoga wagons invaded the port facility to ship grain to a starving world and to Colonists living in the other twelve colonies. These immense red and blue Conestoga wagons with white homespun canvas tops were always present on market days, parked to provide the people of Philadelphia with the food necessities on a week to week basis at their markets. By 1776, all roads led to the port of Philadelphia and thousands of PA Dutch farmers from eastern Pennsylvania drove their red, white, and blue Conestoga wagons with sixhorse teams wearing colorful brass bells to prevent congestion with other horse-drawn vehicles on the King’s highway of the day; let alone stagecoaches that could hardly pass them.
Local waggoners, who had a regular export / import business with Sea captains that docked at Philadelphia, had regular routes, and Taverns, in which they did business. Thereby, these impressive, huge Conestoga wagons, built by Lancaster PA Dutch had became an American way of life, some of which took their cargo out to Pittsburgh and the Ohio River, opening up our Westward American expansion in the early 19th Century.