Label used by analysts to describe an area extending from a core in south-central
Pennsylvania into western Maryland and Virginia, characterized by connected cultural
traditions of Pennsylvania German foodways, religions, architecture, language, and
settlement. The region formed from colonial settlement after others had been established
in New England, Chesapeake, and the South. Although Pennsylvania German migration
came through Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley in the late 17th century, it was inland
toward Lancaster and Berks Counties that the cultural region took its distinctive form.
The inland region’s agricultural lifestyle, ethnic connections, and relative isolation (the
area formed into self-sustaining mountain and valley communities) fostered the
persistence of a marked regional consciousness, although it was not as well recognized in
scholarship as Southern and New England areas. In addition to major influences from
Switzerland and the Palatinate Rhineland, the Pennsylvania German setders adapted
customs from English Quakers and Scots-Irish neighbors to develop a New Wodd edinicregional hybrid diat continues into the present.
Folklorists since the 19th century, many associated with the Pennsylvania-German
Society founded in 1891 (a separate Pennsylvania German Folklore Society began
operation in 1936), identified the distinctiveness of the “Dutch Country” by describing
the ways that oral and material traditions integrated into a regional folklife. Traditions
among the Pennsylvania Germans such as hex-sign making, Harvest Home celebrations,
Eileschpiggel trickster tale-telling, powwowing (healing), and Schwabian joke telling
suggested that the central Pennsylvanians held a unique place in the American cultural
landscape. Beginning in the 1940s, cultural geographers used linguistic folk traditions as
evidence to definitively map the limits of the region. Although the number of
Pennsylvania “Dutch” speakers declined after World War II to less than 100,000, the
German dialect had a profound influence on the region’s speech. In 1949 Hans Kurath
identified a Midland English dialect covering central Pennsylvania, western Maryland,
and Virginia between well-recognized Northern and Southern speech areas.
Wilbur Zelinsky found that social traditions such as religion and settement pattern
suggested tighter boundaries than those for speech, but ones nonetheless following the
general regional shape of an oval in south-central Pennsylvania extending from Altoona
to Allentown and a southwestern extension down the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia (see
Zelinsky 1973, 1977). Religious membership in churches of German origin such as
Brethren, Lutheran and Reformed, Mennonite, and Amish churches was more
concentrated in this region than any other in the United States (another area with similar
Pennsylvania German setdement and religious pattern is found in Ontario). Towns in the
region usually had a central square or “diamond,” dense distribution of houses close to
the street, and spacious alleyways. Farmsteads surrounded the towns and typically
featured Pennsylvania bank barns and houses that combined German asymmetrical
interior plans with English symmetrical exteriors.
In contrast to the one-level English barns set on the ground in New England,
Pennsylvania barns have two or three levels with an upper level cantilevered over the
lower level on the barnyard side to form an overhang called the forebay. Joseph W.Glass
used frequencies of the bank barn to give the most detailed map of the Pennsylvania
Culture Region to date (Glass 1986). Subdividing the region according to core, domain,
and sphere, based on the model for the Mormon Culture Region in the West, Glass traced
the most intensive use of the Pennsylvania barn tradition approximately from
Chambersburg to Lancaster, and an encircling domain that takes in much of western
Maryland. The sphere of less regional intensity extends down into western Virginia and
eastern West Virginia. Henry Glassie made the argument that this sphere is the basis of a
wider Middle Adantic material culture that extended well west and influenced cultural
traditions in the Midwest.
Such approaches to finding sharp boundaries of the region focus on historical
continuity, and especially architectural evidence. Recent folkloristic investigation into
modern-day cultural practice has shown the changing character of the region and
probably a fuzzier view of regional culture based more in consciousness than in
landscape. While foods served in the region—including chow chow, pot pie, scrapple,
and chicken corn soup—offer an image of a wide area of influence, the round of life
based on Pennsylvania German customs has moved from the “core” toward southeastern
Pennsylvania to the northern edge of the domain in Schuylkill, upper Dauphin, Berks,
and Northumberland Counties, where commu nity cohesion continues. Arguments rage
over whether the commercial promotion of the Pennsylvania Culture Region, known
popularly as the “Dutch Country” in Lancaster County, around the former core has led to
the demise or conservation of cultural traditions there. Abundant festivals and exhibitions
often allow for celebrations of Pennsylvania regional consciousness to compensate for
the loss of Pennsylvania German folklife in daily existence. Indeed, Americas largest folk
festival is the annual Kutztown Folk Festival devoted to promoting Pennsylvania German
folkways, and Pennsylvania Folklife boasts the largest circulation for a regional folklife
journal. Increasing urbanization and a diversifying mobile population have had a negative
impact on maintaining a unified folk-regional integrity, although identification with
regional folk customs, such as eating sauerkraut and pork on New Year’s Day, and
regional folk humor remains strong. Neither Yankee nor Southern, the mix of
Pennsylvania German and British traditions in die Pennsylvania Culture Region has had a
lasting influence on the ways that people there talk, eat, work, and play.
Simon J.Bronner
References
Bronner, Simon J. 1989. Folklife Starts Here: The Background of Material Culture Scholarship in
Pennsylvania. In The Old Traditional Way of Life, ed. Robert E. Walls and George
H.Schoemaker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 283–296.
Glass, Joseph W. 1986. The Pennsylvania Culture Region: A View from the Barn. Ann Arbor, MI:
UMI Research Press.
Glassie, Henry. 1968. Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Zelinsky, Wilbur. 1973. The Cultural Geography of the United States. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall.
——. 1977. The Pennsylvania Town: An Overdue Geographical Account. Geographical Review
67:127–147