"Pennsylvania Dutch," and other essays

by Phebe Earle Gibbons

In these kissing plays, and in some little romping among the young men, the time was spent until about two or three in the morning, when they separated, two girls from a distance staying all night. Mary was able to sleep until daylight only, for no allowance is made for those who partake in these gay vigils to make up in the morning for loss of sleep.

There were no refreshments upon this occasion, but once at a singing at Christ. Yoder’s, it is said that the party took nearly all the pies out of the cellar, and the empty plates were found in the wash-house next morning.

Dancing-parties are not unknown among us, but they are not popular among the plain people whom I especially describe.

FARMING.

In this fertile limestone district farming is very laborious, being entirely by tillage. Our regular routine is once in five years to plough the sod ground for corn. In the next ensuing year the same ground is sowed with oats; and when the oats come off in August, the industrious “Dutchmen” immediately manure the stubble-land for wheat. I have seen them laying the dark-brown heaps upon the yellow stubble, when, in August, I have ridden some twelve or fourteen miles down to the hill-country for blackberries.

After the ground is carefully prepared, wheat and timothy (grass) seed are put in with a drill, and in the ensuing spring clover is sowed upon the same ground. By July, when the wheat is taken off the ground, the clover and timothy are growing, and will be ready to mow in the next or fourth summer. In the fifth the same grass constitutes a grazing-ground, and then the sod is ready to be broken up again for Indian corn. Potatoes are seldom planted here in great quantities; a part of one of the oat-fields or corn-fields can be put into potatoes, and the ground will be ready by fall to be put into wheat, if it is desired. A successful farmer put more than half of his forty acres into wheat; this being considered the best crop. The average crop of wheat is about twenty bushels, of Indian corn about forty. I have heard of one hundred bushels of corn in the Pequea valley, but this is very rare.

When the wheat and oats are in the barn or stack, enormous eight-horse threshers, whose owners go about the neighborhood from farm to farm, thresh the crop in two or three days; and thus what was once a great job for winter may all be finished by the first of October.

Jacob E. is a model farmer. His buildings and fences are in good order, and his cattle well kept. He is a little past the prime of life; his beautiful head of black hair being touched with silver. His wife is dimpled and smiling, and her weight of nearly two hundred does not prevent her being active, energetic, forehanded, and “thorough-going.” During the winter months the two sons go to the public school,—the older one with reluctance; there they learn to read and write and cipher, and possibly they study geography; they speak English at school, and “Dutch” at home. Much education the “Dutch” farmer fears, as productive of laziness; and laziness is a mortal sin here. The E.’s rarely buy a book. I suggested to one of our neighbors that he might advantageously have given a certain son a chance with books. “Don’t want no books,” was the answer. “There’s enough goes to books! Get so lazy after a while they won’t farm.” The winter is employed partly in preparing material to fertilize the wheat-land during the coming summer. Great droves of cattle and sheep come down our road from the West, and our farmers buy from these, and fatten stock during the winter months for the Philadelphia market. A proper care of his stock will occupy some portion of the farmer’s time. A farmer’s son told me also of cutting wood and quarrying stone in the winter, adding, “If a person wouldn’t work in the winter, they’d be behindhand in the spring.”

Besides these, the farmer has generally a great “freundschaft,” or family connection, both his and his wife’s; and the paying visits within a range of twenty or thirty miles, and receiving visits in return, help to pass away the time. Then Jacob and Susanna are actively benevolent; they are liable to be called upon, summer and winter, to wait on the sick and to help bury the dead. Susanna was formerly renowned as a baker at funerals, where her services were freely given.