The Demise
Of The Family
Farm:
An Illustrative
Example From Eastern
Pennsylvania
Darlene
Della Schneck, ed. The Last Generation On
The Farm: The Clarence and Della Geissinger Family and a Vanished
Way of Life (Create Space, 2017)
160 pages $21.99 ISBN: 9781548023614
Reviewer: Forrest Wayne Schultz Date:
January 10, 2018
I do not recall ever visiting the farm in
this book even though I grew up on a farm only a few miles south of it, and was
a member of one of the churches there, the Palm Schwenkfelder Church. And one of the individuals mentioned, Edwin
Fox, was one of my Sunday School teachers at this church; and the school mentioned, Perkiomen, was
founded by the Schwenkfelders and was the one from which my father and his
brothers and sisters graduated. And our
barn, like the one in this book, was a bank barn, so I know what that
means! Also, like their house, ours had
a maple tree in the yard from a branch of which a swing was attached. We also had apple trees, but ours were in the
cow pasture. And I know the pies and cakes in the book,
but, surprisingly, one of those my mother baked had a different name, “Shoo Fly
Pie”, not “Shoo Fly Cake”. I also know
about curing meat hung from hooks inside a wall smoked by a fireplace fire. And, as a boy my mother sent me to the barn
to fetch vinegar from a keg stored there many years ago. I also knew of the Normal School in Kutztown
because both my maternal grandmother and an elderly lady in East Greenville I
knew graduated from it. And, when it later became Kutztown State Teachers
College, my brother-in-law Clare Reihman got a B.S. and M.S. in science education
there. In regard to the farm safety
mentioned, I know of its importance both from the films I saw at the Advisory
Board meetings of the Lehigh Valley Cooperative Farmers, and also from the
horrific accident with the manure spreader on the farm of Claude Bieler
(directly south of our farm) suffered by his son Richard, who fortunately
recovered and who now owns the farm. I
remember him being in the hospital for a while and for a while hobbling around
on crutches!
-1-
The book mentions the cordial relationship between the
Schwenkfelders and the Mennonites which I experienced also, one example of
which was the joint Thanksgiving Services which the Palm Schwenkfelder Church had
each year with a nearby Mennonite Church (whose name I do not remember). We alternated years – one year at our church,
the next at the Mennonite Church. I am
surprised that this fact was not mentioned in the book. On the other hand one thing the author
mentions that I did not know was that there is a Mennonite Heritage Center in
Harleysville, PA. The only thing I knew
about Harleysville when I lived in PA was that the Harleysville baloney was the
best brand there was!
Our farm (the Scholtop Dairy Farm) was
located in Upper Hanover Township, which is at the extreme northern end of
Montgomery County. The people discussed
in this book lived in Upper Milford and Hereford Townships slightly north of
where Montgomery County ends. The family
farm on which I grew up and the family farm in this book both ended during the
1960s – our farm in 1961 and the farm of this book in 1967.
Today there is a lot of talk about
“traditional American values”. This book
provides some good examples of what that means.
However, when I was growing up, people didn’t use terms like that!! Also my father highly valued work and praised
those who were hard workers, but he never said anything about “the work ethic”! The most concise way to summarize all this is
found in the words of the Mennonite historian Forrest Moyer on the rear jacket,
where he says that this book provides “a window into the historic rural culture
of southern Lehigh County”, which is true but it needs to be noted that this
same culture was also found in Montgomery County as well as the other
Pennsylvania Dutch communities generally up until the middle of the twentieth
century!!
I highly recommend this book for its
well-told story about this farm, as I did the author’s earlier book about the
adventures of Isaac Schultz. These
reviews plus more about what I have to say about our farm and ancestors and the
Upper Perkiomen Valley are on my blog http://schwenkfelderschultzes.blogspot.com.
-2-
HERE IS THE AMAZON REVIEW BY K. VESTAL
July 31, 2017
ADDENDUM:
Home Movies of this family can be viewed on this U Tube email address;
HERE IS THE AMAZON REVIEW BY K. VESTAL
July 31, 2017
Format: Paperback
No comments:
Post a Comment