One summer when she was a child, Lisa
Minardi attended a Colonial craft day camp at the historic Peter Wentz
Farmstead near her home in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, where
activities focused on local German culture and early American farm
life.
Unlike the state history she remembered from school mostly William
Penn, Philadelphia and the Quakers she learned that Germans also lived in earlyPennsylvania.
In fact, there were a lot of Germans, who by 1790 made up 40 percent
of the population in the southeastern part of the state. And they all
seemed to have a tradition of surrounding themselves with brightly
colored and whimsically decorated items.
I was totally hooked, says Minardi, now a University of Delaware
alumna and doctoral student, who is curator of a new exhibition at
Winterthur Museum titled A Colorful Folk: Pennsylvania Germans and the
Art of Everyday Life. The exhibit features many examples of fraktur, a
decorated type of manuscripts and documents such as birth and baptismal
certificates, as well as household items ranging from tiny pincushions
to an elaborately carved tall-case clock.
These people decorated everything, Minardi says she soon realized.
Cooking utensils, the cloth hanging behind the cooking utensils to
protect the wall from dirt if they could paint a tulip on it, 20
tulips were better.
Minardi pursued her fascination with the Pennsylvania German (also
known, less accurately, as Pennsylvania Dutch) culture throughout her
academic career. After undergraduate studies in history at Ursinus
College, she earned a masters degree in 2006 from UDs Winterthur Program in American Material Culture and is a current doctoral student in the Department of History.
Now an assistant curator at Winterthur, she created A Colorful Folk
primarily from objects that are part of the museums collection. Many
were collected by Henry Francis du Pont, who first opened the family
home as a museum, and in 2013 Winterthur greatly expanded that
collection by acquiring items from the estate of Pastor Frederick
Weiser.
Weiser, who led Lutheran congregations in York and Adams counties and
died in 2009, was a noted scholar and collector of Pennsylvania German
fraktur and folk art. He was also a mentor to Minardi, who says she
first contacted him after reading his books on the subject while she was
an undergraduate.