The weather cooperated: winter wheat was green in the fields and teams were plowing beneath bright skies, reminding us that those rolling hills were America’s first breadbasket. We were entering a foreign world. Only as the symposium progressed did we realize how foreign it was, and that we couldn’t have crossed the border or understood the language without guidance. We visited a “Dutch Country” that tourists can barely imagine.

One of the great values of attendance at a Trust symposium is that many speakers are informal “scholars in residence,” becoming part of the group as they share meals, lectures and bus rides. In this case, it was a bit different: those who have studied the Pennsylvania Germans are a select number who know each other so well that it was we who were invited into their group. The informal family created for the duration of the weekend intensified our sense of having entered another world.

Over the weekend, speakers referred often to the religious and geographic origins of the peoples who are now called Pennsylvania Germans. By Sunday afternoon we were comfortable with the distinctions: the Moravian, Mennonite, Amish, Huguenot, Lutherans who settled the region and contributed to its culture. Two important regional institutions provided our grounding: the Heritage Center Museum of Lancaster County and the Landis Valley Museum.

Peter Seibert, Director of the Heritage Center, spoke on the county’s furniture and welcomed us into the museum for a private viewing of its new exhibit, “The Pennsylvania Germans.” Some of the men and women who had assisted in the creation of the exhibit had lectured for us, and their presence in several of the galleries turned the evening into comfortable, informal study sessions.Members of the Heritage Center Board hosted a reception for Trust members, concluding our visit to the Center in a characteristically hospitable way.

Steve Miller, Executive Director of the Landis Valley Museum, prepared us for our visit with an introduction to the extraordinary Landis brothers, George and Henry, who shared with collectors like Henry Ford, H. F. duPont, Electra Webb and Henry Mercer the zeal for acquiring and saving artifacts of a vanishing world. Walking among the structures of the Landis Valley collection we understood their passion We’re looking forward to the opening of the new Landis House Collections Gallery this September.

Well prepared by Dr. Irwin Richman, who teaches American Studies and History at Penn State Harrisburg, we were able to “read” the architecture of buildings we passed on our bus forays through towns, seeing the half-timbering that betrayed a building’s Palatinate origin , the characteristic stone and brick chimneys, or the log construction that went west and ultimately became the toy “Lincoln Logs” of our childhood. When we arrived at the Hans Herr House, we were already familiar with its history and construction. There’s so much more to see if you know what you’re looking at.

And the region is alive with history. Both “Wheatland,” the gracious 19th-century home of President James Buchanan, and “Rock Ford,” the Federal home of Revolutionary General Edward Hand and his family, are exemplars of conservation and interpretation. And both are set in forested landscapes, away from noise and traffic. To visit them is to enter another time.

Dr. Donald Yoder, dean of Pennsylvania German folklife studies, introduced us to fraktur, the graphic art that combines religious symbolism and baroque calligraphy. Scorning the “do-it-yourself” folk artist myth, he averred that it is specialists in every community who have always been responsible for the creation of its finest decorative arts. Fraktur, the art of breaking apart (fracturing) a letter and putting it back as part of a design, was mostly the handwork of schoolmasters and ministers, and its products were church- and school-oriented: baptismal certificates and marriage contracts, scholastic rewards, holiday gifts.

A similar taste for elaborate balanced ornamentation and strong patterning was evident as Patricia Herr discussed the fabric handwork of the Pennsylvania Germans. Trish, an accomplished needleworker as well as a noted scholar, gave us “the whole nine yards.” On a later visit to Linden Hall, the 1745 Moravian girls’ school in Lititz, we examined with her some of the finest of the ornamental images that we’d seen in her lecture.

Furniture studies were a significant element of the weekend. Peter Seibert of the Heritage Center discussed the county’s distinctive furniture, including case pieces with sulfur inlay ornament, and those once attributed to the Bachman family. By linking the objects, their makers, their owners, and the culture that supported them, Seibert made them memorable.

Philip Zimmerman, the furniture scholar whose lectures have enriched other symposiums, discussed three of his current 18th-century furniture projects: the issue of the Boston chairs exported for sale to Philadelphia and other cities; the broad range of furniture in the Sewell Biggs Collection; and his confident steps toward the use of science in the connoisseurship of painted furniture. He concluded that perhaps he should “give all of this up, and get into something easier — maybe teaching chemistry!”

Jack Lindsey, Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Curator of American Decorative Arts and a member of the Trust’s Board of Governors, talked about “the things that were part of the world experience” of the Pennsylvania Germans. Reminding us of Penn’s conviction that there would, and should, be cross-culturation in his colony, Jack described the Europe from which the various groups came, and some of the ways in which their craftsmen brought their past experience here and translated it.

Jay Stiefel, collector and scholar of American furniture, summarized his recent research into the unknown account book of London-trained Philadelphia cabinetmaker John Head. The folio-sized volume covering the years 1718 to 1753 contains “more information about Philadelphia furniture in the first half of the century than all the other sources combined.” Jay’s enlightening talk used the book to explain the barter economy at work, connect Head with other Philadelphia craftsmen, and show him gradually becoming a merchant. (www.amphilsoc.org/library/bulletin/20011/head.html)

Donald Herr, whose studies of the pewter in Pennsylvania churches resulted in a major reassessment of American pewter, gave us not only a great survey of the forms and a summary of the men who made them, but also reinforcement of the distinctions among the religious groups, and clues to understanding them. “The most important thing about this work,” he said, “is meeting with the pastors and elders, and talking about caring for their pewter.”

It wouldn’t be possible to study the Pennsylvania Germans without getting ourselves into clay. Those on Thursday’s trip had already been out of the classroom into the kiln: the home of master potter Lester Breininger, where we met him and his wife, visited his ceramics collections, and learned from the potters who produce his celebrated wares.

On Saturday, Jack Lindsey reminded us that the Philadelphia Museum was founded in 1876 with the V & A as its model — so production, craftsmanship and industrialization were valued highly. He tracked for us the development of its extraordinary early collection of Pennsylvania ceramics and their European sources, and the significant and sometime humorous interaction between the museum’s administration, trustees, and legendary curator, Edwin Atlee Barber.

The Thursday and Sunday trips bracketed the symposium perfectly. We saw the incomparable survivals of two aspects of the Pennsylvania German world: inventive industry and intense spirituality. On Thursday we were privileged to visit two sites associated with the region’s early iron industry: Elizabeth Furnace and Charming Forge, both founded by the entrepreneur “Baron” Heinrich Wilhelm Stiegel.

Elizabeth Furnace, owned by the Coleman family since ironmaster Robert Coleman married the boss’s daughter in the 1770’s, produced many of the plain and ornamented cast iron artifacts that we treasure today as last survivors of their kind. Because of its isolation, its mid-19th-century closing, and its continued ownership in one family, the entire site — home, offices, shops, lands — remains undisturbed. Its current owner, Bill Coleman, is concluding almost five years of careful restoration of the family home, so his invitation to the Trust was an extraordinary honor.

From Elizabeth Furnace we rode to Charming Forge, another survivor of Stiegel’s vision of greatness The ironmaster’s home has been lovingly restored by its current owners, Chip and Vonnie Henderson who were most helpful in planning the symposium. Our tours proceeded slowly, since our hosts told vivid tales of the restoration, and there were so many details we wanted to see. Standing at the entrance of the building, looking down the road at the surviving houses in the silent village, we were again lifted out of the present and set gently into another world.

As the whole weekend had dealt with the interrelationship between the arts, the community, and the spirit, our closing trip took us to Ephrata Cloister, the physical survivor of one of the country’s earliest and most celebrated communal societies. All that remains of it, other than examples of its massive fraktur, is a small cluster of breathtaking structures within a wooded grove. But the Director of the site, Michael Showalter, spoke eloquently about the community and the German mystic who founded it. He led us through the shadowy and sparely furnished communal living spaces, describing the members’ lives. Climbing into areas that are not on view, standing in the small working areas and stark sleeping cells, we were undoubtedly among spirits from the past.