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| Here Is A Story I Would Like To Pass On To Those Of You
Who Are Interested In Ordering One Of My Leather Bound Journals. In 1829 a young Pennsylvania Dutch, Lutheran woman moved with her family from Lampeter Township, Lancaster County, to another part of the county, and her friend Anna Koufs made her a drawing of birds, tulips, and a heart as a keepsake, a remembrance. In the 1890s, when the woman, who had by then moved several more times, was contemplating death, she divided her few keepsakes among her family. Susanna Tanger Harnish (1800-1895) was like many other Pennsylvania Germans of her day. She had made the transition from dialect to English; most of her grandchildren could neither speak nor understand her mother tongue. She had lived through industrialization, but when she taught her grandchildren to sew, she brought the standards of the apprentice system to bear: she rapped their knuckles when they made too large a stitch. She had lived through a moral revolution that changed the behavioral contour of America, yet she had been married to a Mennonite man who had operated a still with her brother-and after supper, as countrywomen of her generation did, she sat on a chair in back of the stove and smoked a pipe. Her estate amounted to only a few dollars, but her treasures became the treasures of the next generation by her choice. One granddaughter who bore her name received her scissors, the youngest grandchild a china figurine that she had had all her life. Her Bible, its pages interleaved with cutouts and fold drawings and some of the births entered in flowers and hearts, remained with the daughter who cared for her. The drawing Anna Koufs made for her in 1829 was carefully marked for a little great-grandson who caught her fancy. Her world was full of stylized birds and tulips-neither Plato's ideal nor Daguerre's mirror-and that was the world she wanted a youngster born in the 1890s to remember her by. No one would remember her today, however, because she was simply one more Pennsylvania German woman, her life stamped by the notions and institutions of her culture. It Is My Sincere Wish That You Continue To Record Events And Happenings In Your Life In One Of My Leather Bound Journals And Then Pass It On As A Family Heirloom For Future Generations To Enjoy. KeN SCoTT The above account is from Home /
Pouches / Folk
art & Prints / |