Lillian and William Walter and Richard Peter Hoffman pictures from the Kutztown Folk Festival.
The Walter pictures were donated to the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center by Lillian Walter and are now catalogued in the Center’s files. The pictures depict the early days of the Festival and include pictures of some of the founding leaders, including Alfred Shoemaker and William Frey. There are pictures of Author Frances Lichten, Muhlenberg Professor Harry Hess Reichard, a visit from NBC News with their correspondent Arlene Francis, and many others. There are some pictures of Olive Zehner who was very instrumental is providing crafts people from the Berks-Reading Guild of Craftsmen to work at the Festival. Elaine Vardjan, a member of the Reading-Berks Guild of Craftsmen and friend of the coordinator Olive Zehner attended the Festival from its earliest days. Elaine provided insights into the activities and people in the pictures. The notes accompanying the Walter slides that are in quotes were on the original slides and presumably were written by either Lillian or William Walter.
We are grateful to Lillian Walter for the gift and all those who worked on this display.
The Hoffman pictures of the Kutztown Folk Festival were donated to the Festival and cover the years from 1955-1991. Richard Peter Hoffman (1911-1997) was a Pennsylvania German artist who took pictures of the Festival. His art work is featured in the A Pennsylvania German Precisionist: The Art of Richard Peter Hoffman with Critical Essays by Mahlon H. Hellerich and Scott T. Swank, (Pennsylvania German Society 1990). Many of Hoffman’s Festival photographs show his artistic temperament.
Both the Walter and Hoffman Collections were organized, catalogued, and uploaded by Kutztown University Students Alana Rohrbach, Beau deForest and Vance Dotterer. We are grateful for their work. The collection is at the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center at Kutztown University.
The Kutztown Folk Festival operated from 1950 to 2024. It was the oldest folklife festival in the country and inspired many other folklife festivals including the Smithsonian’s national folklife festival on the National Mall. The Festival was founded by three professors who at the time were teaching at Franklin and Marchall College in Lancaster, Alfred Shoemaker, William Frey and Don Yoder. All were dedicated to studying and displaying the Pennsylvania German/Dutch culture. Many state that a fourth person, Olive Zehner, should be included as one of the Festival’s founders since she organized many of the crafts people who attended the Festival. Don Yoder became a prominent scholar of Pennsylvania German/Dutch Folklife and Folklife Studies more generally.
A discussion of the Kutztown Folk Festival’s origin and purpose by Don Yoder can be found here:
Yoder, Don. 1974. “Twenty-Five Years of the Folk Festival.” Pennsylvania Folklife. 23(suppl.): 2-7 https://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/pafolklifemag/60/
A tribute to Don Yoder by Patrick Donmoyer can be found here:
https://www.kutztown.edu/about-ku/administrative-offices/pennsylvania-german-cultural-heritage-center/a-century-of-don-yoder-father-of-american-folklife.html
Another tribute to Don Yoder by Stephen Winik of the American Folklife Center here:
https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2015/08/don-yoder-1921-2015-the-man-who-put-the-life-in-folklife/
