When my daughter Elizabeth and I attended Erntedankfest at Old Economy last year, we vowed to return and check out all the things we missed the first time. Erntedankfest is the Autumn Harvest Festival celebrated each year at Old Economy Village, the impressive historical site in Ambridge that celebrates the heritage of the long defunct Harmony Society, a pietist communal organization that flourished in the nineteenth century. Located in Ambridge, Old Economy Village is administered by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission with massive volunteer support by the “Friends of Old Economy Village”.
The village consists of seventeen soon-to-be-two centuries old buildings and extensive gardens in a six acres plot that is surrounded by twenty-six acres of Ambridge’s National Register Historic District, designated a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service in 1986. “The buildings, grounds, library, archives, and original artifacts are a memorial to the (Harmony) Society’s commitment to the religious discipline and economic industry that built their American Utopia”. It is the closest thing we have in Western Pennsylvania to Virginia’s “Colonial Williamsburg” or Massachusett’s “Old Sturbridge Village”.
The Harmony Society was a group of Separatist (from the Lutheran Church) followers of Father (George) Rapp who believed in a simple, pietistic life based on the early Christian church. They believed everyone should work together for the common good and, in return, have all their needs (food, clothing, and shelter) provided for them. Because they also believed the Millennium (Christ’s return to earth) was imminent, they elected to practice celibacy. Because of discrimination in their homeland, eight hundred farmers and craftsmen left Germany in 1804 and came to North America. After two failed settlements (Harmony, Pennsylvania and New Harmony, Indiana), they arrived in what is now the Ambridge area and found their home.
For years the business model (voluntary labor with minimum benefits) was successful and they were able to acquire a handsome bankroll. When the declining labor pool required them to employ outsiders (and pay them!), their competitiveness suffered. They gradually phased out of manufacturing and diversified into investing in the oil industry, banking, and railroads (the Pennsylvania and Lake Erie). By 1905 the handful of members still surviving dissolved the Society. By then its assets had shrunk to $1.2 million. In 1916 the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania acquired the six acres that currently comprise the Village; the American Bridge Company acquired the rest and developed Ambridge.
Erntedankfest is a very enjoyable conglomeration of food, craft demonstrations, vendor booths, live music, and old-fashioned sight-seeing. This year we made it a point to take in a concert by the Allegheny Brass Band, thirty volunteer musicians dedicated to keep alive the tradition of the British-style brass bands of the nineteenth century. They include every imaginable brass instrument, plus one percussionist. Their repertoire was wide – “Mama Mia”, Western movie themes, Leroy Anderson, “Putting On the Ritz”, etc. – and then went into Sousa’s “The Thunderer”, which immediately made all the other selections sound like Elevator Music. I would be thrilled to hear this band play a full concert of Sousa pieces – he is an underappreciated genius.
I always enjoy craft demonstrations. One booth was preparing ginger beer; another, grinding apples for cider. One gentleman was chopping cabbage and making Sauerkraut (I well remember a crock of fermenting Sauerkraut weighted down with a Mason jar full of chain links in our “fruit cellar”, when I was a kid). We had seen artisans making brooms and winding rope last year. The same was true of weaving and blacksmithing, but I will never tire of watching them.
There was the usual variety of vendors. I am always puzzled that people can sell enough home-made jewelry or scented candles to justify spending a day staffing a booth. A female author was hawking her own self-published novels –I nearly bought one, out of sympathy for her. There were the usual Christmas-related gimmicks and the unusual rice-filled heating pads. I am always impressed by items produced and sold by woodworkers – especially impressive was a display of bowls and cutting boards. Our only purchases were some pastries (for immediate consumption) and a sack full of wassail ingredients (set aside for our own Christmas celebration this year).
We saved a few minutes for an inspection of the Old Economy gardens, now long past their summer-time prime. These include decorative flowers, herbs, medicinal plants, and the normal variety of edible vegetables. The heart of the Society complex is a large lawn with a lovely pavilion encircled by a moat filled with goldfish and lily pads, and neatly groomed hedges. One edge of the lawn is the location for their grape arbors. This has not been a good year for their grapes; someone blamed it on the spotted lantern fly.
Each time I visit a site like this one, I am impressed by the quality and commitment of its volunteers and by the general public’s indifference to what is being presented. According to their website, Old Economy Village has about 25,000 visitors a year. This isn’t bad for a six acres site – the one million visitors per year each at Colonial Williamsburg and Old Sturbridge Village are attracted by facilities thirty or forty times as big as Old Economy.
The Ambridge Historic District Economic Development Corporation is a non-profit organization actively seeking to attract “cottage-type businesses such as antique shops, bookstores, cafes, bistros, pottery, bakeries, or children specialty stores” to occupy the eighteenth-century buildings in the Historic District adjacent to Old Economy Village. The concept of converting the additional twenty-six acres into a synergistic historical/cultural/arts colony is indeed appealing.