Pennsylvania Deutsch Farm Models "Farm To Table" Concept
Quiet Valley In The Pocono Mountains Centers On Creating Food From Resources Available On The Farm With Festivals Filling The Calendar
On any particular day at Quiet Valley, you may find Deb DiPasquale making candles or soap, spinning or felting, basket weaving, churning butter, quilting or making sauerkraut. Or she may be taking care of the farm animals, teaching kids how to make a fire or answering questions from visitors about the farm’s outhouse. As Quiet Valley’s director of marketing and special events in addition to volunteer coordinator, she wear many bonnets.
“My farm name is Aunt Eunice,” she tells The Buzz. "I portray the spinster aunt who’s not so very patient with the kids.” Like the other interpreters on the farm, she dresses in period clothes and answers questions based on the knowledge of the 1800s. “For instance, if a camera flash goes off, we say it must have been lightning. The kids - and the adults too - really get into it.”
Quiet Valley, located near Stroudsburg, in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains, recreates daily life on a farm owned by the same family since the 1760s. “Johann Depper came over from Germany, taking up William Penn’s offer to settle in his colony. He arrived in 1765 in Philadelphia aboard the Betsy, an English ship, and came up here to start a farm. We have records of the family in the local Lutheran church in 1777,” Deb says.
The landscape in the Poconos would have been familiar to the Depper family, with limestone ridges, forested valleys and plenty of springs and streams for water. “They had to clear off the old growth forest to plant their fields,” DiPasquale says. “Their first house and barn were built right into the side of a hill.” The original house still has a bank room, called a cellar kitchen, from that earliest construction.
Johann Depper’s daughter married a Hessian soldier who had been captured during the Revolution and decided to stay on in the new country after his release. The farm remained in the same family until 1913 and was acquired by Alice and Wendell Wicks in 1958. “They intended to develop it,” DiPasquale says, “but they found original buildings that hadn’t been modernized since the 1890s, no electricity or plumbing installed, and the original tools, furnishings and artifacts still in place. The outhouse was still in use. So they decided this would be a perfect living history museum.”
The Wicks opened the farm to the public in 1963, and in 1974, formed a non-profit corporation to ensure its survival, with the mission to preserve and recreate the life on a Pennsylvania German (sometimes called Pennsylvania Deutsch) farm in the 1800s. Alice Wicks portrayed “Gram” at the farm until her retirement at age 85.
Deb DiPasquale entered the scene in 1980. “I volunteered to do rug braiding at one of the Quiet Valley festivals,” she recalls. “Then dear Mrs. Wicks said I would make a wonderful interpreter, and asked me to come be a guide. Ham that I am, I loved it. Then they had me organize the Harvest Festival, then running the summer camp for 25 years. I ended up marketing director when they came up with another new position.” Deb discovered her own ancestors, also settlers with a German background, attended the same Lutheran church as the family at the farm.
During her time at Quiet Valley, Deb has seen her kids and now her grandkids become involved with the farm. “They’ve all learned something,” she says. “Who says learning can’t be fun?” Her husband, a baker, is involved as well, firing up the farm’s old-fashioned bake oven to turn out artisanal loaves of herb-laced bread.
As with any farm, much of the activity at Quiet Valley centers on creating food. Interpreters preserve foods from the garden and make apple butter and cider, butter and cheese, as well as German specialties such as sauerkraut, scrapple and pretzels. “We even had a stuffed pig stomach, sort of like a haggis, at last year’s Harvest Fair,” Deb says. “People raved.”
DiPasquale thinks it’s important that kids learn where the everyday items they take for granted come from. “They meet Molly the sheep and find out how cloth is made, and Henrietta the hen, who produces their eggs for breakfast, and the other animals, and tour the kitchen garden to see food coming out of the ground,” she says. “When I was growing up there were lots of farms, and we went to Grandpa’s for Sunday dinner, helped collect the eggs, had a great meal. We made that connection. But that doesn’t happen much anymore.”
Kids want to know about every aspect of farm life, Deb says. “One asked me the other day how kids back then brushed their teeth. And everyone is fascinated by the outhouse.”
First person interpreters, all playing descendants of Johann Depper, share what life on the farm was like in the 1820s, the 1850s, and the 1890s, when the original house received a fancy Victorian parlor and a cook stove. In the fields and barns, visitors see typical livestock in their natural settings. “We’ve got calves, Clydesdale work horses, a mule, sheep that we shear, goats we milk, poultry of all sorts - chickens, geese, ducks - and of course pigs,” DiPasquale says. “Pennsylvania Germans loved their pigs.”
Quiet Valley is open for tours all summer, and hosts school groups year-round. Festivals fill out the year, starting with the Farm Animal Frolic in spring, when the baby lambs and goats are at their cutest. The annual Harvest Festival, the farm’s largest event, features traditional foods and crafts, such as scherenschnitte, a German paper cutting technique, egg-etching and broom making. Other public events include garden parties, chicken BBQs, and a real Farm to Table progressive dinner. Special Spooky Days mark the Halloween season, while candlelight tours and a live nativity bring old-fashioned Christmas traditions to life.
Deb DiPasquale, whose job includes organizing and staffing all these events, says that there’s something going on at the farm pretty much all year. “It’s not really very quiet at Quiet Valley,” she admits.
Renee Wright
A graduate of Franconia College in Social Psychology, Renee has worked as Travel Editor for Charlotte Magazine and has written three travel guidebooks for Countryman Press among other writing assignments. She enjoys food and camping.
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