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Schwenkfelders, Fraktur, and the Christian Faith: An artifact of a vibrant Christian community · Centrally Speaking

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Centrally speaking, is the Central Schwankfelder Churches podcast.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: It speaks about issues that would be of interest to our society.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: In particular, it addresses how a Christian worldview intersects with Western secular culture.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: In the spirit of the church's founder, we take the perspective of the middle way, which is in agreement with the historic Christian Church.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Dr.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: Drake Williams, Minister of Mission and Theology of the Church.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: Our website is www.cscfamily.org.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_03: Well, today we're talking about uh the art of Froctour and Schweinckfelder's and the Christian faith.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_03: And we're very fortunate to have Candace Perry uh here with us today.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_03: She's been uh serving as the curator of collections at the Schweinfelder Library and Heritage Center for 25 years.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_03: She's also written a catalog of Froctour for the uh Pennsylvania German Society and has done many presentations on this topic.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_03: So uh Candace, we're very glad that you're with us.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_03: So welcome to the show.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much, Drake, for having me.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_03: We've noticed over the years that various churches and Christian communities uh leave behind uh uh memories or relics of uh their past uh uh existence.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_03: And there have been a lot of frocteurs that have come through uh the Schwankfelder denomination.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_03: Can you tell our audience that may be less familiar with what a frocktur is?
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_03: What is a frocture?
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_03: What would be typical if you're saying to somebody you're looking at a frocture?
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_03: What is it?
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: Frocktur are at which is actually the singular and the plural are Pennsylvania German decorated manuscripts.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: Or if we include Europe in there, German language decorated manuscripts.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: I should add today, a lot of particularly auctioneers and antique dealers tend to group any kind of um watercolor drawing under this Froctour umbrella, but they're actually specifically German language decorated manuscripts that were made from about the 1740s here in the United States or the 13 colonies to uh well it well into the 20th century, and it still goes on.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: There's still individuals today who are working in the old form and making contemporary Frocture.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: Some of um the listeners may have marriage certificates or birth certificates that somebody did for them in the Froctour style, but the golden age of Froctour truly was from about 1780 to about 1830.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: So it was that um 50-year time period that really saw the growth of Froctour um here in this country.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_03: And as you look at a Froctour, uh it has uh certain type of scripts uh to it.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_03: It also has different pictures on it.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, what might be a typical picture on a Frocur?
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the Pennsylvania Germans in general, whether they be Schwankfelders or Mennonites or or Reformed or Lutheran, love their birds and flowers.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: Birds and flowers are the most frequent denizens of Froctour, you see.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_03: And there's a particular type of script that goes with it.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_03: There is also called a Frocktur script?
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: There is.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and and you know, the use of the term frocture for the objects, these decorated manuscripts, I'm not even sure when that came about.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: I've been actually trying to trace that for a long time because it is true that the the name of the the script is now the name of the object.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not sure how that evolved at all.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I've been looking with the old collectors.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: There were several collectors around the turn of the 20th century, and how they referred to Froctor, and they didn't necessarily use that term.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm interested in hoping maybe to track that down someday.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_03: You've talked about certain things on a Froctor, not only um images and script, uh, but there are also some distinct colors, right?
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yes, and they were, of course, um colors that were really um from natural dyes in the early period before they had synthetic paints or um inks or anything like that.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: So they there were very specific colors, and they tend to be colors that you associate with um 18th century America blues and reds like that, barn red, mustard yellow, greens, nothing too unusual in the scheme of colors.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: Although we do have um uh on some frocter here at the Heritage Center a verdigree color, which they somehow achieved um with pigments.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: So um, and and these pigments um were actually usually um commercially produced.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: They were things that they were able to buy in terms of the watercolor pigment, um, and not necessarily something that they made up a dye from nature or a paint from nature.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_03: Interesting how this form has come together as largely being an early colonial period.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, exactly.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's how when it started, definitely.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_03: And then thriving through the early 1800s.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_03: But the idea for Froctor uh originated in Europe, didn't it?
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: It did, it did.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um I and there has been research done by a wonderful scholar named Alex Ames on some of the origins, particularly in Switzerland, where it would have come with the Mennonites who came out of Switzerland specifically.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but also we have a piece in our collection here that came out of Lower Silesia, where the Schweinfelders originally lived.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's not Schweinfelder, but it is from Lower Silesia.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: And it's what's interesting about it, it's not a personal document that uh or manuscript that we see most associated with Germans here in the United States, but a public document, it's like um some sort of contract or something like that.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not one of these personal things that we most associate with Froctor here.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that a lot of it was was that kind of thing, these public documents.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_03: Originating the idea in in Europe, but then being expressed expressed in uh America, yeah.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_03: Not only by Schwenkfelder's, but you also mentioned Mennonites.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, absolutely, and especially here in Montgomery County, the rich Mennonite heritage of Froctour um is very well documented and preserved um both in our collection to an extent.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: We are very fortunate to have some wonderful Mennonite Froctour, but also in the Mennonite Heritage Center collection in Harleysville, uh, which um listeners can go and view that wonderful collection anytime.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so yes, very rich.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: And and I should add what the reasons for that is specifically because in the Mennonite and Schweinfelder groups, Froctor was really a function of education.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: It was used as a teaching tool by schoolmasters who integrated the into their teaching, their pedagogy and their teaching skills.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: So the some of the most important Froctor then coming out of the Mennonite and the Schwenkfelder schools were pieces known as Vorschriften, which were writing models.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: And originally they were to you use to teach students writing and literacy, but eventually evolved more into presentation pieces that were given as special gifts at the end of a school year.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: But these um in our collection and in the Mennonite collection, we all have some spectacular examples of this.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: And because of the lack of infant baptism among the Mennonites and the Schweinfelders, you see less birth and baptismal certificates, which are called Taufschina in the Frochter world, then you see these writing models and other things related to the schools in particular.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_03: Interesting.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_03: So they are educational needs.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: They were, they were teaching tools and specifically made by men.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: They were made by school masters.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: There were not women teaching school during that time period.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: That did not come along until much later, meaning the 18th and early 19th century.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so they were made by men as part of their professional skill set, let's say.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: That's something very important to remember.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: Even though there are there were some, like a handful of good female froctor artists, most of them were men.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: And on top of that, froctor was usually made for kids, for children or teenagers, which is interesting because now these very valuable objects that were, you know, they were they were made for children essentially.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_03: Can you give us an idea how many uh froctures Schwenckfelder's made?
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: I I have no idea overall.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: I know in our collection we have over a thousand pieces, but that's both Schwenkfelder and Mennonite.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: The Schwenkfelder pieces seem to be concentrated among a few pretty well-known individuals who were either schoolmasters or in the case of our female Froctor artist, Susanna Heebner from Worcester Township.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone wasn't just making Froctor willy-nilly.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: It was really concentrated among these individuals who were teaching or had some sort of artistic impulse to make these things, like Susanna Heebner.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: Later on, after the golden age of Froctour, you saw more children copying things.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: So you have more kind of amateur work later on in the 19th century than you had earlier.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_03: But as far as numbers going of Froctours, that's still a fair number of froctours for a small community.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: It is, it is, it is, and they were actually several of them were quite prolific.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: Susanna Hiebner, in particular, who made um Froctour for her nieces and nephews.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: She was an unmarried lady living on her own in Worcester Township, and she was very devoted to her nieces and nephews and made them all these wonderful, very inspirational pieces.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_03: How did Schwankfelder's go about using or preserving Froctour in their their uh society?
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the use, first of all, was specifically for educational purposes.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: Or um many individuals made them as gifts for other people.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: We have several of those kinds of things that uh came out of the Schweinfelder group because they did not have baptismal certificates.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: They they used them for other purposes, still not quite understanding why they did that, but there was a lot of gift giving, presentation type Froctors.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: There's a whole that's a whole other topic, but there's a whole culture of presentation objects, and Froctor was a part of that among all the Pennsylvania Germans.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: But also in preserving them, I should I should speak to one family in particular, once again, the Hebner family of Worcester, who obviously very much treasured the Froctor.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: It may have been because of the through at least three members of the family who were very interested in making Froctor and very artistic.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: That would have been Abraham Hebner, his son Abraham W.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: Hebner, and and um Abraham Sr.'s sister Susanna Hebner, who all had very artistic um and creative impulses to make Frocktur.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: And that family seemed to be extraordinarily interested, much more so than other families, in keeping them.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: So they preserved this large collection of Froctour and then very generously gave it to the Heritage Center or the Schweinfelder Library, as it was known then in the early 20th century.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so um that's how much of these things came to us.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: Our collection is unique because it is older than many of the other collections that are known.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: And also because most of it came directly from the families, the Schwenkfelder families or other families.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: It didn't, there wasn't a private collector like Henry DuPont, for example, who collected Froctor or Henry Borneman in the Philadelphia Free Public Library who collected Froctor and then gave their collection.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: These pieces came directly out of the families, so they have a lot more significance in my mind than something that was sort of cherry-picked by a collector, if that makes sense.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_03: Froctors, you've already said, are used for educational purposes, uh coming from um headmasters at the time to help instruct their uh students.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but froctors were also important for uh weddings?
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, some.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: We don't have a lot of them, but I know out there in the world there are definitely more of them than we have.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: I think we have maybe one, but I should to address that.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: The reason why is because romantic love, and if you look, I guess if you look at the spiritual union of a man and a woman, but romantic love was not expressed through Frockt, or at least Schwenkfelder Froctor.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: There's only one piece that might even vaguely seem to reflect romantic love.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: It was mostly more spiritual love.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: And when they're speaking or writing in loving terms, it's often about Christ and should be interpreted that way.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: But sometimes it looks a little confusing, but it was usually spiritual love that was being expressed and not romantic love.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_03: At least for the Schweinfelder friends.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: At least for the Schweinfelders, yeah.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_03: But there are plenty of uh uh wedding commemorations, uh, done in Froctour and uh also baptisms too.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yes, the baptisms now that area is is where uh the great bulk of Froctor for the larger Pennsylvania German sphere enters in.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: The birth and baptismal certificate, which was known as the Geburts und Taufschein, was manufactured actually pre-printed forms in the tens of thousands from the late 18th century all the way to the end of the 19th, probably even into the 20th century.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: They were still making these documents.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: And they really served a purpose to document birth before there were any vital statistics out there.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: As a matter of fact, the Library of Congress collection of Froctour evolved from veterans sending in their Talf shine, their Taufshina to prove their birth when they were looking for their pensions and so forth.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: So um, many of you out there, many of your listeners, probably have these Tauff shina at home, possibly rolled up in a drawer, possibly hanging on the wall.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: That is one type of frocture they actually sometimes did frame and hang up on the wall.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, usually there's two angels on them on either side that are hand painted, but it's a pre-printed form that was then filled in by a um a calligrapher of one sort or another.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_03: Let's talk a little bit further about some of those uh symbols or pictures on a fracture.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_03: You've already mentioned some uh uh about angels uh being present.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_03: Uh wonder about uh some other uh symbols, um uh pictures that and what they represent uh in the Bible.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_03: Um I think would be intriguing for our listeners.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and I think specifically where I see in Schwenkfelder Frocture the most spiritual kind of symbolism is in the flowers that really reflects true Schwenkfeldian ideas.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: And Peter Erb was the first person to really figure this out.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, he would because he's brilliant.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: But uh, we have several Froctor in our collection that depict a garden.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: So with a garden fence, that's unusual in Frocture to begin with, a garden fence and a garden gate, and then flowers blooming within this garden that were representative of Christ blooming in the garden or uh Mary.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: I guess it depended on the interpretation of the individual Froctor artist.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: There were things in the Frocture that you might not necessarily associate with Protestantism, but were still lingering on into the 18th century, although they seem more of a Roman Catholic idea.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: And it's in those flowers, and specifically, we have a piece by the Reverend David Kreble, who was also of Worcester Township and Gwynedd, that has a poem that I think was by uh the poet uh Terstegan, a little piece of a poem, and talking about this flower blooming in the garden.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: And and it, you know, a casual reader might just interpret it as a pretty verse about a flower, but it's not.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's very laden with this symbolism of Christ blooming in this garden or blooming in the heart of man, I suppose.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: So that very strongly is uh that that fence and gate symbolism and the flowers in the garden, one of the best spirit pieces of spiritual symbolism, I think, in Froctor.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: And there's been a lot of talk over the past 20 years or 30 years about Froctor not having symbolism in it.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: There were scholars that would say that nothing meant anything, none of those pretty pictures meant anything.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: They were just illustrations to uh bring in the viewer to the Froctor.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: But I think with the Schweinfelders, that was really quite different.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think that early on, and I'm saying in the 18th and the early 19th century, when they were still the when true Schweinfeldianism still existed to some extent, that that kind of symbolism was still powerful for them.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, we also have another piece that uh descended in the Schultz family, uh uh number of Schultz family members here in the upper Hanover Township vicinity, which is once again a garden with two trees growing in it, which of course symbolized something, which was taken from a book of devotions on the Song of Solomon that was written by Daniel Suterman, who was a Schwenkfelder adjacent poet.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: And this one is a very so it was taken directly from this 17th century book, this illustration, and then put into Froctor of this garden with these two trees growing in it.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I think very much was something that a Schwenckfelder in that time period that and in terms of those Schultz pieces, the early 19th century, which they that would mean something to them.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_03: Thinking of uh Let's say a baptismal fracture or even a wedding fractur, uh, with uh you mentioned the garden and and Christ blooming within would fit fairly well with the Schwenkfelder uh belief of the the heart, uh the inner heart uh uh blossoming uh as expressed with with the time of baptism.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: They are very powerful pieces.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: And then another symbol that intrigues me very much, there's several frocter, and this is in the earlier period, that have the heart serving as sort of a vessel.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: So the heart, you see the heart, but then it's open at the top, like a vase almost, and there's something emanating from this vase, whether it be flowers or some other kind of it um sometimes like a sacred heart, sort of, but mostly in terms of flowers blooming out of this heart vessel that you only see in the very early period, but I I particularly like that one.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: There's some splendid representations of that.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_03: That would certainly fit a Schwenckfelder theme of the inner heart uh being uh of such great importance.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, absolutely.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_03: In your opinion, then, uh Candace, what does uh the art of Froctour illustrate about the significance of Christian ideas in the homes of Schwankfelder's in uh let's say the golden age?
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, in the golden age.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, specifically because as I'll go back to my discussion of schoolmasters making Froctour for young people, this was a way that the schoolmasters who were terribly important to the community and the usually among the most learned men in the community, and especially for the Schwenkfelder's, these were very significant individuals in the community, Reverend David Kriebel being one of them, that they were passing on their spirituality through the Froctour to these young people, um, both as a way of instruction in Schweinfelder spirituality and also as a form of moral admonition to um make sure that the children were following the right path.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: You see that a lot in Mennonite frocktur in particular.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: There's very specific phrases that they use, youth and virtue, for instance, that they're very much pushing on the children to be paying attention to youth and virtue.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: And in the Schwenfelder's not always that, so much, but similar spiritual lessons that to pass on to the children.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: These were very important uh ways of conveying the spirituality to the younger generation during that golden age.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_03: Well, this has been very fascinating to uh think about uh uh Frocktur, this uh remnant uh relic of uh Schwenckfelder uh community life uh in uh the uh late 18th century and then early 19th century.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_03: I guess you have many of these uh Froctures available to view up at uh the Library and Heritage Center.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_03: Are they on display regularly?
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I try.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: They are challenging as exhibits because they're they're delicate and they need to be framed and treated a certain with uh a certain degree of care, a great deal of care.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: But we do currently have an exhibit uh called Froctour and Miniature on exhibit.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that will be um here in the Heritage Center until, let me see, um March, I believe.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but listeners can always make an appointment with me if they want to look at Froctor and we can do a show and tell.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I often encourage people to do.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I've done that often, where we'll just sit down for a couple of hours and and look at Froctor.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_03: That's great.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_03: And thank you for taking the time to uh talk with us uh today about this uh valuable art and uh certainly welcome people to the Schwankfelder Library and Heritage Center to view Froctor.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_03: Uh but then also to think about uh the good heritage that's been passed down uh from age to age to age uh throughout the Christian tradition, uh, through uh not only through writing, but also through art.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you, Candace.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Drake.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.