“From My Own Observation and Familiar Acquaintance”: Phebe Earle Gibbons Introduces the Pennsylvania Dutch to the World

This view of an orderly Pennsylvania Dutch farm, Berks County Farmscape, was painted by German immigrant John Rasmussen (1828–95), circa 1879–86, around the time when Pennsylvania Dutch and Other Essays was being read across America.
American Folk Art Museum / Art Resource, NY

“It was on a Sunday morning in March, when the air was bleak and the roads were execrable, that I obtained a driver to escort me to the farm-house where an Amish meeting was to be held,” wrote Phebe Earle Gibbons (1821–93), describing a Lancaster County Amish religious gathering in the late 1860s. “The floors were bare, but on one of the open doors hung a long white towel, worked at one end with the colored figures, such as our mothers or grandmothers put upon samplers. These perhaps were meant for flowers. The congregation sat principally on benches. On the men’s side a small shelf of books ran around one corner of the room.’’

This passage about a church service held in an Amish home is typical of the detailed observations that Gibbons made about her subjects in Pennsylvania Dutch and Other Essays, first published in 1872 by J.B. Lippincott, a Philadelphia publishing company. Gibbons, a Quaker, wrote in the first person about her Amish and Mennonite neighbors. She included her personal reactions to what she saw and heard, which amazed and sometimes amused readers who had never heard about the Amish.

Folklife scholar Don Yoder called Gibbons “the nineteenth-century ‘discoverer’ of the Amish, as well as the first writer to bring the Pennsylvania Dutch and their way of life to a national audience.” He compared her research techniques to the early ethnographic work of Margaret Mead in the South Pacific. The Pennsylvania Dutch scholar Mark Louden, who specializes in German linguistics, has written that Gibbons “put the Pennsylvania Dutch and their language on America’s popular cultural map.” Eric Conner, a historian of Lancaster County’s tourist industry, has said that Gibbons’ book and the curiosity it fanned about an unusual group of people marked “the birth of tourism” in Lancaster County. Beyond all that, Gibbons was an extremely talented writer.

Pennsylvania Dutch and Other Essays, the book that made its subject, and eventually its author, famous, was first published in 1872. Gibbons expanded some essays and added more about other Pennsylvania Dutch groups in an 1874 edition. The 1882 edition included stories about miners in Scranton and, from her travels abroad, Irish farmers and the English.
Collection of Jack Brubaker

She was born in Philadelphia on August 9, 1821, or, as the Quakers date it, Eighth Month 9th, 1821. Her name, Phebe, is the plain Quaker version of the New Testament name “Phoebe.” Quakers believed that including the letter “o” was too worldly, that is, too common. Phebe Gibbons embraced the distinction. For all of her later fame as a regional writer, she remained as plain as her name in her personal life.

Unlike her parents, grandparents and husband, she never had her likeness painted or engraved, or at least no such depiction survives. Her early newspaper and magazine articles and even the first edition of Pennsylvania Dutch were anonymous. In the 19th century, it was the nature of Quakers, formally known as the Society of Friends, to shun personal promotion, a characteristic Gibbons overcame only late in life.

Phebe was the daughter of Thomas and Mary Hussey Earle, natives of Massachusetts who had moved to Philadelphia four years before Phebe’s birth. Thomas Earle failed as a merchant and so studied and then practiced law until his death in 1849. When the Society of Friends, also known as Quakers, split into Orthodox and Hicksite branches in 1827, Thomas Earle and his family joined the more liberal Hicksites.

Besides practicing law, Earle published and edited several antislavery newspapers. In 1840 the new antislavery Liberty Party chose Earle as presidential candidate James G. Birney’s running mate. The party played an inconsequential part in that election, a spoiler’s role in the next, and eventually dissolved. Some members helped form the Republican Party in the 1850s.

Earle also wrote several books, including A Treatise on Rail-Roads and Internal Communications, an 1830 work of considerable influence, as well as textbooks for public schools. His daughter no doubt received her writing inspiration, her enthusiasm for public education, and her progressive spirit in large part from her talented father.

Phebe was educated, according to a brief 1872 biography by Lancaster County historian Alexander Harris, in “select schools in Massachusetts.” Harris said she taught in a “French School” in Philadelphia. From 1839 to 1840 she was a teacher in the Female Department of the New York Monthly Meeting School on Elizabeth Street in New York City, according to the school’s records. There are no other details of her early life. We do know that in 1845, when she was 24, she experienced two life-altering events.

That summer, the orthodox Philadelphia Monthly Meeting condemned Gibbons for not taking part in its meetings and instead attending Hicksite meetings. The condemnation actually barred her from the Religious Society of Friends. It is doubtful that, having grown up as a Hicksite, she was acutely distressed by this rebuke, but it did limit her interaction with orthodox Quakers.

Gibbons was a devoted Quaker who worshipped at the Lampeter Friends Meetinghouse in Bird-in-Hand, where she also frequently lectured.
Wikimedia Commons / Smallbone

More pleasantly, that autumn, she married Dr. Joseph Gibbons (1818–83) of Bird-in-Hand, Lancaster County. The son and grandson of active Quaker abolitionists and operators of a primary station on the Underground Railroad, Joseph spent his early years helping to spirit fugitive slaves toward freedom (see “Three Generations on the Underground Railroad: The Gibbons Family of Lancaster County” Fall 2019). After obtaining his medical degree, Joseph spent only five years practicing medicine before dedicating the rest of his life to using his pen and his personal influence to help abolish slavery and other social ills.

For 10 years — 1873 until his death in 1883 — he published The Journal: A Paper Devoted to the Interests of the Society of Friends, a Hicksite weekly. He also was active in the temperance movement, as were all members of the family. He was a founder of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania and a friend of Thaddeus Stevens (1792–1868), a fellow Republican and Lancaster County’s representative in Congress.

The couple had five children, four of whom lived to adulthood. The eldest, Marianna, wrote for several newspapers in Philadelphia and actively promoted civil rights in Lancaster County in the early decades of the 20th century. Caroline, wife of William G. Gibbons, was active in the temperance and suffrage movements in Lancaster and Wilmington, Delaware. Frances, wife of Caleb Alfred Pusey, operated a music store in Philadelphia. Daniel edited newspapers in Philadelphia, New York and Seattle before establishing a real estate business in Brooklyn.

Phebe Gibbons, like her parents, husband and children, embraced many of the progressive causes of her time, including abolition of slavery, temperance, women’s suffrage, and free public education. But Gibbons was progressive within a relatively conservative Quaker culture, so her primary allegiances, besides to her writing, were to her roles as farm wife and mother.

Her annual diaries that remain — from 1849 through the mid-1850s — chronicle her daily participation in customary farm chores, such as baking and other food preparation, gardening, candle making, house cleaning, and laundering. She helped oversee other workers in her house and on the farm. These included some formerly enslaved African Americans who had fled the South before the Civil War and decided it was safe to remain at the Gibbons farm for several weeks or months before traveling on to the next Underground Railroad station.

Because she lived simply — in some ways like her Amish and Mennonite neighbors — and because she spoke German and, less fluently, Pennsylvania Dutch, Gibbons easily communicated with these people about their lives and readily recognized the differences and similarities between their culture and hers.

In the opening article of Pennsylvania Dutch and Other Essays, Gibbons states, “I have lived for twenty years in the county of Lancaster, where my neighbors on all sides are ‘Pennsylvania Dutch.’ In this article I shall try to give, from my own observation and familiar acquaintance, some account of the life of a people who are little known outside of the rural neighborhoods of their own State, who have much that is peculiar in their language, customs, and belief.” This photograph of a Lancaster County residence was taken in the late 19th century.
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Michael B. Emery

But she also lived another life as an intellectual, especially after her children were grown. She studied several languages and translated major works from Greek, German and French into English. She was a founding member of the Bird-in-Hand Lyceum and an avid member of the Lancaster Linnaean Society, both of which focused largely on the natural sciences. She delivered papers to the Linnaean Society on an earthquake that shook the Lancaster area in 1867 and on the bean weevil that attacked local gardens in 1870. Active in the Lampeter Quaker Meeting House, which still stands along the Old Philadelphia Pike in Bird-in-Hand, she spoke there and elsewhere about her views on slavery and other topics of the time. Phebe Gibbons led a full domestic and intellectual life of her own while chronicling the lives of her neighbors.

Much of the material in her two books, Pennsylvania Dutch and Other Essays and the subsequent French and Belgians, originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s magazines. The New-York Tribune and the Philadelphia Public Ledger first published other articles. So, tens of thousands of readers were introduced to her subjects in small portions. Gibbons expanded this material in her books.

It is probable that if Gibbons had not revealed the Pennsylvania Dutch in depth to the world in the years following the Civil War, someone else would have. But even if there had been an alternative to Gibbons, that person’s writings may not have remained so readable in the 21st century. The folklife scholar Alfred L. Shoemaker explained in 1952 that “the reason Pennsylvania Dutch is so interesting is that its author was a fascinating person, a sort of Eleanor Roosevelt: humanitarian, world traveler, and author.” Don Yoder said much the same in an introduction to a 2001 reprint of Pennsylvania Dutch when he commended “our Pennsylvania Phebe, with all her winsome talents, to the wider readership she deserves.”

Gibbons’ stories and anecdotes are distinguished by vivid details and insights that often extend well beyond the commonplace. She described the “Dutch” so well because she lived among them, boiled apple butter with them in their kitchens, quilted with them in their living rooms, and enthusiastically attended their weddings and funerals and barn-raisings. Even while repeatedly judging the Amish as “primitive” in their refusal to consider anything beyond basic education for their children and in their rejection of progressive causes of any kind, she clearly admired their simplicity, humility and generosity.

Good farming was essential to the livelihood of the Pennsylvania Dutch. Gibbons wrote, “This rich level land of ours is highly prized by the ‘Dutch’ for farming purposes, and the great demand has enhanced the price. The farms, too, are small, seventy acres being a fair size.”
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Michael B. Emery

“When I turn my mind to these plain people,” she wrote, “I sometimes recall the trailing arbutus, which is found partly buried under the leaves and clinging close to the surface of the ground, but which when drawn up displays, though sometimes disfigured with dead, brown leaves, such a delicate form and tint, and exhales so sweet a perfume.”

The Amish, Mennonites and other Plain sects have changed since the late 19th century, in large part to adjust to life within a general society that employs increasingly complex technology, but the essential nature of the Amish has not changed since Gibbons’ time. That is another reason her writings about them remain relevant decades later.

“The Amish dress is peculiar; and the children are diminutive men and women,” she wrote. “The women wear sun-bonnets and closely-fitting dresses, but often their figures look very trim, in brown, with green or other bright handkerchiefs meeting over the breast.” She went on to say, “One middle-aged man, inclined to corpulence, had coarse, brown, woolen clothes, and his pantaloons were without suspenders, in the Amish fashion. No buttons were on his coat behind, but down the front were hooks and eyes.

Gibbons described the Amish in the Bird-in-Hand area as more progressive than many other members of the sect: “The Amish in this immediate neighborhood still cling to the plain customs . . . except that it has become quite common for young people to drive in simple buggies. Now the yellow-covered wagons are not so universal; other colors are also used and more elegant harness. (They generally keep very good harness.) Neither do the young men wear their hair to their shoulders. Many of the Amish now wear suspenders. One of my friends, who is Amish, says that you cannot speak of any such rule as regards the church in general, for every congregation has its own rules in their minor affairs.”

Gibbons noted that one of her “Dutch” neighbors who owned two farms told her, “The woman is more than half.” Gibbons continues, “the woman . . . milks, raises the poultry, has charge of the garden,—sometimes digging the ground herself, and planting and hoeing, with the assistance of her daughters and the ‘maid,’ when she has one.” The section on “Farmers’ Wives” also discusses the many distinctive Pennsylvania Dutch foods made in the kitchen.
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Michael B. Emery

Phebe Gibbons recorded numerous memorable stories, including her account of a traditional Sunday evening Amish “singing.” After the older folks had gone to bed, the young people, much as some do today, remained awake and played games into the small hours of the morning. Their games apparently involved close physical contact.

“In these kissing plays,” Gibbons related, “and in some little romping among the young men, the time was spent until about two or three in the morning, when they separated, two girls from a distance staying all night. Mary was able to sleep until daylight only, for no allowance is made for those who partake in these gay vigils to make up in the morning for loss of sleep.” Gibbons told a revealing story of an incident that occurred following the farmhouse church service she described. She had taken advantage of a quiet moment to study some German books on the shelf in a corner of the meeting room.

The Amish “are not great readers,” she wrote, explaining that their understanding of German was limited so that the German books in that corner probably went unread. “I am naturally not unwilling to be admired,” she added, “and, as two or three sisters were standing near while I examined the books, I endeavored in haste to give them a specimen of my attainments.” After she read in German from a religious book, she looked from her text to her audience. “Glancing up to see the surprise which my proficiency must produce,” she wrote, “I beheld a different expression of countenance, for the attention of some of the thoughtful sisters was attracted by the subject-matter, instead of the reader, and that aroused a sentiment of devotion beautifully expressed.”

Gibbons tells the story of the Seventh Day Baptists in the essay “Ephrata.” During her research, she visited the Ephrata Cloister in 1872 and again in 1882, finding that on “the plain upon the banks of the Cocalico still stand the brother- and sister-houses.” She found “no longer do the unmarried or celibate members own all the property, but it is now vested in all who belong to the meeting, single and married, and is in the hands of trustees.” The brothers’ house, Bethania — pictured here around the time Gibbons visited the site — no longer survives.
Ephrata Cloister, PHMC

Besides revealing that Gibbons had a sturdy ego that had been somewhat deflated by the pious people who heard her recite, this anecdote raises the question of the difference between the Pennsylvania Dutch and German languages. Gibbons was intrigued by this distinction. Her German was excellent, her “Dutch” less so, but her reporter’s ear was tuned to the linguistic peculiarities of both.

Gibbons attempted to render the Pennsylvania Dutch she heard as accurately as possible and then compared that to English and German. For example, she heard for the English phrase “Are you going to ride?” the Pennsylvania Dutch “Widdu fawray?” and compared it to the German “Witt du faahre?” In another instance, she asked an Amish woman what “pie crust” is in Dutch. The woman answered “Py-kroosht,” something of a combination of English and German.

Some 19th-century readers interpreted Gibbons’ comparisons as suggesting that she thought her neighbors spoke a simple and defective language. A New York Herald reviewer, for example, said he believed Gibbons inappropriately compared Pennsylvania Dutch to German because the former is a unique Pennsylvania phenomenon, distinct from German. That reviewer also pointed out that many of the “Dutchisms” Gibbons described — such as a sturdy basket being called a “lasty” basket — were simply regional English words that have nothing to do with Pennsylvania Dutch.

Most reviews in Pennsylvania newspapers were positive if brief. In the years following release of the second (1874) and third (1882) editions of Pennsylvania Dutch, Gibbons saw to it that local newspaper editors received copies of her book by personally visiting editorial offices in Bellefonte, Mifflintown, Chambersburg and other Pennsylvania towns. She also toured Illinois, receiving a largely uncomplimentary review in the Chicago Tribune, but a positive review in the small city of Sterling: “Mrs. Gibbons is an entertaining writer and there ought to be many people hereabouts interested in her little book.”

Many readers appreciated her work, not only because she wrote engagingly about the Amish, but because she also profiled at length the religious and cultural customs of Mennonites, Dunkards, Moravians, Schwenkfelders and other relatively obscure sects. Pennsylvania Dutch also included essays on coal miners of the Scranton area and Irish and English farmers in their countries. Multiple tours of Pennsylvania and two trips to Europe informed those writings, as well as the essays in her second book, French and Belgians.

Pennsylvania politician and Gibbons family friend Thaddeus Stevens was the subject of a magazine article Phebe wrote for Packard’s Monthly. This portrait of Stevens as a young state legislator by Lancaster native Jacob Eichholtz (1776–1842) was painted in 1838.
Special Collections and College Archives, Gettysburg College

Meanwhile, Gibbons was writing about entirely different subjects in newspaper and magazine articles that reached other audiences. For example, Packard’s Monthly for August 1870 carried an anecdotal sketch of Thaddeus Stevens. Because of her family’s personal relationship with Stevens, Gibbons related stories that appeared nowhere else.

The writer said Stevens and his mother were very close. When he was established as a lawyer and then a congressional representative in Lancaster, Stevens wanted his mother to leave Vermont and live with him in his home and office on South Queen Street in Lancaster. She declined, citing as one reason that “I can’t live in that bilious climate.”

Gibbons quoted Stevens as saying his mother was concerned about his reluctance to go to church. “Why, mother, can’t a person be good without going to church?” Stevens asked.

“Oh!” his mother said, “you forget — you get lukewarm.”

“But mother,” replied the argumentative Stevens, “according to your religion, once in grace, always in grace.”

“But Thad,” she said, “I’m afraid you’ve never been in grace.”

The most interesting anecdote in that magazine article concerned not Thaddeus Stevens but politician James Buchanan, a Lancaster Democrat and Stevens’ rival. Stevens apparently believed that Buchanan was ignoring him because of “a trifling thing” he had said after President Andrew Jackson appointed Buchanan minister to Russia in 1832. Stevens had said, “The gentleman has gone to hide his burning blushes amid the frozen snows of Russia.” We cannot know precisely what “burning blushes” meant in 1832, but we can suspect it had something to do with one or both of two equally suggestive rumors: that Buchanan had an intimate relationship with a male U.S. senator and that he sired two illegitimate children with Mennonite women. These rumors, though unsubstantiated, persist.

As she grew older and better known, Phebe Gibbons began thinking of herself as a professional writer. She abandoned her anonymity: the third edition of Pennsylvania Dutch carries her full name. After persuading the editor and poet William Cullen Bryant to make her the New-York Evening Post’s correspondent at the Paris Fair in the spring of 1877, she wrote by-lined, first-person articles for that newspaper. Following the fair, she remained in Europe to research more essays about people and customs in the city and surrounding countryside. These writings appeared in French and Belgians in 1879. After touring Great Britain and Ireland in 1881, she wrote a series of columns under the heading “Letter by the Way” for her husband’s Quaker Journal.

Gibbons sent copies of her books to other writers, seeking their approval. Fellow abolitionist Henry Wadsworth Longfellow told her that Pennsylvania Dutch “is very interesting and valuable, full of curious historic matters and pleasant anecdote.” Fellow Quaker and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier was more enthusiastic. He said he read Pennsylvania Dutch with “the heartiest satisfaction. . . . Thy account of the quaint usages of the German sects in Pa. is full of interest. The volume is in every way a readable one.” He said French and Belgians “gives me a better idea of the home life of France & Belgium than I have ever had before.”

In this letter of February 6, 1873, to Gibbons, the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow praises Pennsylvania Dutch and Other Essays.
Collection of Jack Brubaker

Gibbons corresponded regularly with other prominent Quakers. These included the Hicksite minister Lucretia Mott, her mother’s first cousin. Mott, an organizer of the feminist Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and the first president of the American Equal Rights Association, discussed women’s rights with Gibbons in one of her last letters before she died at Philadelphia in 1880.

After Dr. Joseph Gibbons died in 1883, his wife moved to Philadelphia. Phebe Gibbons lived with her sister, Caroline White, then president of the Women’s Branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Gibbons supported her sister’s work and also served with the Society for Organizing Charity. She oversaw the publication of the 1884 edition of Pennsylvania Dutch and continued writing a column, “Notes by the Way,” for The Journal. She worshiped at the Race Street Meeting House that now anchors the new Friends Center in central Philadelphia.

Phebe Gibbons died on June 5, 1893, and was buried with her parents in Woodlands Cemetery along the Schuylkill River in West Philadelphia. An obituary notice in the Friends Intelligencer summed up her life: “She was the author of two books of note, ‘Pennsylvania Dutch,’ a series of papers on the social life, etc., of the people of German origin in Lancaster county, Pa., and the adjacent region; and a volume descriptive of her travels and brief residence in France and Belgium. Whilst radical in her views and convictions, she was kind and charitable towards those who differed from her, and ever ready to give a helping hand for the encouragement or relief of others.”

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Phebe Gibbons died half a century before I was born, but she has been an inspiration to me as a writer all of my life. As the mother of my great-grandfather’s second wife, she left a substantial literary legacy — not only her published works, but also informative diaries and letters. I don’t read many 19th-century authors; Phebe Gibbons is one I do read, not only because I am, in an indirect way, related to her but also because her writing has remained eminently relevant.

Jack Brubaker writes The Scribbler, a weekly column for Lancaster Newspapers (LNP) that explores Lancaster County history and culture. He is the author of Massacre of the Conestogas and Down the Susquehanna to the Chesapeake. His most recent article for Pennsylvania Heritage, “Three Generations on the Underground Railroad: The Gibbons Family of Lancaster County,” appeared in the Fall 2019 issue.