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The colonial
schoolmaster, Christopher Dock, introduced to the Eastern Pennsylvania Mennonite
community a folk art form known today as fraktur. Earlier known
as fraktur schriften (literally broken, or fractured writing),
this was a type of decorated or illuminated religious writing which has origins
in the monasteries of medieval Europe. Dock taught at the meetinghouse schools
of the Skippack and Salford Mennonites during the 18th century.
Other
schoolmasters who followed Christopher Dock and continued the fraktur
tradition in Mennonite schools in Montgomery County include Huppert and
Christian Cassel, Henrich Brachtheiser, Andreas Kolb, Jacob Gottschall, Jacob
Hummel, Isaac Z. Hunsicker, Martin & Samuel Gottschall, and Henry G. Johnson.
Bucks County schoolmasters whose work has been identified include Johannes
Meyer, John Adam Eyer, Samuel Meyer, David Kulp, Rudolph Landes, Jacob
Oberholtzer, and Jacob Gross.
The use of
fraktur schriften played a significant role in the educational
process. A writing example, called a vorschrift, was used to
teach the students to write the alphabet and numbers, and to learn hymns and
scriptures. The texts on the vorschriften encouraged and
admonished the children to fear God, lead pious and obedient lives.
The
schoolmaster also drew colorful birds and exquisite flowers on small slips of
paper, which he gave to industrious children. He decorated bookplates for
handmade hymn-tune notebooks. Later, in the first half of the 19th
century, schoolmasters created many delicate bookplates for printed hymnals,
Testaments and other devotional books.
Fraktur
writing flourished in this community from approximately 1750 to 1845. The
reluctant acceptance by the German-speaking Townships of the state sponsored
public school system in the 1840s brought the decline of fraktur
writing in the schools. These vibrant treasures were cherished by the children,
safeguarded in family Bibles, and passed from one generation to the next.
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