Mosaic Mennonites

Missional - Intercultural - Formational

Mennonite Historians of Eastern PA

Conference Related Ministries (CRM) Profile: Mennonite Historians of Eastern Pennsylvania

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by Mennonite Heritage Center staff

The Mennonite Heritage Center in Harleysville, PA collects, preserves, and shares the Anabaptist/Mennonite story and welcomes visitors to learn and contribute to their collection. Photo credit: Forrest Moyer

The Mennonite Heritage Center (MHC), is a nonprofit museum and historical library located at 565 Yoder Road, Harleysville, PA. It is home to the Mennonite Historians of Eastern Pennsylvania (MHEP) that were founded in 1974. Our mission is: To educate, inspire and witness to the church and community by collecting, preserving and sharing the Anabaptist/Mennonite story.

The MHC keeps the records of the Mennonite communities in Eastern PA who began immigrating from Europe in 1683. For centuries, these primarily Pennsylvania German congregations lived quiet lives, separated from other communities, maintaining their own schools until the mid-19th century, and speaking the Pennsylvania German dialect until the mid-20th century.     

The MHC historical library has volumes relating to Mennonite and local history, faith, and life and an archive that includes rare books, manuscripts, and other printed materials. Manuscript collections vary from farming records to personal diaries and photographs. Many of the local congregations and Mosaic Mennonite Conference have chosen us to preserve their records.   We invite people to use the library to do genealogical research. 

One of the most significant museum collections is the fraktur collection.  Fraktur is a kind of colorful illuminated manuscript. It is called fraktur because of the broken or fractured style of German lettering.  The artifact collection also includes quilts, coverlets, samplers, clothing, furniture, farm implements, housewares and musical instruments.  

Collections Manager Joel Alderfer stands with a display of early Bibles in the Mennonite Heritage Center in Harleysville, PA. Photo provided by MHC.

Because of the pandemic, we were closed from March 12 until July 1 and have been featuring posts on our website (mhep.org), our Facebook page, and the Pa Dutch at Home Companion blog, a joint project of the MHC and the Goschenhoppen Historians Schwenkfelder Library & Heritage Center.

In a more typical year, the MHC features exhibits and programs on Anabaptist and local history topics. Saturday workshop participants enjoy learning traditional crafts such as basket weaving, paper marbling, and fraktur drawing. The Whack & Roll Croquet Tournament that usually happens in spring, is now scheduled for Saturday, August 29 and is a fun competition with teams from area nonprofit organizations vying for cash prizes. 

The annual Apple Butter Frolic, our fall harvest festival, will not be held this year but we are working on an event which will include pick-up sales of delicious traditional foods. The MHC will be sharing a portion of the proceeds from this revised October event with the Conference Shalom Fund to be used for food insecurity needs. Watch for information about this fall food celebration!    

Our board and staff are thinking about our role as a place for Mennonites and the broader community to learn about the Mennonite heritage.  We want to become more reflective of the growing diversity of the local Mennonite community today. We especially encourage people and congregations of color to visit the Mennonite Heritage Center, and contribute your family and faith stories to our collections, exhibits, and programming. Items can also be submitted for the archives digitally. We welcome volunteers to host in the museum and help with events and projects such as installing exhibits or archival sorting.  You can also support the MHC with an annual membership. Memberships begin at $55/$45 annually and members receive our quarterly publication and discounts on workshops/purchases. Please contact us at 215-256-3020 or info@mhep.org for information on volunteering or becoming a member.

Be a Part of History!

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by Joel D. Alderfer, Mennonite Heritage Center, Collections Manager

At the Mennonite Heritage Center, we want to collect and preserve stories from this time of health crisis in which we find ourselves.

We’re inviting persons from our Mennonite communities to help with this by responding to our Coronavirus Crisis Survey at mhep.org/coronavirus-crisis-survey.  No need to answer all questions.  Just type your responses and click “submit” at the end.  From the responses received, we will create a digital archival collection at the Mennonite Heritage Center, which will be available to future researchers.

Melky Tirtasaputra, Associate Pastor at Nations Worship Center (Philadelphia, PA), and his wife, Alvina Krisnadi, transport eggs, rice, and potatoes to Whitehall Mennonite Church (Whitehall, PA) via motorcycle and trailer to help those who are without work and food during the pandemic. (Photo Credit: Melky Tirtasaputra)

We also invite congregations and ministries to share a few good photos (no more than five) that document life during COVID-19 – showing congregational and community life, in all its new, creative, and restricted forms! If you submit photos, please briefly describe them, and email (preferably as jpgs) to: alderferjoel@mhep.org.

Thank you for considering this invitation!  We encourage you to include the following brief paragraph about this survey to include in your church’s newsletter or online bulletin:

Mennonite Heritage Center is inviting persons from our Mennonite communities to help preserve stories of life during the COVID-19 pandemic. All persons are invited to participate. Please respond by taking the Coronavirus Crisis Survey at: https://mhep.org/coronavirus-crisis-survey/.  No need to answer all questions.  Just type your responses and click “submit” at the end.  From the responses received, they will create a digital archival collection at the Mennonite Heritage Center, which will be available to future researchers. 

Food – Heritage, Sustenance, Culture, Celebration, Community

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by Sarah Heffner, Mennonite Heritage Center

 Food is a daily and essential part of our lives. It touches on creation, celebration, and community.  Food is also a concern as extreme weather cycles and global strife impact the production of food and people’s access to adequate food. Global issues affect local food production and food consumption. Locally, 10 – 11% of Montgomery County residents experience some form of food insecurity.  

A new exhibit, Food: Our Global Kitchen will be on display from July 6, 2019 through January 4, 2020 at the Mennonite Heritage Center. The Opening Reception for the exhibit is scheduled for Sunday, July 28 from 2-4 pm. The exhibit features large-format, colorful exhibit panels created by the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH).  Exhibit themes about the global food supply include Food Waste, Scarcity & Abundance, Crop Diversity, Trade & Transportation and the Future of Growing.

The accompanying exhibit, Food Heritage of Eastern Pennsylvania, depicts our regional food heritage. Raising crops and preparing and preserving food was, and still is, a keen reminder that we are dependent on the Lord for the harvest each year. Events like our Apple Butter Frolic are great fun, with the sampling of traditional foods and farming demonstrations, but events like that don’t always connect us to the realities or labor of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century farm families or what the loss of prime farm land to development has meant in the mid-twentieth century. The regional food heritage exhibit connects some of those dots.

The local food story will begin with that of the 17th-century Lenape people and continue with the stories of the 18th-century European immigrants and 19th-century farm families who raised and prepared most of their own food. Beginning in the mid-20th-century, the region experienced rapid growth and development, and, today, a minority of area Mennonites are involved in agriculture. There is, however, a resurgence of interest in locally grown food, seasonal cuisine, and environmental and social justice issues surrounding food production and distribution.

Programming accompanying the Food: Our Global Kitchen exhibit: 

  • Friday, September 20, 5 p.m. Traditional Foods Potluck, in partnership with Indian Valley Public Library. Bring a dish from ethnic cookbooks featured at the library. Preregistration required.
  • Sunday, October 27, 7 pm. Community Harvest Home service in the Nyce Barn. Speaker Nate Stucky, Director of the Farminary Project, Princeton Theological Seminary. Open to the public.
  • Friday, November 8, 5 p.m. “Mennonite Community Cookbook” Potluck celebrates this classic Pennsylvania German Mennonite cookbook. Bring a dish/recipe from the cookbook. Preregistration required.
  • Sunday, November 17, 2:00 pm: This Very Ground, This Crooked Affair—Historian and storyteller John Ruth will present his work on finding language and understanding around the transfer of the land between the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers from native peoples to our Mennonite ancestors. Open to the public.

Thank you to the following congregations for their financial support for the exhibit: Blooming Glen Mennonite Church, Franconia Mennonite Church, Plains Mennonite Church, and Zion Mennonite Church, and to our business sponsors; Alderfer’s Poultry Farm, Godshall’s Quality Meats, and Bauman’s Fruit Butters.