Stay Music and Folklife Demonstrations Headline the Enjoyable at Heemet Fescht 2025

From Kutztown University

Indulge your curiosity in regional people tradition on the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center’s Heemet Fescht 2025, a celebration of the harvest and Pennsylvania Dutch farm life, on Saturday, Sept. 27, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., on the historic Sharadin Farmstead, 22 Luckenbill Road, Kutztown.

Heemet (pronounced HAY-met) means “home” in Pennsylvania Dutch. Heemet Fescht options dwell music within the barnyard, conventional crafts, folklife demonstrations, hearth-cooking, cattle, youngsters’s actions, and extra. The occasion is free, enjoyable, and academic for the entire household.

Enjoy among the area’s best in conventional music within the barnyard that includes native Berks County people musicians Mike and Linda Hertzog, Keith Brintzenhoff, Northside Stringband, and The Shooflies. Join Dr. William Donner within the schoolhouse to find out about Pennsylvania German harvest traditions and Patrick Donmoyer for a presentation on Mountain Mary: Sainted Healer of the Oley Valley.

Traditional artisans from the Reading-Berks Chapter of the Pennsylvania Guild of Craftsmen will share their experience in positive crafts within the historic log cabins on-site, together with folklife demonstrators in woodworking, tin smithing, blacksmithing, and extra all through the farm. Learn about barn stars and hex indicators with preeminent painter Eric Claypoole, who has painted greater than 100 barns in his profession and might be demonstrating his conventional barn artwork.

Grab a burger or savor some French fries from the Kutztown Lions Club stand within the barnyard. Visit the Sharadin farmhouse to see open-hearth regional cookery within the kitchen that includes conventional Pennsylvania Dutch meals. Be positive to cease by the summer time kitchen to style Terry Berger’s sugar cookies baked in a wooden range.

Children can discover autumn craft actions, together with pumpkin portray and potato stamps. Puddin Heartland’s extraordinary potbellied pigs may even delight guests of all ages.

Visitors may also volunteer to assist with bringing within the potato harvest on the farm acreage, the place the Potato Project might be internet hosting its annual potato selecting to offer crops to households in want via the Berks County Foodbank.

Don’t overlook to go to our new headquarters on the DeLight E. Breidegam Building to discover our featured exhibition “Healing Herbs and Vibrant Roots: Transatlantic Botanical Traditions Among the Pennsylvania Dutch.” Pick up a duplicate of the most recent quantity within the annual Heritage Center publication collection, “Sauer’s Herbal Cures: America’s First Book of Botanical Healing,” by William Woys Weaver, sizzling off the press and accessible on the Heritage Center bookstand.

For extra data, observe PGCHC on Facebook and Instagram, go to the Heritage Center’s website, or name 610-683-1589.