On Centre: Penns Valley

Folklore lives on in Penns Valley

Ed Mahon

Henry W. Shoemaker is the man behind the legend of Nita-nee — the story of a white trader who died in Penn's Cave, calling out the name of an Indian princes.

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In 1947, Shoemaker also was named Pennsylvania’s first official folklorist. By then, he’d already long been working to promote and conserve the state’s culture and wilderness.

“In his enthusiasm for this enterprise, he often used a lot of his own imagination,” said Simon J. Bronner, a distinguished professor of American studies and folklore at Penn State’s Harrisburg campus. “It became difficult to separate the truth from the fiction in his work.”

Shoemaker died in 1958, so he missed much of the folk music revival that is being celebrated at the Elk Creek Cafe and Aleworks in Millheim from 2 to 8 p.m. Sunday with the Harry Smith Festival. But his work has some interesting similarities to that of Smith, who created the “Anthology of American Folk Music” in 1952.

Smith focused on collecting voices from across the United States, and the result was a mix of country, cajun, blues and gospel music. Shoemaker collected stories and captured voices of Pennsylvania.

The publisher of the Altoona Tribune and the Reading Eagle, Shoemaker also wrote more than 20 books on the state’s mythology. His most famous was “Pennsylvania Mountain Stories.” He said the stories were told to him as he traveled the mountain region, embarking from his grandmother’s home in Clinton County.

“As so many of the tales are devoted to subjects of a more or less supernatural order, they cannot very well be true,” Shoemaker wrote, but added, “neither are they of the author’s invention.”

Like, Smith, Shoemaker was a collector.

“He was a pioneer in trying to recover the last remnants of Pennsylvania’s Native American heritage” collecting songs and stories, said Bronner, author of the 1996 book “Popularizing Pennsylvania: Henry W. Shoemaker and the Progressive Uses of Folklore and History.”

As a conservationist, he worked to establish state parks, protected wilderness and focused on capturing a cultural identity for Pennsylvania — to put the state’s romantic imagery on par with New England and the South.

His approach? “If you connect it to some kind of cultural activity then people will have more reverence for it,” Bronner said.

The legend of Nita-nee was first published in the Centre Hall newspaper, the Centre Reporter, on March 12, 1903, according to Jackie R. Esposito and Steven L. Herb’s “The Nittany Lion: An Illustrated Tale”

Painter holds jam session

At last year’s Harry Smith Festival, artists Elody Gyekis and Alice Dolbin created two abstract paintings by working on the same canvas at the same time. They’d switch places or flip the canvas around so they worked on all parts of the painting.

“It’s an exciting, fun way to make art. Perhaps it is the equivalent of a music jam session for painters,” said Gyekis, a Penns Valley alumna who will graduate from Penn State in December.

“One must be aware and reacting to an ever-changing context and find a rhythm with the other artists organically rather than communicating verbally and planning. It is more intuitive than logical.”

Gyekis will do the same artwork for the festival on Sunday.

Ed Mahon writes about news from the Penns and Brush Valley regions. He can be reached at 231-4619 or emahon@centredaily.com.

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