A Fading Tradition.

I don't tend to often get nostalgic for my childhood but, having grown up in Pennsyvania, this NY Times story about the disappearing hex sign brings back a lot of old memories. I remember driving around our neck of the woods and seeing them on barns everywhere. It was probably my first exposure to public art.

For those not familiar with hex signs, here's some background.

They were brought here by the Germans who came from the Rhineland-Palatinate area to these fertile valleys in southern Pennsylvania, a region rich in mystery — and mistranslation. Though the people in these parts are of German descent, they are called the Pennsylvania Dutch because the dialect that most of them once spoke, a mix of German and English, was referred to as Pennsylvania Deutsch.


And while the power to ward off evil and bring good luck or plentiful harvests has been attributed to the hex signs, most scholars now believe that this notion too sprang from linguistic error. In Wallace Nutting’s 1924 book “Pennsylvania Beautiful,” the author most likely confused the Pennsylvania German word for six-pointed, “sechsafoos,” with the word for witch’s foot, “hexefuss.”

The real origin of the tradition was purely artistic, said David Fooks, executive director of the nearby Kutztown Folk Festival.

“The barn was the most important place in the farm family’s life,” Mr. Fooks said, “and it was only natural for them to decorate it.”