To create beauty in their daily lives, talented Pennsylvanians brushed vivid watercolors on paper, fashioned decorative salt-glazed stoneware, built and painted handmade furniture that served generations of families and stitched silk onto cotton samplers to honor late relatives.

This presentation dog says A.B. Dunaway Druggist -- Greensboro. It is part of the "Made in Pennsylvania: A Folk Art Tradition" exhibit at the Westmoreland Museum in Greensburg. Click photo for larger image. If you go Admission is $5 suggested donation for adults, and children under 12 are free. The Westmoreland Museuem of Art is at 221 N. Main St., Greensburg. 724-837-1500. www.wmuseumaa.org Related article A celebration of folk art: Several programs complement exhibit A celebration of folk art: Heritage School aims to preserve folk art skills

These examples of handmade artistry comprise a new exhibition called "Made in Pennsylvania: A Folk Tradition." The show opens Saturday at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg and runs through Oct. 14.

This showcase of folk art, made up of German documents called fraktur, stoneware, Soap Hollow furniture, samplers and coverlets, is an object lesson in how imagination, patience and attention to detail can transform paper, clay, wood and cloth. Each type of art was curated by experts in the given specialty.

With 389 artifacts, this is the largest and most in-depth exhibition of locally produced folk art in the region in five years. A 2002 show at the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center showcased a Smithsonian folk art collection as well as local examples.

"We're dedicated to collecting the art of the region. That's one of our missions," said Judy Linsz Ross, the museum's marketing director. "This is the first time a lot of these objects in this quantity have been brought together that represent Pennsylvania folk art."

At the entryway of the museum's changing gallery, visitors will see an example of each art form. The show in the first gallery begins with painted furniture. The next gallery is fraktur, the documents Germans prepared to record births, baptisms and weddings. The word fraktur means fractured, indicating that each letter is broken and distinct.

Click photo for larger image.

In the third gallery are textiles and tanware, while the fourth gallery holds stoneware.

Fraktur arrived in America from Europe via German immigrants.

"Schoolteachers did these to supplement their income. They would sell them for 25 or 35 cents," said David Brocklebank, who assembled this part of the show and has studied fraktur since the 1960s.

"These documents were kept in a drawer or pasted inside the lid of a blanket chest. It was not the type of thing that people displayed, which today, seems a little bit odd to us," Mr. Brocklebank added.

There are more than 85 examples of fraktur; 45 from Western Pennsylvania and 35 from Eastern Pennsylvania. Six of the fraktur belong to the museum. All of the documents are in one gallery so it's possible to compare stylistic variations.

Some of the recurrent motifs in fraktur, such as birds, flowers, crowns, eight-sided stars and barefoot angels, also are found on the 15 examples of furniture produced by cabinetmakers who lived in Soap Hollow, a three-mile long settlement in a valley seven miles southeast of Johnstown.

	George Gottfried Ephraim Burger, who was active from 1820 through 1846, used ink and watercolor to make this birth and baptism certificate for Margaretha Burger in 1838. Click photo for larger image.

Starting in the 1830s, a school of cabinetmakers made up of German Amish Mennonites began making Soap Hollow furniture of poplar and cherry and painting it with vivid colors.

"Most all of the design work is stenciled. I believe they cut their own stencils because they are individualized. One maker had one design and someone else had another. We do have some stencils from the Sala family, which have remained in their family," said Charles Muller, author of "Soap Hollow -- The Furniture and Its Makers."

For his portion of the exhibition, curator Frank Swala arranged 200 pieces of stoneware. Stoneware, made from fire clay dug from the earth, was hand-painted with vivid cobalt blue designs, such as birds, vines, fruit, flowers, animals, shields and abstract patterns. The best local fire clay came from Greensboro and New Geneva in Fayette County.

Stoneware allowed people to store food and protect it from water and critters. It was an improvement over redware or earthenware, which broke more easily because it was fired in kilns at lower temperatures.

Stoneware was sold in towns all over Western Pennsylvania -- Beaver, Butler, Brownsville, Greensburg, Mount Pleasant, New Castle, Somerset and Waynesburg. Potters produced bottles, canning jars, churns, liquor jugs, pitchers and steins.

Another advantage of the decorative stoneware was that it was waterproof and large -- 20-gallon and 50-gallon vessels stored grain and dry goods.

"Rodents and such couldn't gnaw into them like a wooden box," Mr. Swala said.

The earliest piece in the show dates to 1852.

"The most beautiful stuff is the earliest stuff, typically, because the color contrast was better and they had the best vein of clay. Greensboro was known for having had a select grade of clay," Mr. Swala said.

Stoneware production died out as glass manufacturers made containers that were transparent, lighter and durable. While white cylindrical storage pots are still made in Ohio, Mr. Swala said, they are usually not decorative. However, some craftspeople make reproductions of earlier stoneware.

By the 20th century, stoneware was decorated with a less attractive brown color. This tan ware, made in the form of souvenirs, pitchers and flower pots, was sold to tourists who traveled on the Monongahela River and stopped at a factory or toured a town where the pottery was made.

In the 1870s and beyond, stoneware manufacturers struggled to compete with mass-produced goods, which emphasized efficiency over quality.

Phil Schaltenbrand, a Scenery Hill potter and owner of the custom stoneware company Westerwald Pottery, wrote an essay about stoneware for the show's catalog. As demand for handmade stoneware dropped, he noted, the region's remaining potteries were sustained by master potters. And 100 years after George Washington and his troops quelled the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, Western Pennsylvanians still thirsted for liquor.

"It is interesting to note that the Hamilton and Robbins pottery works in Fayette County was still selling hand-turned whiskey jugs to distilleries several years after Henry Ford's first Model T rolled off the line in Detroit," Mr. Schaltenbrand wrote in his essay.

Next is an exhibit of 33 samplers and four coverlets. Harley Trice, who curated this part of the show, spent the past 1 1/2 years researching and identifying more than a half-dozen Allegheny County schools that taught young women how to make samplers.

"Up until now, only one school of sampler making in Western Pennsylvania was known, and that was the Mary Tidbaugh school," said Mr. Trice, an environmental lawyer.

"We identified all the rest as a result of research. A lot of these samplers just got out into the antiques trade and are owned by people all over the country."

Samplers were made in America for 200 years and 18th-century needlework was of much higher quality than later needlework, Mr. Trice said.

Two samplers in the exhibit came from a school identified from the Harmonist settlement of Old Economy, in Ambridge, Beaver County. The Harmonists produced silk and sold it.

Samplers died out in the 1850s when Berlin work, a form of stitching by numbers, became available.

For more information:

Admission is a $5 suggested donation for adults and children under 12 are free. The Westmoreland Museum of Art is at 221 N. Main St., Greensburg. 724-837-1500. www.wmuseumaa.org.

---

Correction/Clarification: (Published June 22, 2007) The first name of Frank Swala, guest curator for the stoneware portion of a major folk art exhibition opening tomorrow at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, was incorrect in this story as originally published June 20, 2007 about the exhibit.