Collectors in the Dell

For the past 17 years on a ramshackle farm in Lancaster County, Pa., two aging Mennonites, Henry ("Henner") and George Landis have collected old knick-knacks from nearby farms and hamlets. Everything their thrifty neighbors had to sell, from cracked millstones to old whiskey bottles, the Landis brothers bought and stored away.

They amassed old books, rifles, farm tools, wagons, toys, wax fruit, chamber pots. They salvaged the whole floor of a barn because members of an early German-American sect had knelt on its boards to pray. When a neighboring hotel was torn down, Henner and George Landis bought its whole barroom. But Henner and George Landis were not antique dealers, never sold so much as a darning needle. They just collected things as a hobby.

Before long the tremendous clutter of their possessions filled half a dozen barns and spilled out all over the yard. They had to clear paths through their bedrooms to get to bed. Their kitchen became a small clearing amid dust-laden heaps of guns, bottles and spittoons. Still Henner and George Landis went on collecting.

Most visitors thought they were a little queer. But connoisseurs soon found that the Landis brothers' hoard contained the largest and most complete collection of Pennsylvania-Dutch arts and crafts in existence, and the Oberlaender Trust decided to build a museum on the farm where scholars and tourists might see what Henner and George had collected.

Last week more than 300 bearded Amish and Mennonite farmers, Pennsylvania scholars and historians, guests from as far away as Manhattan thronged the Landis farm to attend the formal opening of the Landis Valley Museum. Awed neighbors in flat hats and black bonnets greeted each other in Pennsylvania Dutch ("Wie bist du Heit?"--"How are you today?").

While the historians and scholars pored over such museum pieces as wooden-wheeled Conestoga wagons (Pennsylvania-Dutch originals of the famed Western covered wagon) and hoary Kentucky rifles (which were manufactured by the Pennsylvania Dutch before the Kentuckians ever heard of them), Henry and George, all dressed up in store clothes, tried their best to enter into the spirit of things.

Seventy-five-year-old Henry even made a short speech. Said he: "We are trying to preserve these things which future generations won't be able to find." More diffident, 73-year-old Brother George once got as far as standing up and waving his hand, but most of the time prowled disconsolately about in dark corners.

Over the bright new stone and whitewash museum that stood at the other end of the dooryard they brooded like a couple of aging hens over a porcelain egg. Grumbled George: "Those buildings they're putting up aren't adequate. Candidly I never saw a carriage shed anywhere like those out there. That's just an architect's imagination, that is." Said Brother Henry philosophically: "Well, we want these things to be where people can see and study them." Descended from a long line of Pennsylvania Dutch, they were brought up in a well-to-do farming family, studied engineering at Lehigh University. Henry, a mining engineer, worked for Bethlehem Iron Co., drifted on to a professorship of mining & metallurgy at the Missouri School of Mines, spent many years in Manhattan editing various engineering publications, including the Gas Age Record. George, whose main hobbies have always been guns and big-game hunting, was once a construction engineer on the Great Northern Railway in Montana, Idaho and Washington.

But in 1924 both brothers found the call of their old homestead and neighbors in Lancaster County too strong to resist. Says George: "They are plain folk but friendly and hospitable. Only thing is they put food on the table and you got to reach for it if you want any. Otherwise you don't get nothing. I guess that characterizes the Dutch around here."

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