Pennsylvania Gypsy's
Chikener also brought with them a "symbolism of good and bad trees. They classed as good trees first the beech, widely known as the "Gypsy tree," after that the ash, and the rowan or mountain ash, the white oak, the birch, the linden and the maple. Pines and aspens were evil, and the Chi-kener?s prejudice became a prime cause for early settlers cutting down all pine trees near their dwellings." 28 As well, the giant stag-horn sumac was called the "devil tree." 29 The Chicanere also used trees medicinally. For example, in newly cleared pastures rattle snakes and copperheads killed many cattle. As a remedy the head of a newly killed reptile was inserted into a hole bored into a young "snake ash" and plugged up. The following year switches were cut from the suckers of the tree and gently used on the bitten area.
"As they were naturally an extremely reticent people, the Pennsylvania German Gypsies developed a tree language which in time was their chief defensive weapon against the constant persecutions of the white people."29a Pictographs were carved into trees. "A circle quartered on a beech, ash or linden indicated...a safe and pleasant place to camp." A half or quarter circle meant danger, ranging from loss of money to death, the severity being indicated by which quadrant the quarter was taken from and the type of tree on which it was carved. Likewise, "a diamond, cut on a beech, bisected, translated to mean that "must leave for reasons (best known to self). Will be within two days journey." The bisecting line when extending on both sides beyond the diamond, "four days journey." 30 On one side only a "three days journey." Also carved on a beech tree a heart and a cross were "symbols of Gypsy lovers."
Shoemaker also describes "the white man?s warning against the Chi-kener:
a white star and black hand" 32" While still In the Rhine when a Gypsy came to a house looking for work and found their was no money to be made he painted a discrete white star was on the doorjamb as notice for the next Gypsy traveling through. 32a It is uncertain who added the black hand and when but the black hand and white star appear in a Gypsy Holocaust Memorial in Salzburg leading me to believe that this image originated in the Rhine and traveled to Pennsylvania, a clear visual indicator that the intolerance they had hoped to escape in the New World had followed them.
In 1930 Shoemaker wrote that "They were expert horsemen, and created the first interest in horse-breeding and horse-racing in rural Pennsylvania. In other words, they stood for better horses. They were expert potters, making better pots, jugs and flasks than the Indians, or the potters of Huguenot, Spanish or Moravian antecedents. They were expert coppersmiths, and turned out finer work than any other foreign element in Pennsylvania. They were clever ironworkers and artistic tile makers. Everything they executed was distinctive and of artistic merit, and yet they did not try half so hard as the plodding gentiles they out-created and out-sold. They knew how to make glass, and the famous Baron Stiegel whom Pennsylvania is so tardy in honoring, used every inducement to secure their staying with him at Manheim, his chief glass-maker?s name was Stanley, a German speaking, Gipsy, whose descendants are today part prosperous and sedentary and part wanderers and impecunious. They were famous musicians, and as dancers excelled for their grace. The She-kener were the vanguard of the artistic impetus which the so-called "Dutch" gave to Pennsylvania, the colonial houses, furniture, stoves, firebacks, glassware, tiles, illuminated manuscripts, sconces, urns, pottery and bells, as well as ballads and music that have caused antiquarians to remark that the Pennsylvania Germans alone of all the colonial elements left behind them artistic remains."20 Because no people are ever all good or all bad, they also had the reputation of being able "to put a "disturber" on a person, a spell that may last indefinitely. Pennsylvania witchcraft, the black art the "hechs," is theirs.." and "In telling "fortunes" the She-kener girls and women never impart anything that is pleasant, for example, they will tell a married man that his wife is false," etc. 21 The Pennsylvania Dutch people, although pious, were also superstitious which brings us to the famous Pennsylvania Dutch Hex Signs that decorate the barns of Lancaster County. By all accounts the symbols are purely decorative but I find it hard to imagine that the Pennsylvania Dutch, believing it possible to be hexed would just coincidentally call their barn decorations "hex signs".
Some authorities have claimed that from 1845 to 1870 there were approximately three thousand of the She-kener following the roads in Pennsylvania." By the 1930?s, " three hundred would be a liberal estimate of their numbers. The World War drew many of them to Hog Island and other industrial plants, with the result that they settled down in cities, and will probably never take the roads again." The three thousand would not have included the second wave of German Gypsy migration in 1850-70. Those "Gypsies in large numbers...travel in handsome automobiles...on the Pennsylvania highways in the summer months. But beyond acknowledging a racial and lingual kinship the She-kener maintain no intercourse with them.".42