If you’re lucky enough to have visited some parts of Pennsylvania Dutch country, you’ll be familiar with what historians call “hex signs.” These are large, often colorful, usually geometrical, and always striking decorations painted prominently on the region’s barns. Speaking exclusively with Hunker, Patrick Donmoyer, director of the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center at Kutztown University, tells us about hex signs, how they came to be, and what they might mean.
Donmoyer has long been on a personal mission to document the barn decorations of Berks, Lehigh, and the surrounding counties, and he has tracked down over 500 such barns in the area — a number that he says is increasing. The fact that they continue to be painted and repainted helps to explain this growth, and it also illuminates the fact that residents think of their barn stars as at once prized and ordinary.
If these elaborate folk-art badges aren’t what you first thought of when you read “barn star,” that’s understandable. Donmoyer sees a common heritage between the Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs and the stars people put on their houses and sheds — and, yes, barns — nationwide. “There seems to be an association in the American imagination with stars and barns, and the earliest examples of painted stars are among the Pennsylvania Dutch,” Donmoyer says. “This art form became extremely popular in the early 20th century with the rise of tourism, and is likely to be a major source of inspiration for the tin stars.” Perhaps it is natural that these community and faith-oriented symbols should eventually be transmogrified into a universally loved way to bring farmhouse style to porch decorations.
The deep history of a relatively young art form
Speaking to Hunker, Patrick Donmoyer elaborates on a barn star tradition that’s much more richly faceted than modern store-bought tin stars. “My research and historical vernacular architecture is based on another type of barn star,” he explains, “which is the term that was widely used to describe the circular geometric painted murals produced by the Pennsylvania Dutch that are also referred to as hex signs.” The term “hex sign,” Donmoyer says, was an invention of a travel journalist that originates from only around 100 years ago, but the area’s barn decorations — Scheier-Schtanne, literally “barn stars” — date to the first half of the 19th century or earlier, with roots traceable to the late Middle Ages…