Hex Signs Fading in PA Dutch Country

from The New York Times, Saturday, July 22, 2006:

Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs that have benn painted on barns more than two centuries ago are disappearing.

Usually about four feet in circumference, the signs were painted in bright hues on barns’ gable sides, especially along Old Route 22, or the Hex Highway, a quiet, winding road just off Interstate 78.

Experts counted more than 800 of the signs on barns in the 1980’s; fewer than 200 remain. The barn stars are disappearing ever more rapidly as old wooden barns themselves disappear, replaced by cheaper metal ones. Another factor in their decline was the $300 or so it cost farmers to keep them repainted.

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/us/22hex.html?_r=1&oref=slogin