Kutztown, PA

Kutztown is the heartland of the Pennsylvania Dutch — the German-speaking farmers whose hex signs bloom on the barns of Berks County and whose dialect can still be heard at market. The town's great institution is the Kutztown Folk Festival, founded in 1950 and reckoned the oldest continuously operating folklife festival in America: for nine days each summer it fills the fairgrounds with quilt auctions, one-room-schoolhouse lessons in dialect, hexerei painting, sauerkraut and shoofly pie — an entire folk culture demonstrating itself, seriously and deliciously, to a quarter-million visitors.

The town's second engine is Kutztown University, grown from an 1866 normal school into a regional university whose arts programmes and performance calendar sustain concert life in the borough — the campus stages have long hosted the touring ensembles that reached this corner of Pennsylvania. And the town produced, improbably, one of late-century art's most recognisable hands: Keith Haring grew up in Kutztown, absorbing the bold outlines of local folk art before his radiant figures conquered the walls of New York and the world; the town remembers him with pride. Farm country, folk festival, university and one pop-art prodigal son — Kutztown is Pennsylvania Dutch culture, alive and unembarrassed.