Bucks County Was the Place To Be

One of the best-loved songs from a Broadway musical was inspired by bucolic Bucks County.

Oscar Hammerstein II drew on the sights he saw from the porch of his Doylestown Township farm when he wrote the lyrics to "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'," the opening number of the musical Oklahoma!

He recalled a hot summer's day when "all the cattle are standing like statues." He observed the corn in his neighbor's field was "as high as a [sic] elephant's eye." Hammerstein's lyrics and Richard Rodgers' melodies took Broadway by storm when Oklahoma! premiered in 1943.

The recalls this golden age of creativity in Bucks County in a new exhibit entitled "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'": The Heyday of Our Artistic Celebrities (1920-1950).

Hammerstein was among the noted figures, mostly from the literary and theatrical circles of New York City, who moved to Bucks County beginning in the 1920s. The trend picked up during the 1930s, when some farmers were forced to put their farms up for sale during the Depression.

The exhibit, which includes photographs, documents and memorabilia, features seven of the best-known celebrities. Besides Hammerstein, they are Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Moss Hart, S.J. Perelman, Pearl S. Buck and James A. Michener.

Parker wrote witty, acerbic pieces for The New Yorker and other magazines. She was a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, an informal group of writers who regularly gathered at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan during the 1920s to exchange witticisms and repartee.

"I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true," Parker once cracked.

Kaufman and Hart became famous as collaborators on some of the most successful plays of the 1930s, notably the comedy You Can't Take It with You, which won a Pulitzer Prize. Both became disillusioned with country living after pouring tens of thousands of dollars into their respective Bucks County farmhouses, and expressed their frustrations in the 1940 play George Washington Slept Here.

Perelman, noted as a writer of witty magazine articles, branched out into screenplays, co-writing the scripts for the Marx Brothers movies Horse Feathers and Monkey Business. After 15 years at Eight Ball Farm in Erwinna, Perelman wrote about the ups and downs of life in Bucks County in "Acres and Pains," a 1947 collection of humorous anecdotes.

Buck won the Pulitzer Prize for The Good Earth three years before she moved in 1935 to Green Hills Farm in Hilltown with her second husband. In 1938, she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Besides continuing to write novels, she founded the Welcome House international adoption agency.

Michener was the only one of these luminaries who actually grew up in Bucks County, but like the others, he was regarded as an outsider by the natives. Michener won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1947 collection of wartime stories, Tales of the South Pacific. A world traveler, he was a prolific author of historical novels and nonfiction books until his death in 1997 at age 90.

After World War II, Bucks County's appeal faded for the "cafe society." Some celebrities still kept homes here, but the culture that nurtured a circle of literary elites was dying out.

The county's reputation suffered a further blow in 1959 with the publication of The Devil in Bucks County, a lurid novel by Edmund Schiddel of Center Bridge. The best-seller portrayed the county as "a slice of Hell" (according to the book jacket blurb) where big-city refugees came to indulge in sin and scandal. Schiddel followed this with two more novels in a similar vein.

During its celebrity heyday, however, Bucks County was renowned as a creative haven.

The Doylestown Historical Society's exhibit is dedicated to the late Brooks McNamara, a noted professor and historian of the American theater. McNamara and his wife, Nan, moved from New York to Doylestown in 1994 and he became a director of the society.

McNamara founded and edited "The Doylestown Correspondent," the society's biannual newsletter. He wrote the script for a 2001 performance called "Cafe Society in the Country." He produced an abridged edition of W.W.H. Davis's "Doylestown, Old and New" (1904) to make it accessible to modern readers. McNamara died in 2009 at age 72.

The exhibit, free to the public, opens Saturday, April 16 at the society's headquarters, 56 S. Main St., Doylestown. Regular hours are 10 to 4 p.m. Saturdays and noon to 4 p.m. Sundays. To view the show at other times, call 214-345-9430 for an appointment.