A fiery dragon

Hiob, 8 May 2026

For today’s blog post, we return once again to that upper corner of Berks County known locally as the Eck, pressed against the Blue Mountain ridge of the Appalachians. Rising above the farmland is one of the region’s most recognizable summits called the Pinnacle, or Zinnekopp in Pennsylvania Dutch. From the steeple of the New Bethel Church, the mountain stands quietly on the horizon, as if keeping watch over the valley below.

Zinnekopp from the New Bethel Union cemetery, 2024

According to local legend, the Zinnekopp is anything but quiet after dark.

Stories once circulated that late at night a great dragon emerged from a cave high along the mountain. Witnesses claimed the creature swirled through the air above the ridge.

Unlike the dragons of European folklore, the Zinnekopp dragon is strangely elusive. No treasure is mentioned. No heroic knight arrives to slay the beast. The creature breathes fire, apparently, but to what end no one quite explains. It exists in our folklore less as a villain and more as a lingering presence of the landscape itself, deeply tied to the mountain. Surprisingly, we have a few more dragons lurking in the Pennsylvania Dutch country.

Even today, standing beneath the shadow of the Zinnekopp, it’s not hard to imagine why such stories endured. The Blue Mountains have a way of appearing just out of reach from the valley below, especially at night as the woods on the slopes grow dark. I wonder if perhaps the treasures that our Zinnekopp dragon is guarding are the mysteries of the Blue Mountains.

I really enjoy this bit of folklore and so I decided to call my latest weaving project Zinnekopp. A custom order of napkins came in to the Bullfrog Inn and I decided to adapt them to a 19th century mattress tick design housed at Landis Valley Museum. The original textile is blue and white, but I enjoyed incorporating not only other colors, but also different tones.

Zinnekopp off the loom