History & local legend
Johnny Ott, the proprietor of the Lenhartsville Hotel in Berks County, made himself famous as a self-styled “Professor of Hexology.” By 1951 he was painting colorful hex signs in a side-porch studio and entertaining customers with stories about the powers of his designs. The former hotel is associated with today’s Deitsch Eck restaurant.
One of Ott’s favorite tales involved two signs meant to bring rain. A farmer supposedly ignored his instructions and left them outside too long, causing the Delaware River to flood and inflict millions of dollars in damage. The outrageous scale of the claim was part of the performance: a customer went home with both a painted sign and a story about what it could do.
Ott’s commercial folklore grew alongside the older Pennsylvania Dutch tradition of decorating barns with stars. He did not paint barns himself, and other artists objected to treating their designs as magical charms. The hotel’s legend belongs particularly to Ott’s showmanship and the stories he told over his own work.
