Following up last week’s look inside a New York Amish living room, we have a couple more photos of an Amish home interior, courtesy of SUNY-Potsdam anthropology professor Karen Johnson-Weiner. These shots were taken in a home in the Swiss Amish settlement in Clarion County, Pennsylvania. Swiss Amish tend to be fairly plain, and I [...]
Continue reading Inside an Amish Home: Swiss Amish
Beth Russo has kindly shared 10 photos of the Amish settlement at Bowling Green, Missouri (Pike County). Beth recently made a trip during which she visited an Amish woodworking shop and a beekeeper. You can find more of her photos on her Facebook page. Bowling Green is the oldest Amish settlement in Missouri, founded in [...]
Continue reading Bowling Green, Missouri Amish
After regretting (on the original buggy sign post) that we had no Allen County, Indiana sign, reader Torey has kindly shared this photo, taken near the town of Grabill. You may be aware that Amish in Allen County are considered “Swiss Amish”. Swiss Amish differ in a few ways from most other Amish (most Amish [...]
Continue reading Buggy signs, part 2
You may have heard the term “Swiss Amish” used to describe certain Amish groups. The term “Swiss” refers to a separate ethnicity within Old Order society, in contrast to Pennsylvania German-ethnicity Amish (the majority of Amish today). Swiss Amish have specific customs and cultural markers. I first encountered Swiss Amish in the Allen County, Indiana [...]
Continue reading Swiss Amish
Who loves rankings? (everyone loves rankings)–today I offer my personal top-five favorite Amish settlements. I hope you’ll indulge my self-indulgence for this one day (I’ve been wanting to do this post for a long time!). I haven’t been everywhere, but of the 17-or-so communities I’ve visited, these are the ones I would most readily revisit [...]
Continue reading My top five Amish settlements
The Amish arrange themselves into compact groupings known as church districts. Each district has its own name, usually a geographically-based one–Lamoni South, Randolph, and Crab Orchard are examples of places providing names for districts, these being found in Iowa, Mississippi, and Kentucky Amish communities. Since the Amish travel by horse-and-buggy to one another’s homes for [...]
Continue reading The Amish Church District
Random fact: The Amish yodel. As in yodel-ay-eee-ooo. Not all Amish, though, and maybe not quite like that. This is a ‘Swiss Amish‘ practice. Within the Swiss ethnic sub-group, Chad L. Thompson tells us (see Anthropological Linguistics Journal vol. 38 no. 3) it’s mainly done in two settlements that straddle Fort Wayne, Indiana–the Adams County [...]
Continue reading Those Yodeling Amish
