Tennessee Amish

The Ethridge, Tennessee Amish community is the largest in the South. It’s a Swartzentruber Amish settlement founded in the 1940s. Today there are about 1,500 Amish living here. Typical of Swartzentruber settlements, it is a farming community supplemented by a lot of small shops and home enterprises. Amish commerce extends off the farm with some [...]

Continue reading Ethridge, Tennessee Amish Map

I’m staying with Amish friends in Lancaster County this week, but will try to get to a computer soon.  In the meantime reader Adair shares some photos taken in the Ethridge, Tennessee area. Thanks Adair for the nice photos.  Read more on the Ethridge TN Amish.

Continue reading Ethridge Amish photos

Last year I visited the Ethridge, Tennesse Amish community.  I was surprised to find that Ethridge is the Amish mecca of the South. For being a conservative Swartzentruber community, the place is crawling with tourists (relatively speaking, of course.  Lancaster County, this ain’t). It’s also a charming place to visit.  It’s got a rural feel [...]

Continue reading 10 views of the Ethridge, Tennessee Amish

I’m happy to introduce a new feature on Amish America: the Amish State Guide. The Amish State Guide will be a comprehensive resource on Amish communities in all 28 states where they are currently found (plus Ontario, Canada).  We previewed this a few weeks ago with an entry for Michigan Amish. The State Guide features information [...]

Continue reading Introducing the new Amish State Guide

The usual summer gas hikes have yet to materialize this year.  But when they do, we’ll all be thinking how good the Amish must have it, right?  This shot from the Ethridge, Tennessee community is a little reminder that Amish use fossil fuels too. It’s been a little light on blogging lately because I have [...]

Continue reading Gassing up the buggy

The Amish community at Ethridge is one of a handful in Tennessee, and at ten church districts, the largest Amish settlement in the South.  The Amish here are of the Swartzentruber “lineage”, meaning low levels of technology, numerous farms, and buggies lacking the Slow Moving Vehicle triangle.  Ethridge is unusual as a sizeable and long-established [...]

Continue reading The Amish of Ethridge, Tennessee

Here’s an interesting article on a produce auction in the largest Amish settlement in Tennessee (article no longer online).  The settlement of ten church districts at Ethridge, Tennessee, is a conservative Swartzentruber Amish affiliation. So it was interesting to see local Amish contributing to this article, as well as learn that the area has something [...]

Continue reading Tennessee Amish produce auction

An AP story has just hit the wire on population growth among the Amish.  This coincides with the release of additional information on trends in Amish growth and migration from here at the Young Center. The Amish studies site now lists trend data for the 1992 to 2008 period as well as the 2007 to [...]

Continue reading Amish growing like mushrooms after a rain shower

photo:  Scroonch From Lancaster, Pennsylvania, through Ohio and Indiana and on out to other long-established settlements in Illinois, Iowa, and Kansas, we tend to associate the Amish with the nation’s middle latitudes.  Since their earliest years in America, the Amish have gravitated to the cooler climes of these corn and dairy regions.  However, the Amish [...]

Continue reading Southern Amish

Following up a recent AA post on Amish families leaving the church, Kevin Williams at the Amish Cook is blogging an article on a down-south Lancaster-transplant Amish clan that ends up ‘going Pentecostal’. Some good points made by Kevin and the commenters…I would only add this:  on the article-writer describing the Amish ‘believing the use [...]

Continue reading Leaving, once again