16-Year-Old Killed In Fall From Wagon While Harvesting Corn (Lancaster County)

Another tragic farm accident in Amish Country. A sixteen-year-old boy lost his life Monday afternoon in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, after falling from a horse-drawn wagon during the corn harvest. From LNP | LancasterOnline:

A 16-year-old boy died Monday after falling from a horse-drawn wagon while harvesting corn in Leacock Township, according to the Lancaster County Coroner’s Office.

Alvin Petersheim, of Paradise Township, died of multiple traumatic injuries, and his death was ruled accidental.

Fire and emergency medical officials responded to the first block of North Hollander Road near Old Philadelphia Pike around 3 p.m. Monday for reports of a person struck by a vehicle, according to a dispatcher at Lancaster County-Wide Communications.

Officials arriving on scene reportedly found one person down near a barn and requested that the coroner’s office be sent to the scene.

The report doesn’t identify the boy as Amish. But pretty much every detail points at that.

Petersheim is a common Amish name in Lancaster County. His home is in Paradise Township. Neighboring Leacock Township, where he was harvesting corn, is right in the heart of the Lancaster Amish settlement, including the area of Intercourse. Both are heavily Amish areas. And of course the wagon was horse-drawn.

Prayers and condolences to Alvin’s family.

Another 16-Year-Old Died On A Lancaster County Farm In August

This is the second time in about six weeks that a sixteen-year-old boy has died in a Lancaster County farm accident. On August 2, Jonas Fisher of Colerain Township fell eight to twelve feet through a hay hole in the barn on his family’s farm, according to LNP | LancasterOnline.

He died later that day at the hospital. That report did not identify the family as Amish either, though Colerain Township, in the southern end of the county, does have Amish residents, and the circumstances match typical Amish farm activity.

Lancaster County typically sees more farm deaths than any other county in Pennsylvania, according to LNP | LancasterOnline. And children are the most common victims.

In a 2023 analysis, the paper cited Elizabethtown College sociologist Conrad Kanagy’s estimate that the Amish own at least half of the county’s nearly 5,000 farms. With large families living and working on those farms, LNP concluded that Amish children are, by the numbers, the people most likely to die in farm accidents in the county.

Sadly we’ve covered a number of these over the past year, both in Lancaster County and beyond. Back in February, a two-year-old Amish girl died after falling from a tractor in Upper Leacock Township in Lancaster County. An eight-year-old boy lost his life in Mercer County, PA just last month in a farm equipment accident, a twelve-year-old boy was killed while discing a field in New York, and a fifteen-year-old girl was run over by a wagon loaded with corn in Wisconsin.

Amish children are more exposed to these types of dangers due to the prevalence of small family farming in Amish society, and cultural customs of involving children in work activities.