Feel Good: Amish Serve Dinner To Raise Money For Firefighters (Michigan)

And not just dinner. They also put on an auction in support of their local volunteer firefighting force. The event was held at an Amish farm in Quincy, Michigan – the Jake Steury family farm. More from the Coldwater Daily Reporter:

QUINCY TWP., MI — The Amish communities in Quincy and Butler townships served up a chicken dinner, then auctioned off items Friday, Sept. 19 to benefit the Quincy Volunteer Fire Department’s non-profit Quincy Axes and Irons Association.

Jake Steury and his family host the biennial event at their farm, located at 577 N. Briggs Road, for both English and Amish.

From 4 p.m. until auction time at 6 p.m., diners filled the large barn, enjoying a typical farm meal of Amish noodles, corn, mashed potatoes, and gravy, accompanied by grilled chicken, and finishing with ice cream and homemade pies.

Sounds great. The auction raised some money – how much exactly will be revealed later:

Those who attend donate and bid on donated items. The Amish will present the amount raised at a later date.

The non-profit started getting funds from the Amish dinner about 10 years ago. But the dinner itself had been ongoing since the 1990s.

I assume it must have been to raise funds for other causes prior to this one. The non-profit supports firefighter needs like training, and also local community sports teams.

Another neat example of Amish cooperation with the local community. And there’s not just a dinner and auction – they do a horse pull – apparently a big draw as well:

A draw for many is the Amish-only horse pull, where draft horses pull a sled filled with an increasing number of concrete blocks that can go over five tons pulled along a measured length of rope.

A dozen teams of light and heavyweight Belgian and two Percheron draft horses pulled on Friday.

If you watch the video at the link above, you can get a sense of the power of these horses. They are raring to go and at least one time they took off before being hitched up to the concrete blocks.

Amish outreach is not unusual

The Amish are depicted as “apart” from the rest of us but the reality is that they are very much plugged-in (no pun intended) in various ways in our communities.

Now some are more plugged-in than others, and are more involved in things like this dinner. Go to larger Amish settlements and you’ll see it regularly. On individual levels, Amish people help their neighbors in need – and get the same in return. You see plenty of examples of Amish outreach when they go hundreds of miles from home to disaster areas to help clean up and rebuild.

But even in smaller places, and plainer communities, the “Amish community” and the “non-Amish community” regularly interact and team up on efforts like this. In the end, simply coming together, for a time at least, as one community.

Great job by everyone involved.