On the whole, the Amish are avid hunters. In Nature & The Environment in Amish Life, one Amishman puts plainly how much hunting mattered in his community: “When I was growing up, if you didn’t hunt, it was almost as if you didn’t belong.” (p. 148). Why does hunting appeal to the Amish? For one, hunting is an outdoor activity that can be done with…
David Riehl is a person I’d heard a lot about – both reading his story, and directly from his family. David was a key figure in the development of the Amish quilt industry. His is one of the more unusual tales of an Amish person crafting a successful enterprise – by taking his goods right into the heart of the nation’s largest metropolis. Beginning in…
This isn’t a map, but it is a nice directory giving addresses of 26 Amish businesses in Clare County, Michigan. There are three Amish communities with a presence in Clare County. I believe the businesses here are from the more progressive of the two larger ones. That settlement has families both in Clare County, and neighboring Isabella County. It is seven church districts in size….
Several years back Amish in Illinois made news when they moved the state’s oldest-known Amish home using horsepower (that is, at least part of the way): This was originally the home of an Amishman named Moses Yoder, and dates to 1865. The Moses Yoder house is joined by a second historic home, the Daniel Schrock house (1882), as a focus of preservation efforts in…
This is the largest and most expensive of the properties we’ve seen from the batch of 7 Amish homes on the market in Fleming County, KY. While we’ve looked at a couple of small houses and even a 21-acre “baby farm“, today’s property could be considered more the real deal as far as Amish farms go (“grownup farm”?). Its size, at 91 acres, is a…
A case that we’ve followed for some time now reached another point in its journey through the court system. On Monday a Minnesota Court of Appeals upheld the original decision. The article in the Post Bulletin summarizes recent events in the matter: The Minnesota Court of Appeals upheld a ruling Monday that would require four Fillmore County Amish families to install subsurface sewage treatment systems…
This is another great photo by Cindy Cornett Seigle. I can’t say I’ve ever encountered this exact sight coming down the road – at least not at this size. These guys are riding atop piles of hay that have them literally two – or is it three – stories up in the air. I assume they have those things well-balanced. This photo was taken in…
Here’s a simple article from the Alberta Press giving us a look at the Amish approach to “retirement” and aging. This comes from the Prince Edward Island settlement at Dundas. It largely consists of an interview with James Kuepfer, 35, and his father Peter (as an aside, note Kuepfer is not a common name among the Amish, but it is found in Canada). The men…
While we’ve lately featured numerous videos of Amish singing, we haven’t had too many examples of church singing here. If you haven’t heard Amish church singing before, today’s clip of Amish singing Lebt Friedsam, by Ed Yoder, will give you a sense of what it is like. A song leader opens with the first notes of each line of the hymn. The congregation then joins…
I’m seeing more and more examples of Amish business maps, both online and off. To give a few examples, there are the multiple maps in Ethridge, Tennessee, the map we saw last week from the small Whitefield, Maine community, and this online map of the Conewango Valley, New York settlement, with over 180 Amish businesses listed. I see the maps as good marketing by people…