Amish Business

Where can you stay on an Amish farm? We often get this question, and happily around this time last year were able to point to amishfarmstay.com. The site lists Lancaster County Amish-owned properties where you can pay to stay overnight. As of last summer the site featured 6 Amish hosts; this year the listings have doubled […]

Continue Reading 12 Amish Farms Where You Can Stay Overnight (Lancaster County – 2019)

As mentioned in yesterday’s post on Amish hand-deconstructing a historic building, there is an Amish community at Guthrie, Kentucky, right near the Tennessee border. Guthrie is one of the more atypical Amish settlements, as it is an “electric New Order” community. The Amish here permit electricity in the home, and also fully use tractors, even […]

Continue Reading Is This The Oldest Amish Bakery?

Who to call when you need your building “hand-demolished”? To the general public, “Amish” often equates to handcrafted – meaning hand-milked cows, handmade quilts, hand-built furniture, and the like (whether that perception is always accurate is another question). And in that spirit, one Tennessee city found that an Amish hands-on approach was exactly what they needed […]

Continue Reading Amish “Hand-Demolish” Historic Tennessee Building

The Amish are well-known for not attending higher institutions of learning. That noted, the business I want to share with you today might be the closest thing in America to an “on-campus” Amish operation. But first, a brief recap – I’ve just returned home after the better part of a week on an Amish trip. […]

Continue Reading A Visit To Campus Ridge Farm Market – Elizabethtown, PA (9 Photos)

This is my friend Daniel Weaver. Daniel belongs to a New Order Amish church: You might remember him from the Guardian article “Our faith will be lost if we adopt technology” (which is where this photo comes from). Daniel just opened a market in his community of Morris (Otsego County) in upstate New York. The Daily […]

Continue Reading My Friend Daniel Weaver Has Opened A New Market (Morris, NY)

The first business I stopped at while in Charlotte County, Virginia last month was Esh’s Variety Stand. What is a “variety stand”? Well as you might guess, something like the more common variety store, but in stand form. I came across this neat little place shortly after arriving in the community, not far from where I […]

Continue Reading A Visit To An Amish Variety Stand (11 Photos)

“We take horses as collateral all the time.” That’s Middlefield Bank vice president Al Thompson Jr. explaining how his institution works with Amish customers. Apparently, that practice goes against what lenders are taught (“never take anything for collateral that eats”). But for the Amish, the exception is worth it. “If they offer you the horse, you […]

Continue Reading 5 Facts On The Amish & Banks

Local NC station Fox8 recently did a “foodie report” on the Amish-owned Shiloh General Store, a popular destination in the Tar Heel State. The video below includes some nice comments from brother and sister Mark and Delilah Graber, who work at the store with their parents and five other siblings. They talk about baking sourdough […]

Continue Reading The Amish-Run Shiloh General Store – Hamptonville, NC (Video)

So another memorable stop from my recent Holmes County trip was at a farm I had first visited a decade earlier. This is a Swartzentruber Amish farm, technically located in Wayne County. They have a creaky signpost by the road displaying whatever it is they have for sale. At the time, the only items on […]

Continue Reading A Visit To A Swartzentruber Amish Rug Seller (12 Photos)

Did you know that Amish are heavily involved in building recreational vehicles? We’ve touched on this topic in the past, in posts like Why are Amish building RVs? and 3 Concerns for Amish Working in the RV Industry. The funny thing is that these are really some luxurious vehicles that don’t seem at all to fit […]

Continue Reading Amish Making RVs (Video)