Don Burke has been on a tour of Amish settlements in the South and Midwest. These are his photos and account of the small community at Salem, Arkansas (Fulton County), one of only two Amish settlements in the Natural State. You can view more photos at Don’s Arkansas Amish Flickr album. — Nestled in the Ozarks of north-central Arkansas, within a dozen miles of the Missouri state line,…
Not a lot of information to this article, but I think it’s worth passing along anyway. According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, two Amish families from Ontario recently spent time searching for a new home on Canada’s Prince Edward Island: Anthony Wallbank is a friend of several members of Ontario’s Amish community, and drove some of them to the Island to look at farm properties….
My first Amish trip of 2014 happened last week. I made a short visit to one of only two Amish communities in North Carolina, the Union Grove settlement. (Note: see update at end of post for the latest on NC Amish). The Union Grove community includes both Union Grove and Hamptonville addresses (Iredell and Yadkin counties). This is the western part of the state, about…
Earlier this year Tom Geist shared his visits to Amish communities in Plains States, including Chouteau, Oklahoma, Hutchinson County, South Dakota, four Nebraska communities, and Yoder, Kansas. The Amish have a scattered presence across the Great Plains, which you can see in this map taken from a directory dedicated to those states (photo by Janar S). Today Tom gives us a look at another Kansas…
Ernest Bontrager has a clip of still images taken in the Amish settlement at Monte Vista, Colorado (Rio Grande and Conejos counties). It’s not a new video (2010), but is a nice look at the type of sights you might see in a western Amish settlement. I haven’t visited Amish further west than Iowa, so I like these looks at communities in the Mountain Time Zone….
The Arthur Amish community occupies a special place with me. This was where I first really got to know something about Amish people. As an outsider who knew nothing about them, I never intended to “study the Amish”. I could scarcely have had any idea where things might lead when I knocked on that first Amish farmhouse door ten years ago. As I tell in the foreword of…
We started the week talking Amish population–so why don’t we close doing more of the same! First, there were a number of interesting points from the recent Young Center Amish population data that I wanted to share, but couldn’t really fit on the Amish population infographic: There are 480 Amish settlements, but most are small. Fifty-two percent of all settlements are just one district in size. There…
With close neighbors Ohio and Pennsylvania home to over 130,000 Amish, you’d think a few people with an itch to move would have looked south or east and considered the Mountain State. There are some Amish spots on the WV map, but not many–three to be exact. West Virginia is just not as attractive to Amish for whatever reason, especially compared to places like New York or…
If you were scanning a map of Kansas for places where Amish might be found, Yoder in Reno County would seem a logical guess, given how common that last name is among Amish today. And it’d be a good guess–the town itself was named after the son of an Amish bishop, Eli M. Yoder, who came to homestead here in 1870 (see GAMEO – Yoder). In 1886, the…
Maybe more than any other Amish place name, I’ve never had a clue how to pronounce “Chouteau” (Chah-toe? Shoh-two? Choo-tee-ow? 🙂 ). Lucky for me, this is a blog, not a podcast. Why am I pondering pronunciation quirks again? Well, our busy contributor Tom Geist checks in today with a visit to the Chouteau, Oklahoma Amish settlement. Tom, I should say, gets around pretty well. Besides recent…