As you might have heard, Amish are constantly starting new communities – about once every 2-3 weeks. But not every new Amish settlement makes it. Some attract dozens of families and last decades before dwindling to zero. Others muster just a few short years before economics, church struggles, or other factors send settlers on to new pastures, or back to the old. Don Burke recently visited a newly-extinct…
Suzanne Woods Fisher took a trip to the Amish community in Buchanan County, Iowa earlier this year. She shares that visit with us today–along with a few surprises she encountered. — The next time you have an occasion to travel to an off-the-beaten path Amish settlement, carve out a little extra time. Slow down and take a moment to look, really look, at the sprawling farmhouses that dot the two-lane…
The atypical Amish community at Pearisburg, Virginia (Giles County) has been described as “unique”. I’ve never been there, but we’ve heard a lot about Pearisburg–the oldest of Virginia’s half-dozen Amish settlements–from readers and contributors over the years. First, Rich Stevick has shared about this mountain settlement a few times. How about this unusual courtesy for non-Amish visitors: Several years ago at a wedding in Pearisburg, VA, we had the…
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…