Amish Communities

Reader Rebecca Rury recently took a visit to the only Texas Amish community, at Beeville in Bee County. She stopped in at the community’s best-known Amish business – Borntrager’s Combination Shop – but writes that she “didn’t get to chat with Mr. Borntrager as he was busy shoeing a horse.” Mr. Borntrager is the owner of the combination shop, and the bishop of this community….

So in addition to the 2021 statewide Amish population numbers which came out two weeks ago, we now have the updated list of individual Amish settlements for 2021. There are around 600 of them. You’ll find it at the Elizabethtown College Young Center Amish Studies website here. This guide provides the following information for each Amish settlement: the county (or census division, for Canadian settlements) main town or geographical…

Based on the most recent Amish population figures, there are more than 380,000 Old Order Amish people living in over 630 settlements. Joe Donnermeyer has dug deep into the settlement data – particularly a separate set of data which he discusses below.  Today Joe presents a list of Amish communities which cross state borders. In other words, communities having households in two neighboring states. Joe…

The new Amish population estimates are out for 2021 via the Young Center at Elizabethtown College. We’ll have some posts related to this coming up, including from Joe Donnermeyer of Ohio State University. In the meantime you can find the tables and map here. Some quick facts from the latest figures: The estimated total Amish population is 361,635 There are no new states, provinces or…

From the “Off-the-Amish-Beaten-Path Files” (not really a thing, but maybe it should be a thing): Reader Denise sends in a nice little account of an Amish store in a corner of Iowa. The community is Chariton, in Lucas County. I know little about it beyond what Denise shares, and what clues I can gather here and there. The Amish settlement list tells me this settlement…

I did a video looking at ten unusual Amish communities. Across 600 different communities and dozens of affiliations, you can notice quite a number of differences in the ways Amish people live and manifest their faith. So what makes these communities unusual or atypical? It could be something about how they worship, or get around, or other aspects of how they live. I drew on…

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the founding of an unusual (at least at the time) Amish settlement in Indiana. In December of 1991, two Amish families departed Lancaster County for their new home 700 miles away in the Hoosier State. New settlements were less common then than they are today, and Lancaster Amish had rarely moved outside the state to form new communities….

We’ve got a selection of photos from a Swartzentruber Amish settlement in Missouri today. This is Shannon County; this is in the vicinity of Summersville and Hartshorn. The photo collection is by Don Burke, who has passed through this community several times over the years. The community was started in 2006 according to the State & County Amish listing. It’s a single church district. We…

Fourteen Amish families settled in a corner of Kansas (Hartford in Lyon County) in the summer of 2020. That community just held a benefit to raise funds for a new school (article in the Emporia Gazette). Amishman Eddie Yoder explained that the event had two purposes: “to raise money for a much-needed school building and also an an opportunity to get to know people in…

I did a video giving my list of five friendliest Amish communities. I also discuss one well-known and large community that did not make the list. And, at the end I share two communities that I consider not-so-friendly, and why. If you’d like to see the written version of this video, you can find that here, though I add more detail in the video (and…