Idaho’s Only Amish Community Lost Its Market To Fire. 6 Months Later It’s Back — And Bigger

Six months after a fire destroyed their country store, an Amish family in Lemhi County, Idaho has reopened it – and the owner says he was initially inclined not to rebuild at all.

Baker Country Market is in the unincorporated community of Baker, about nine miles southeast of the larger town of Salmon, by which the community is sometimes known.

Paul and Maria Miller opened it in 2015, and it grew to be a beloved part of the community. It burned to the ground on February 21, leaving a total loss estimated at $1.2 million. Fire officials determined the cause to be embers from a debris burn near the building.

The next morning, the community turned out to clear the site. Contributions began coming in to help the family. The settlement itself, the only Amish community in Idaho, dates to 2012 and has remained a single church district in size, around 120 Amish residents.

It’s funny because I was just this past week looking back at this story, and wondering how they were coming along. Then I saw the news out today on their reopening – which actually happened over a week ago, on Friday, August 14.

East Idaho News reporter Rett Nelson, who visited the Millers at the store for the outlet’s “It’s Worth Mentioning” program (video at bottom), described a line of customers running around the building on opening day.

The Owner Was Leaning Against Rebuilding

In the weeks after the fire, Paul Miller says he was not inclined to rebuild, citing the amount of work involved. Speaking with Nelson, he says family members and community leaders – Amish and non-Amish – pressed him to reconsider: “So I don’t claim a lot of credit for opening back up.”

Maria Miller says Paul had been considering going into construction work with their sons instead. I think I can see Paul’s perspective in the aftermath of such a loss. It must be terribly demoralizing, or can be if you let it I suppose.

Customers came to the family directly and asked them to rebuild. A family friend sat down with the Millers more than once to help them work through the decision.

Maria explained how a son helped them see the reason:

And our children said, “We don’t know why the store burned down.” But one of my boys, his name is Malachi, said, “We now know why we need to rebuild. Because we didn’t know how many friends we had, and that’s why the store burned down. God wanted us to know that we had so many friends.”

That’s pretty powerful and certainly an uplifting way of looking at things. And here six months later those friends have to be glad that their favorite store is back up and running.

The Store Was Not Insured

Like many Amish families, the Millers were carrying no insurance on the building. Maria was in South Carolina with her daughter and sisters when the call came. She says that she initially assumed the caller was joking. That would be a pretty bad choice of humor in my book. Maria presumably soon learned it was not a joke. “It was very devastating,” she says.

The news reached her through her daughter:

And my daughter was crying and she came and told me, “Mom, they said the store is burning down.” And I called right away and they said, “Yeah, it is true. The store is burning down.”

Here is how Maria described the exchange with Paul about insurance:

And it was so devastating because I asked my husband like a month before, “Do we have insurance?” And he said, “No, we don’t.” And I told him, “What if it burns down?” And he was like, “There’s a 3% chance that it’ll burn down.” And it burned down.

The New Building Is About 20% Bigger

As we saw in the follow-up report, cleanup started the morning after the fire, with roughly 20 people on site by 7 a.m. and equipment including excavators, skid steers and dump trailers. Volunteers donated time, materials and equipment toward the rebuild.

There were both Amish and non-Amish among the volunteers. In the more remote and smaller Amish communities, that type of thing is more common especially when you have fewer Amish hands to help out as compared to the bigger communities.

Paul Miller says the replacement building runs about 20 percent larger than the original. The added space went mainly into wider aisles rather than expanded inventory: “People can meet each other in the aisles without having to feel they’re in somebody else’s way.”

So there’s a plus – an aspect of the store that might have been bugging you or your customers a bit now gets fixed on the second go-round.

He says the store will add stock over the next couple of years, weighted toward non-food items. The market’s best-known product remains its fried pies. Miller also notes that their sandwiches are made with bread baked fresh each morning.

The Millers Plan To Stay

Asked whether the family intends to remain in the area, Paul Miller said he has no other plans, and that the response to the fire showed the family how deep its friendships in the valley ran.

Nelson’s full conversation with Paul and Maria Miller runs 36 minutes and covers considerably more ground, including Amish belief and practice, technology in the settlement, and why the family chose Idaho.

Though Paul has been interviewed on camera before, the Millers declined to do so this time, so the interview is audio only. There are some interesting parts in the rest of the talk beyond the report on the market, so we may come back to that in a future post. You can listen to the whole thing here: