While putting together last week’s post on 5 old but small Amish communities, I came across another real estate listing for an Amish farm – this time in Indiana in the Kokomo settlement.
While the exterior photos are not great (taken on an overcast day), there are good photos of the interior showing the different rooms.
This place has a classic Amish look to it and reminds me of countless farmhouses I’ve visited in Indiana, Illinois and other Midwestern states. This one has a solar panel on the roof.
Kokomo is a mainstream-to-progressive settlement (permitting tractor farming), and so the contrast with the images from the recent look inside a very plain New York Amish home should be obvious.
The first thing that jumps out is this home’s kitchen with running water and appliances and other amenities.
Linoleum floors and wooden cabinets are commonplace in Amish homes. Here’s the refrigerator which most likely runs on propane or natural gas.
The overall look of this place could resemble a non-Amish farmhouse kitchen of 50 years ago. The smoke detector and the lighting would be two exceptions to that comparison however.
There is a second kitchen photo which is described as a canning kitchen located on the main floor.
The living room with musical clock, comfy sofa and recliner seats.
Another angle showing the heating stove.
View back into the kitchen with china cabinet.
Oddly this is the only bedroom shown in the photo set. It looks like one of the children’s rooms, possibly a teen/youth.
I’m not sure this is the best photo to really “sell” the closet space, but here we have an up-close shot of a lot of Amish clothing hung in a closet.
The bathroom.
What about heat, lighting, and hot water? From the listing:
The property does not currently have electricity from the grid. It does, however, have solar power available. There are some lights that run from the solar source, as well as gas lights throughout the home. Heat for the home and the water heater are sourced from solar power as well.
So the buyer would need to be ready to live a lower-power lifestyle, or convert the place to a standard public electric setup.
While the exterior photos don’t look very “autumn,” this calendar says October 2018.
Why is this property online?
There is always the question of why these properties end up in an online brokerage and not simply sold directly to another Amish family.
In some of these cases you might speculate that the seller is a family which has been excommunicated from the church, which would preclude doing business with church members in good standing.
But this is a community which practices a milder form of church discipline so I don’t think that is the issue here.
Probably more likely is the fact that this is a small settlement (two church districts) that, as we saw in the previous post, does not really grow.
So the demand among Amish is more limited than in a larger, or even similarly-sized community which is rapidly expanding.
Perhaps the seller simply wanted to expand the potential market for this farm home, possibly selling to a non-Amish person willing to invest in adapting it to English standards (or someone who wants to take a crack at living an Amish-like lifestyle).
Property details
Confusingly, there are two sets of details given for the home. It is either 2,446 square feet, or 3,150 square feet, and has either four bedrooms or three, and three full bathrooms.
There is a barn, and several outbuildings, including a garage-type building (described as “a large detached 2 car garage” though obviously it has mainly been used for buggies not cars).
The home was reportedly built in 1900 and renovated in 1964. Looking at the architecture, I’m going to guess they added an addition onto the home at some point.
The property acreage is also unclear – it either consists of 19 acres, or just eight. Either way it would be small for an Amish dairy. It was sold last year for $270,028. No word on who the buyer was.
All in all it looks like a clean, simple, classic Amish-style farmhouse. I think it would make a pleasant place to live.
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Thanks for posting these when you find them. It’s always nice to get an inside look. I agree with you that it looks like a pleasant place to live, and Ideal for someone who wants to live off the grid.
Amish houses for sale
If u know of any for sale here in the NY area I’m about 1/2 hour from PA border I would certainly be interested! Please send me info on any if found! Thanks
Familiar
So many of the rooms in this home look like mirrors to my grandparent’s property. The living room furniture is the same they had. My GP’s had a canning kitchen in the basement.
Cozy house
“The overall look of this place could resemble a non-Amish farmhouse”
No kidding. A very cozy looking place to live in 2020. Even an exact of my Maytag Fridge.
I enjoyed viewing these pictures from a home in the Kokomo settlement. I’ve only very briefly visited the settlement once — about 20 years ago. I agree
with you about the resemblance of the house to a farmhouse 50 years ago. The whole interior reminds me of an aunt and uncle’s farmhouse in the late 50’s and early 60’s. The heater resembles the only heater we had on the first floor in our own farmhouse. We lived in an area that gets very cold in the winter and had no heat in our upstairs bedrooms. I wondered what type of heat, if any, this house had in its upstairs bedrooms. It can get pretty cold sometimes in the winter in that part of Indiana.
How do Amish communities stay small w/ high birthrate?
This community and others I see being referred to as small, staying small over the decades, etc. With the Amish birthrate being high, the only way that is possible is if the land gets subdivided, other ways of making money are taken up, and/or the kids leave or work jobs elsewhere. If an Amish community has managed to keep large farm spreads for generations and not grown in size, that means their kids have gone elsewhere.
Good bones!
It looks pretty darn good for a 120-year-old farmhouse! I could live there, but would have to install more solar panels to power an AC unit
for sure!
I grew up in a similarly old Chicago house that only had gas space heaters, similar to what’s shown here. My mother used the laundry area of the basement as a temporary canning kitchen when my aunt (with a huge vegetable garden) gave her a bushel or two of tomatoes and other produce to can and pickle.
Alice Mary