Amish retreat leader Sam Shetler will not be tried in Cooper County, Missouri — the county where he ran the Mercy and Truth Retreat, and where he was arrested in March. Prosecutors have agreed to move the case. This is the latest in a case we’ve been following since Shetler’s arrest in late March. If you’re new to the story, he made his first court…
Just like your car, Amish buggies – not to mention their horses – need the occasional wash too. That’s the idea behind an upcoming event in the Shipshewana, Indiana area, passed along to us by Jim Halverson. This is the ad for a benefit buggy wash to be held about two weeks from now, on Saturday August 15: BENEFIT BUGGY WASH to be on Saturday,…
Grocery prices are on a lot of people’s minds lately, and for good reason. The USDA’s moderate-cost food plan has a family of four at around $1,385 a month as of this writing. Scale that up to a household of ten mouths to feed, and you’re well past $2,500. Why do I say ten? Well, that’s an average-sized Amish family – two parents and eight…
The Morrisons Cove Herald has a fuller writeup now of the July 21 Bedford Township (Bedford County, PA) meeting we’ve been following. It’s the one where supervisors were set to vote on the steel wheel and manure ordinance, but in the end – likely responding to the backlash from attendees – didn’t. We first covered the proposed ordinance a couple weeks back, then wrote about…
Another ending of sorts, this one on a story out of Williams County, Ohio ​we’ve been following since November. The driver who injured Martha Wagler, a 27-year-old Amish woman, and her two children in a hit-and-run crash last fall has taken a plea deal. As we covered back in November and again in December, Wagler’s buggy was struck from behind on November 12 in her community. The driver…
Auctions To Support The DDC Clinic Are Happening in Spartansburg, Pennsylvania (August 7) and Middlefield, Ohio (August 28) Two benefit auctions this August support the DDC Clinic in Middlefield, Ohio – an Amish-founded nonprofit that has identified more rare genetic disorders than any clinic in the world. In the late 1990s, a group of Amish mothers in Geauga County, Ohio – whose special-needs children met…
Kentucky is home to America’s eighth-largest Amish population. Over 17,000 Amish live in more than 50 settlements across the state. These ten communities are the largest in Kentucky, based on the most current Amish population estimates (2026). Population numbers via Young Center for Anabaptist & Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College (source link at bottom). 1. Munfordville Munfordville (Hart County) Community founded: 1989 Total Amish population:…
Looking at its name alone, the Amish Black Box Phone has an air of secrecy or mystery to it. Is it some sort of clandestine Amish spy-ops device? A tool meant for conveying bad news? Of course, many of us will connect “black box” with the recording devices used to record communication in plane crashes, another morbid association. But it’s none of those things. Rather,…
A Population Profile of the Greater Holmes County settlement of Northeast Ohio Out of 700-plus Amish settlements, there are four that can be considered super-sized. In previous editions of The Journal of Plain Anabaptist Communities (JPAC), profiles for three already were published. The first of these was by Lawrence Greksa about the Greater Geauga, Ohio settlement, published in volume 1, issue 2. This was followed…
Ben & Rose are back, this time covering a hymn beloved by many. “How Great Thou Art” went up on YouTube yesterday, their first new song since “Stroll Over Heaven” at the end of June. The hymn has an interesting history. It started life as a Swedish poem, “O Store Gud,” written by Carl Boberg in 1885, reportedly after he was caught out in a…