This morning I came across a pair of ads from an Amish builder named Junior Weaver on Craigslist. It’s always interesting to see the ways Amish companies, in this case construction outfits, promote themselves. Some do so with full-fledged websites, like my friend John Smucker in Lancaster County. Others rely primarily on word-of-mouth. The approach a business owner selects will in part reflect his church’s…
On the morning of Christmas Eve, I visited an Amish community in Summers County, West Virginia. This is near the Virginia border, about a half hour’s drive from the Pearisburg, VA settlement. The town is Forest Hill. The first place we came across was this double-business – Shady Hillside Variety Store and Kountry Crust Bakery. Inside. Keeping things toasty. On completing my purchase, I…
So this is one of the rougher-looking Amish places we’ve seen – maybe the roughest. You can see the exterior has an unfinished scruffy look to it. Inside, the place has been cleaned out, and also appears unfinished in parts. But it is a certified organic farm (or at least was until recently – it’s been on the market for the better part of a…
In this slice of Amish life, young men play ice hockey on New Year’s Day. This is Barren County, Kentucky, which has several Amish communities. The photos were taken in 2018. We don’t have the full view, but I’m curious what they are using for goals. Are they some sort of hockey nets or something simpler? The photos were taken by Don Sniegowski (via Flickr)….
I’m not sure that looking back “favorite” will be a word I’ll associate with 2020. But there were certainly bright spots in what most would probably agree was not the greatest year. In that spirit I am keeping with the usual tradition here of sharing a “favorite posts” year-end compilation. These are posts which either got a lot of responses from you, or that I…
A new store has opened in one of Kansas’s oldest Amish communities. Owners Robert and Elaine Headings bought an existing Amish store’s inventory (Anna Borntrager’s Country Variety Store) to outfit their new store. They also added some items. The business is now called R & E Country Store, and it opened about three weeks ago (any guesses where the new name came from?). The community…
Farmhouse Frocks is a Millersburg, Ohio clothing company run by an Amish-raised woman named Lena Schlabach and her daughters. Though Lena is no longer Amish herself, Amish women are key to this business, which makes plus-sized garments and other clothing. From Root and Vine News (hat tip to DBK): From the beginning, Farmhouse Frocks has partnered with Amish seamstresses to design and make the clothes…
Don Burke is back today to share his visit to the Graber family in Jamesport, Missouri, and his stay at their “Doddy House”. We’ve heard about the Graber family before in other posts from Don (links to follow). Don explains what the Doddy House is below. First off it’s not an Amish grandparents’ house, which is what the term usually refers to in PA Dutch…
I’m starting to dread looking at my Amish news feed because it seems every other story lately is some sort of tragedy. Sorry to say that this news out of Marquette County, Wisconsin falls into that unfortunate category. Amish often make use of frozen ponds and lakes for ice skating. In this case it ended with an accident and one child losing his or her…
A nice article in the Boston Globe on how the Amish came to settle Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Some excerpts: “They wanted to see a particular place,” Maclure recalled. “I told them it was getting awful dark. Let’s wait until morning. They asked if they might camp in a field or barn.” They’d brought sleeping bags. Maclure wouldn’t hear of it. “I said, ‘No, you’re not…