Are the Amish starting to pay more attention to a state they have – til now – mostly ignored? A new community in West Virginia appears to be the latest example of a fresh trend of migration to the state. West Virginia lies wedged between Ohio and Pennsylvania, the two biggest Amish-population states. But for most of its history, it’s had little Amish settlement. However,…
The four Swartzentruber Amish plaintiffs who filed a lawsuit against the state of Minnesota over gray water disposal ended up losing their case in a ruling delivered in April. If you missed it, here’s a summary of the case/events, and our original post on the matter. Brian Lipford, the attorney for the Amishmen, has since asked for a new trial (article no longer online) along with…
What can you find in an Amish variety store? I’ve got over five dozen photos to share with you today from one of my favorites, so this should give you a pretty good idea 🙂 I recently returned, twice, to King’s Kountry Store in Halifax County, Virginia. I mentioned this place in my post earlier this year on the local Amish community. Bennie Ray and…
Where can you stay on an Amish farm? We often get this question, and happily around this time last year were able to point to amishfarmstay.com. The site lists Lancaster County Amish-owned properties where you can pay to stay overnight. As of last summer the site featured 6 Amish hosts; this year the listings have doubled to 12. So there are quite a few options now…
What’s it like to attend Amish church as an outsider? In previous posts, we followed Don and Pam Burke as they made their first trips to the Amish in Ohio and in Pennsylvania. In this third post in the series, Don and Pam take us along to a Lancaster County Amish church service*. If you’ve never attended an Amish church service, Don and Pam do…
There is a small but longstanding Amish community at Guthrie, Kentucky, right near the Tennessee border. Guthrie is one of the more atypical Amish settlements, as it is an “electric New Order” community. The Amish here permit electricity in the home, and also fully use tractors, even for road transportation. Still they are considered an Amish community, as they dress plain, use Pennsylvania Dutch, and…
It appears that the Lancaster County area will see a second controversial development come to fruition. Following the newly-approved satellite casino in Morgantown (technically in Berks County, on the edge of Lancaster’s Amish region), the Oregon Village housing development has been approved on a 3-2 vote by the Manheim Township Board of Commissioners. The development will bring over 500 new residential units to the rural…
Who to call when you need your building “hand-demolished”? To the general public, “Amish” often equates to handcrafted – meaning hand-milked cows, handmade quilts, hand-built furniture, and the like (whether that perception is always accurate is another question). And in that spirit, one Tennessee city found that an Amish hands-on approach was exactly what they needed to remove a historic structure. The Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle reports that…
We don’t often hear much on the Amish in Colorado, though there are a handful of Amish in the state, spread across four communities. But a recent snippet in the Conejos County Citizen brings word of the La Jara Amish settlement’s unusual plan…to build a meeting hall for community events: CONEJOS COUNTY — The La Jara Old Order Amish Church received permission for a needed structure…
Lancaster Online reports on an increasingly popular option for housing among Amish in Lancaster County: But as their numbers grow, more Amish want to live in a village, town or suburban development and have a small stable for a horse, just as the non-Amish have garages for cars. “It’s become a trend among the Amish community to live on these smaller residential lots as they…