Reader Mike Sparks shares photos from a Sunday visit to Ashland County, Ohio. Most of these are from the Swartzentruber settlement, though you’ll see several from the nearby Old Order community. Note the unusual buggy triangle in the final photo. Ashland County has several distinct Amish settlements. Sunday afternoon in Amish communities is a peaceful time. There is an increased amount of buggy and foot…
Aside from eating in an Amish home, people often want to know where they can find accommodation on actual Amish farms. A TribLive article points us to the website amishfarmstay.com, which lists six such properties – all run by Amish families. I’ve tried to answer this question over the years but never had a resource which gathered several such properties in one place. This site is the…
The past several weeks have seen quite a few buggy accidents in the news. The most headline-grabbing was the story of the Missouri woman who hit a buggy for the second time in a year. The first incident last September resulted in the death of a pregnant Amish woman. In the latest, the 83-year-old resident of Licking, MO, hit a buggy containing four youth, saying…
One thing that makes the Amish such a rich and vibrant group is that there are various ways of “being Amish”. Across nearly 700 different communities and dozens of affiliations, you can notice quite a number of differences in the ways Amish people live and manifest their faith. One common type of comment I come across is when someone comes to know the Amish in…
Would you like to eat a home-cooked meal in an Amish home? If you don’t yet have Amish friends who’ll feed you, you can always track down a home business providing meals for the public. Last year we heard about two such places, in Lancaster County and NE Indiana. Today, a look at another, in upstate New York. Beverly Kehe-Rowland writes about her friend Cindy…
In many ways, the Amish are not one uniform group. To take one example, there are material differences between churches and communities. On one end, there are Amish who permit telephones in the home, regularly hire Amish taxi drivers to transport them for errands or to and from work, and who have homes which visually resemble non-Amish homes, with beautiful gardens and “English” architectural flair….
An update on a group of Amish we covered in “Should Amish Buggies Have Car Safety Features – Like Seat Belts?” Amish in Wood County, WI have agreed to add amber lights to their buggies to improve visibility. Wood County officials previously considered an ordinance requiring seat belts, child car seats, and other enhancements, along with drivers needing to get licenses and insurance. This met…
In 2015 it was reported that Amish were moving to Vermont, to the area of Orleans County, part of a region known as the Northeast Kingdom. Vermont joined Maine to become the second New England state to currently have an Amish community. The Black Hills Pioneer (no longer online) updates us on the group three years later: BROWNINGTON — The yellow street signs showing a horse-drawn…
It’s graduation time for Amish eighth-graders. Lancaster Online shares a closer look at Amish and Old Order Mennonite schools in Lancaster County. Last year they published something similar, covered here. Here are 5 more things of interest from this year’s article (with comments from me in italics): 1. Different ways to get to school – there are several common ways Amish children get to school….
What should people who want to join the Amish or Mennonites or other Plain Anabaptist church believe? What about their behavior? What kind of commitments should they be ready to make? Nicci Price – who herself is a convert to an Old German Baptist Brethren church – writes in Mennonite World Review about getting regular requests from”seekers” wishing to become Amish or Mennonite. Over the…