A few months ago I started to notice search traffic coming to this site for a curious term. “Amish wood milk” is not something I’d ever heard of. But quite a few people were looking for it, with even dozens a day landing here for “Amish wood milk”-related searches. How where they arriving at Amish America, since–to my knowledge–I’d never written anything about this mystery liquid…
You see a lot of this type of story. Amish-helping-English or vice versa. “Feel good”, though usually a bit boring (the headline tells you all you need to know). Still I’m glad these stories are out there. Good news when a lot of what qualifies as news is downright depressing. What got my attention was the strange event that got Amish and English together in this community…
One of our readers, Carl Oliver, recently attended an event on this month’s Amish auction list. Many Amish-attended auctions are benefit sales–raising funds for medical needs, schools, and other community-wide causes. Others include estate sales, auctions run as a private business, or, as in today’s example, moving sales. You see, moving when you’re an Amish farmer is not as simple as cramming the contents of the house into…
Anne is back with a new piece on her recent visit to her Amish convert son Ed‘s community in Minnesota. When last we heard from Anne, she was describing why she felt like a wimp living Amish for a few days. One thing the Amish have in abundance is children. It’s no surprise when they say their children are the only treasure they can take along to…
Three weeks ago the beard-cutting hate crimes convictions were overturned by a federal appeals court in Ohio. Following part 1 of his look at the case, today Donald Kraybill shares some analysis of the case reversals, including why they happened, why they matter for future cases and what might happen next. Maybe not surprisingly for a legal argument, it turns out the reversal hinged on the interpretation of just…
I love this time-lapse video. It’s the best I’ve ever seen of its kind. Here you can observe 10 hours of barn-raising condensed down to about 200 seconds. This took place in LaRue, Ohio, which is the Kenton Amish community. The photographer’s wife gives the back story: My husband, Scott Miller, shot this video with a Canon 60d Camera using a Pixel TW-282/E3 Wireless remote…
My father passed away two weeks ago, having been diagnosed with mesothelioma back in March. Following surgery in July, we were hopeful, but shortly thereafter learned that the cancer had already spread, and there was little more to be done. We lost him a few weeks later, at home. When you read about mesothelioma, a rare, aggressive disease which comes from asbestos exposure, you learn it is…
It’s been over 18 months since Sam Mullet was sentenced to 15 years in prison for his role in the beard-cutting attacks carried out on Amish in Ohio in late 2011. Others in Mullet’s group, including those who actually did the cutting, got sentences ranging from one to seven years. Donald Kraybill’s new book Renegade Amish: Beard Cutting, Hate Crimes, and the Trial of the Bergholz…
What do you know about the Amish of Geauga County, Ohio, the fourth-largest Amish community? Over 15,000 Amish live here. Yet the settlement kind of gets overlooked, especially with Holmes County so close. Among the buggies, windmills, and laundry lines of Geauga County, you’ll find something not often seen in other communities: the classic ice vending freezer. A friend who recently visited Geauga describes there being “hundreds” of them “all over the…
The Watertown Daily Times has published comments from the father of the two girls abducted last week in upstate New York. Mose Miller has 14 children, and is one of the Heuvelton community‘s bishops. In an interview with Johnson Newspapers in their Heuvelton home on Sunday, the girls’ father — Mose Miller, 44 — said he feels “sorry” for the suspects. “It’s sad,” Mr. Miller said. “They…