Spring is here, and that means plowing and planting time. Most Amish do not use tractors in the field. Some will keep a tractor for around-the-barn tasks, such as filling the silo. Why do the Amish limit tractors? Part of the problem is their similarity to cars. Get comfortable behind the wheel of a tractor, the thinking goes, and it’s a short hop to sitting behind…
lithograph: Stan Jolley An Amish friend recently pointed out that the Amish population (roughly 220,000 today), currently doubling in size every 20-odd years, will hit a million sometime in the 2050s. For what it’s worth, 200 years from now, if current trends hold (a huge ‘if’), we should expect to see…204 million Amish on the planet. That would be over five times the current population…
‘Made specifically for the plain people by the plain people’. The Classic boasts ‘unequaled safety’. It is ‘Not just a locked computer’, promising ‘No modem, no phone port or Internet connection, no outside programs, no sound, no photographs, no games or gimmicks’. The ad is found on page 3 of this year’s Lancaster County Business Directory, a collection of advertisements of hundreds of (mostly Amish…
Shannon shares some nice photos from the Amish settlement at Montcalm County, Michigan. Shannon says that the family she knows here belongs to the ‘Troyer Amish’ group. There are currently 24 Amish settlements in Michigan, according to the latest Calender, the almanac-and-guide to Amish church districts. The oldest Michigan settlement, that in the vicinity of Centreville in St. Joseph County, dates to 1910. It is…
Rumspringa: To be or not to be Amish got a lot of attention when it was released in the spring of 2006, with media such as the Wall Street Journal calling it a ‘wonderfully rich portrait and history of the Amish as a people and a faith.’ Rumspringa is also, and primarily, an on-the-scene look at a crucial period of Amish adolescence. Tom Shachtman was…
I was reading through the Economist magazine a couple of days ago and came across an article entitled ‘Where angels no longer fear to tread’, discussing a study whose main objective it describes as an attempt to provide a ‘biological explanation’ for religion. Whether science should be ‘poking its nose into the God business’ may be of issue to some. But if you can get…
As of 2024, there are two Amish communities in Orange County, Indiana – both a similar size (500+Amish people). Let’s have a look at a few more of Cindy Seigle’s Orange County, Indiana Amish photos with a few of my own comments attached. Again, we aren’t 100% sure which of the two Orange County groups each particular picture is from, but there are similarities between…
‘Sylvan’, one of my Amish friends in Lancaster County, runs a scooter workshop in addition to milking cows. In Lancaster County and related settlements, you rarely see bicycles–in Lancaster, for instance, there are only a few church districts I’m aware of that seem to allow them. I’ve also seen scooters in use among the Amish of Allen County, Indiana, and I’d imagine they’d be found…
Cindy Seigle (you can find Cindy on Flickr) has shared some interesting photos of a conservative Amish settlement in southern Indiana. In An Amish Patchwork, Meyers and Nolt explain that Orange County is home to two distinct Amish communities. The newer of the two groups is comprised of ultraconservative Swartzentruber-affiliated Amish from New York and Ohio who began settling in the area in 1994. The older…
They live about as far back in as you can get, two miles down a mud road, deep in the heart of a serene pine-and-birch forest. The neighbors are mostly friendly, and Jacob has worked out a deal with one of them – a big-city transplant and a bit ‘unhandy’ when it comes to farming – to manage and use a cow and some of…