The Morrisons Cove Herald has a fuller writeup now of the July 21 Bedford Township (Bedford County, PA) meeting we’ve been following. It’s the one where supervisors were set to vote on the steel wheel and manure ordinance, but in the end – likely responding to the backlash from attendees – didn’t. We first covered the proposed ordinance a couple weeks back, then wrote about…
Another ending of sorts, this one on a story out of Williams County, Ohio ​we’ve been following since November. The driver who injured Martha Wagler, a 27-year-old Amish woman, and her two children in a hit-and-run crash last fall has taken a plea deal. As we covered back in November and again in December, Wagler’s buggy was struck from behind on November 12 in her community. The driver…
Auctions To Support The DDC Clinic Are Happening in Spartansburg, Pennsylvania (August 7) and Middlefield, Ohio (August 28) Two benefit auctions this August support the DDC Clinic in Middlefield, Ohio – an Amish-founded nonprofit that has identified more rare genetic disorders than any clinic in the world. In the late 1990s, a group of Amish mothers in Geauga County, Ohio – whose special-needs children met…
Kentucky is home to America’s eighth-largest Amish population. Over 16,000 Amish live in more than 50 settlements across the state. These ten communities are the largest in Kentucky, based on the most current Amish population estimates. Population numbers via Young Center for Anabaptist & Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College (source link at bottom). 1. Munfordville Munfordville (Hart County) Community founded: 1989 Total Amish population: 2,525…
Looking at its name alone, the Amish Black Box Phone has an air of secrecy or mystery to it. Is it some sort of clandestine Amish spy-ops device? A tool meant for conveying bad news? Of course, many of us will connect “black box” with the recording devices used to record communication in plane crashes, another morbid association. But it’s none of those things. Rather,…
A Population Profile of the Greater Holmes County settlement of Northeast Ohio Out of 700-plus Amish settlements, there are four that can be considered super-sized. In previous editions of The Journal of Plain Anabaptist Communities (JPAC), profiles for three already were published. The first of these was by Lawrence Greksa about the Greater Geauga, Ohio settlement, published in volume 1, issue 2. This was followed…
Ben & Rose are back, this time covering a hymn beloved by many. “How Great Thou Art” went up on YouTube yesterday, their first new song since “Stroll Over Heaven” at the end of June. The hymn has an interesting history. It started life as a Swedish poem, “O Store Gud,” written by Carl Boberg in 1885, reportedly after he was caught out in a…
A very sad and awful story is now coming to an end of sorts, as Samuel Hochstetler has pleaded guilty to aggravated murder in the death of 28-year-old Amish woman Rosanna Kinsinger. Kinsinger was found dead in her Meigs County, Ohio home back in March 2025. Hochstetler, 18 at the time, was arrested and charged nearly two months later in the crimes. After a series…
We pretty regularly feature posts on the Amish in Missouri on this site. So it’s probably no surprise to many readers that it is the #7 state when it comes to total Amish population. In a new piece on Amish in the state, the Columbia Missourian draws attention to another noteworthy Missouri Amish statistic. Namely, that the Show Me State has added more communities than…
This Amish home listing in Frazeysburg, Ohio contains the description “some of the most beautiful farm ground you can imagine.” Hard to argue after seeing these lovely photos. The property is 25 acres with the Wakatomika Creek running right along its western edge (visible in the photo below). The presence of an icehouse building (we’ll see that farther down) suggests this is an Amish group…