Are “PA Dutch” and “Amish” the same? Here in the heavily-touristed areas of Lancaster County you see “Pennsylvania Dutch” (or just “Dutch” for short), or “Amish” attached to just about anything with something to sell. To take a few examples: “Jakey’s Amish BBQ”, “Amish Paradise Homestays”, “Dutch Delights”, etc. Pennsylvania Dutch and Amish are often taken as synonyms, but they aren’t exactly one and the…
What to do when you’re a retired Amish bishop? Maybe a lecture tour. That could be what one Amish leader has in mind in northern Indiana. Goshen News reports that ‘Atlee Dan’ Miller recently gave a talk on Amish history and the settlement of his region, Amish education, and church splits to an audience at the Topeka Historical Society. The talk was held in the…
A small, accidental settlement of Amish apparently once existed in New Orleans. David Luthy explains that in the 1800s, many migrant Amish came to America from Europe by way of the Mississippi River port. Sometimes it happened that an Amish family lacked the funds to continue upstream and onward to established settlements, often in Illinois. Previous to 1850, stranded families formed a small and short-lived…
The Amish settlement at Piketon, Ohio was an odd one to begin with. A few things made the Amish who settled here in 1949 different from most. One was their evangelistic emphasis. Amish traditionally do not try to convert others. Piketon, Ohio was begun by a minister sympathetic to the idea of spreading Amish beliefs. Secondly, they were the first Amish congregation ever to publish…
Amish tourism did not begin with Witness. That 1985 film just made it worse (or better, depending on how you look at it, I suppose). David Luthy, writing in The Amish Struggle with Modernity, tells us that the first Amish-themed novel came out in 1905 (wait a minute–back when many of us English were still riding around in buggies!), the first Amish postcards around 1915,…
I just picked up my 2002 Indiana Amish Directory for Elkhart, Lagrange, and Noble Counties, and flipped to a random page. Here are the last names of the Amish in the 40 households in the district I landed on, in order:Â Â Bontrager, Bontrager, Bontrager, Bontrager, Bontrager, Bontrager, Bontrager, Bontreger, Bontreger, Eash, Gingerich, Hochstedler, Hostetler, Jones, Lambright, Lambright, Lambright, Lambright, Lambright, Lambright, Lehman, Miller, Miller, Miller,…
‘Our goal is to make Lancaster a center for the film industry.’ That’s Jay Ingram of the Lancaster Film Commission in an article (no longer available) at Lancaster Online. The 1985 Harrision Ford blockbuster Witness and the following media and tourist onslaught has irritated some in Lancaster. Donald Kraybill relates in The Riddle of Amish Culture that the Amish even considered using the ‘ultimate bargaining…
‘The typical English guy looks at one of us and just sees an Amish person. Actually there can be a lot of difference.’ So said a Holmes County Amishman, commenting on the diversity in his area. Compared to the Old Order Amish, the so-called New Order Amish are a curious mix–one which we might term technologically more liberal, but in some ways culturally more conservative….