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…
When we hit the dog days of summer, there are times I just feel like crawling into the freezer, closing the door and hanging out in there awhile (I guess I’d need a bigger freezer to make this dream happen). Home freezers are another one of those once-luxuries, now-conveniences which we use, really 24/7, but tend to take for granted. Not all Amish have such easy…
Amish use of technology often puzzles outsiders. This is exacerbated when observers see Amish using a piece of technology that doesn’t seem to fit their notion of what the Amish should be. Simply put, people are disappointed when they discover the Amish aren’t as “Amish” as they expected, due to the technologies they allow. Sometimes this leads to accusations that Amish have “betrayed their roots”…
Why should the Amish approach to technology matter to the rest of us? I asked Donald Kraybill if he’d share a little today about Amish tech, and the upcoming conference “Amish America: Plain Technology in a Cyber World“: Why should we be interested in Amish technology? The Amish are one of the few communities around the world that have deliberately tried to tame technology in…
The full schedule for Amish America: Plain Technology in a Cyber World has now been posted, along with paper abstracts and event descriptions. The conference will take place June 6-8, 2013 at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College (Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania). From the conference main page: The conference will include more than 100 presentations in a variety of formats—plenary lectures, academic papers, panel…
Here’s a photo of the light over the kitchen table in an Amish home (taken in Mark Curtis’ Ohio home): Some Amish homes have propane fixtures built-in. You’ll find them in nearly every room of the house, just as you’d find electric fixtures in an English home. In other houses you may see hooks in the ceiling from which portable lights can be hung. There…
The Buckeye Tool Expo was held a little over a week ago in Dalton, Ohio. From what I hear it was a dynamic event packed with people from all over. Some correspondents from NPR’s “Planet Money” attended and interviewed an Amishman named Elva Otto (who I’m guessing by his name is probably from the Arthur, Illinois community). Elva was the only Amish person who agreed…
Earlier this week we heard from a reader who visited the Unity, Maine Amish community. We learned about the Kenneth and Katie Copp family, who run a pair of businesses, the Living Grains Bakery and Locust Grove Woodworks. In the video below Kenneth gives a brief tour of the workings of his horse-powered mill which produces the flour used in Living Grains. You’ve also got…
Tom in New York checks in again today with a piece of technology that can be a necessity this time of year, depending on your latitude. This horse-drawn snow plow is at the ready on an Amish farm in the Conewango Valley in western New York. This machine was made by Pioneer Equipment of Dalton, Ohio, a well-known manufacturer of horse-drawn equipment in the Holmes…
In closing a recent post on Amish use of solar and wind power, I joked: Maybe one day we’ll observe Amish buggies rolling down the road, plastered with solar panels, or with whirling wind turbines planted on their roofs. The first part of that tongue-in-cheek prediction is actually closer to reality than one might think, at least for some Amish. A reader shares a photo of a solar…
