Minnesota Amish

The Amish of Harmony, Minnesota are putting old things to use again.  From the St. Paul Pioneer Press: Jonas Hochstetler looked around at the eight abandoned greenhouses, thought of the work for a few seconds — and smiled. Hochstetler and eight other Amish men had just traveled nearly three hours from their hometown of Harmony, […]

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I am speaking with someone shortly for a story on use of the Amish name to sell products.  I’ve found this a topic people react strongly to. Doing anything involving the Amish name to make a buck is obviously exploiting them, after all. I’ve also found that with reflection some see it differently. There are […]

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The Harmony, Minnesota Amish community is the largest in the state. In the video below, a television station visits the community and interviews an Amishman named Dennis as well as a local tour guide. It’s a brief but enjoyable look at this conservative Swartzentruber settlement. I don’t recall a lot of cases in which Swartzentruber […]

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The familiar yellow buggy warning sign tells drivers “Amish ahead”. But there is no standardized design. So the signs you see can vary. Below, twelve examples of Amish buggy warning signs you’ll find across America – and one from outside our borders. From Dauphin County, near Elizabethville, Pennsylvania.  Dauphin County is home to a sizeable […]

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Chilly Minnesota is home to over a dozen Amish settlements.  Amish first found their way to the state way back in the late 1800s. But they did not really get a foothold in the North Star State until the 1970s, when communities were founded in Wadena and Todd Counties, and at Harmony in Fillmore County […]

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Here’s a pretty mundane news story about buggy warning signs being painted over with big red X’s in a Minnesota Amish community (no longer online). This sort of thing goes on to greater and lesser degrees in many places where the Amish live.  Could the culprits be English bigots, kids out for a prank, Amish […]

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photo: Jerry Olson/Post-Bulletin Some Amish in Minnesota will need a new outlet for their milk.  The last creamery in Minnesota to accept milk in cans–mostly provided by local Amish–no longer does.  I guess you call that an end of an era. Milk is an important liquid in Amish America.  And surprisingly, a controversial one as well. […]

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Some Amish avoid vaccination. Why? There are a few reasons why, but some have a motive similar to why almost all Amish avoid insurance:  it would be placing faith in an outside body instead of in God. A lot more Amish do vaccinate their kids than participate in insurance programs, however.  The motive rings clear […]

Continue Reading The Amish, polio, and other unusual ailments