Tennessee Amish

Amish in West Tennessee

Amish in West Tennessee

Today Brenda shares some photos that tie together a few of the topics we’ve covered lately, namely Amish business, buggy safety, and small communities.  The shots below are from the Amish settlement in Carroll County, Tennessee. Carroll County is in western Tennessee, about a 2-hour drive in either direction from Nashville or Memphis. The Amish community is located near the towns of Huntingdon and Bruceton…

Amish Laundry Day

Amish Laundry Day

Brenda shares some photos from Carroll County, Tennessee, taken on a recent laundry day. We’ve had a lot of posts on the Ethridge, TN Amish, but not much from the other communities in the Volunteer State. There are only a few other Amish in Tennessee, and they are quite small settlements, so nice to hear from a lesser-known corner of Amish America. On to the…

Ethridge, Tennessee Amish Map

Ethridge, Tennessee Amish Map

The Ethridge, Tennessee Amish community is the largest in the South. It’s a Swartzentruber Amish settlement founded in the 1940s. Today there are well over 2,000 Amish living here. Typical of Swartzentruber settlements, it is a farming community supplemented by a lot of small shops and home enterprises. Amish commerce extends off the farm with some selling products off the back of the buggy in…

10 Views of the Ethridge, Tennessee Amish

10 Views of the Ethridge, Tennessee Amish

Last year I visited the Ethridge, Tennesse Amish community.  I was surprised to find that Ethridge is the Amish mecca of the South. For being a conservative Swartzentruber community, the place is crawling with tourists (relatively speaking, of course.  Lancaster County, this ain’t). It’s also a charming place to visit.  It’s got a rural feel despite the oversized tour wagons rumbling about. I hope you…

My First Visit To The Ethridge (TN) Amish

My First Visit To The Ethridge (TN) Amish

Update: I wrote the following after my first visit to the South’s largest Amish community way back in 2010. I didn’t know a lot about it, other than it was a very traditional community. I was pleasantly surprised by how friendly the Amish at Ethridge were. I hope you enjoy my impressions from the Ethridge Amish community. If you end up visiting maybe you’ll experience…

Tennessee Amish Produce Auction

Here’s an interesting article on a produce auction in the largest Amish settlement in Tennessee (article no longer online).  The settlement of ten church districts at Ethridge, Tennessee, is a conservative Swartzentruber Amish affiliation. So it was interesting to see local Amish contributing to this article, as well as learn that the area has something called an Amish Welcome Center with maps of farmhouses in…

Southern Amish

Southern Amish

From Lancaster, Pennsylvania, through Ohio and Indiana and on out to other long-established settlements in Illinois, Iowa, and Kansas, we tend to associate the Amish with the nation’s middle latitudes.  Since their earliest years in America, the Amish have gravitated to the cooler climes of these corn and dairy regions.  However, the Amish have also had a long history of attempting to settle America’s southern…

Leaving, once again

Following up a recent AA post on Amish families leaving the church, Kevin Williams at the Amish Cook is blogging an article on a down-south Lancaster-transplant Amish clan that ends up ‘going Pentecostal’. Some good points made by Kevin and the commenters…I would only add this:  on the article-writer describing the Amish ‘believing the use of modern technology to be a sin’…that really ain’t so….