A Visit To Plain Mennonites (Pennsylvania)

In this video I show you more of my visit to the horse-and-buggy Mennonite community in Buffalo Valley (Union County, PA). You’ve already seen the posts on the Mennonite bakery and market – they appear here too as well.

Additional things you’ll see in this video are a visit with to an old cemetery in Buffalo Valley where 19th-century Amish settlers are buried, some snowy views of the Mennonite community, as well as more photos from the market and bakery in Snyder County. My friend Ben and his son make an appearance too. Runtime: 4:40. (See the full video transcript below).

Visiting Plain Mennonites

In Lancaster County recently, I had a chance to take a trip to visit a couple of Mennonite communities in a different part of Pennsylvania.

Now when you say Mennonites in general, that can mean many different things. Some Mennonites are very modern, just like any other Americans, and some of them can be very plain.

Check out my video on the difference between Amish and Mennonites for more on that.

Now the communities we visited were both horse-and-buggy Mennonite communities. I went with my friend, Ben Riehl, whom you might remember from the videos explaining Amish auctions and buying a horse.

Buffalo Valley Mennonites

The first community we went to was called Buffalo Valley in Union County in central PA. You can see from these photos, we had some interesting weather that day, quite wintry weather and it got more snowy as the day went on.

Now what was interesting about the Buffalo Valley area is that there once existed an Amish community here, starting in the 1830s. And Amish people lived here for 90 years.

You can see it’s a beautiful valley. We passed by some Mennonite stores, a school, very big farms. Apparently quite a few Mennonites live in this area. You can notice some by the black buggies as you can see right here in this photo.

One of our destinations was an old cemetery where a lot of the old Amish settlers were buried, including Elias Riehl. He was a bishop there for about a quarter century.

There was a mailbox where you can actually leave your name on a visitor’s log, and we had a look at some of these old gravestones. It even looks like one here was replaced by someone at some point for this Jacob Byler.

So unfortunately, we weren’t able to visit everywhere we wanted in that valley because of the weather. I had a rental car. And it wasn’t a 4-by-4 Jeep.

So, you know, we weren’t really wanting to get stuck, especially since we had to make it to a Christmas dinner that night, and we had about a two-and-a-half hour drive to get back.

Snyder County, PA Mennonite Market

So we started heading back and we actually passed through another horse-and-buggy Mennonite community in Snyder County. You could see the Mennonite homes on the side of the highway as we passed by.

And I noticed right up ahead, there was a telltale sign of what looked like something like an Amish market. Now, of course, it was actually a Mennonite market.

So I quickly pulled over even though we were on a on a time schedule, but we had we couldn’t pass this up. This was a really neat market as you can see here. They had a lot of apples for sale, cider, bird food, you know, outside. This was definitely the Christmas season. Poinsettias everywhere.

They had a lot of gift baskets. What’s interesting about the store is if you’ve been in Amish stores before, you can see this really looks quite similar to a typical Amish store in the decor and the types of products, in the gaslight that you see on the ceiling.

I believe this is about the plainest of the horse-and-buggy Mennonite groups, known as the Stauffer Mennonites or or “Pikers” – “Piker Mennonites”. Ben, of course, spoke with the lady working there in Pennsylvania Dutch because they share that in common with the Amish as well.

Picked up some beautiful cards. I got a book. I got some canned goods. We noticed actually they had some baked goods that looked really interesting. And as I was checking out, the lady mentioned the bakery just next door. I totally missed the bakery as we came in.

Snyder County Mennonite Bakery

When we stepped outside, I did notice there was an amazing smell. It smelled to me like apple cobbler. Even though the clock was ticking, we had to pop in there as well. I’m really glad that we did. This was one of the best bakeries I’ve been in.

Quite small, but you had about a half dozen Mennonite ladies just busy at work there in the back.

All sorts of different treats. Of course, the pies and the breads. You had a lot of cookies. You had this pretty amazing looking fruitcake that I also picked up just chock full of nuts and other things that go in fruitcake.

A couple of my favorite things too I got here were pecan pie squares, and also granola bar squares. Both really delicious.

The prices here were really quite good. It was only like $4 for each of those, squares boxes. I feel like if this was Lancaster County, it could be even double that for the same thing. Really awesome bakery.

I recommend stopping in there if you have a chance. Oh, one other thing that, Ben couldn’t pass up as we were leaving, we actually passed this homemade sauerkraut sitting outside the market. This is apparently the good stuff. Definitely had to grab a bag of that.

So I hope you enjoy this quick look at a couple of Mennonite communities and market and bakery.

Maybe some of you know these communities. I’d love to hear anything you know about them in the comments – or other horse-and-buggy Mennonite communities that you might have been to.

For more, see:

• Visiting a Mennonite Market (21 Photos)
• Visiting a Mennonite Bakery (16 Photos)
• Mennonite Bakery: A Return Visit (22 Photos)
• Mennonite Mincemeat Pie
• Mennonite vs Amish: What’s the Difference?

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