Nancy A. Lininger

Comment on Reply to Alice Aber (February 16th, 2014 at 19:24)

Reply to Alice Aber

Alice, the reason WV has few Amish is likely the same reason the state has relatively few farms. Because WV is so mountainous, their is not enough flat land for large farms like we find in PA and Ohio. Amish need large farms. Large areas of what was once farmland has been destroyed by the timber and/or coal mining industries. Sadly it is still happening.

Vicki Mikell-Noel (maternal side was Pennsylvania Dutch Boyer)

Comment on Because that is the way it always has been (May 16th, 2012 at 16:38)

Because that is the way it always has been

I was born and raised in Amish country and twenty-seven years ago, my husband and I moved our family to West Virginia. Since becoming a “mountaineer”, I also have become very involved with technological information. Consequently, I have read ton upon ton of material that hammers it into an accepting and complacent “English” population that Lancaster valley of Pennsylvania is THE Amish area of the USA. That is so laughable to a senior citizen now who was a little girl with blond plaited hair and feedbag dresses meticulously made by my grossmudder Della Boyer who was a seamstress in addition to being a faultless gardner, canner, quilter, tatter, knitter, sausage, ponhaus and liver-pudding maker, baker, as well as a reasonably sound author of several lost volumns of her own poetry and cookbooks. We (my brother and I) grew up in a communal family household of grandparents and parents who farmed and various other “sometimers” of the aunts and uncles living with us for vacations or just “between”. Our lives were crafted in the image of the Amish tradition although we were not religiously connected to the Amish, we WERE Pennsylvania Dutch by language (try fitting together that combination…we spoke Amish-dutch but were Catholic!!) Our preferences in food, and home style management also fit easily into the Amish culture. Most of the kids with whom I began school were also in that tradition though only two little cereal-bowl haircut and barefooted boys were of the strict ordnung and they were not in that two room school for long before they were pulled to be “home schooled”…a very curious thing to ocur in the early 1950s. I never thought of my traditional “farm” upbringing as weird, unusual nor as being “not the same” as every other kid’s home life. AND WE WERE NOT IN LANCASTER VALLEY, but rather in Snyder County Pennsylvania over a hundred-twenty miles northwest of Lancaster County. As time went forward, I was confirmed in my Catholic faith as a teenager and recall the slow trek to Sunday morning Mass behind a line of black buggies all directing themselves toward the farm hosts of their home church of the week down Route 522. Many of the Middleburg/Kreamer area Christian families who had joined congregations of Lutherans or Catholics had church buildings in the eastern section of Snyder County in Selinsgrove and so were all in a queue of autos putzing along behind a stall of five-mile-an-hour wagons and nonchanlant horses. Father Burokowski used to hold up mass until his Middleburg altar boys arrived to serve…especially in the winter months when the roads were slick, but the steel-rimmed buggy wheels and sure-footed equines continued their ferrying of somber men in black and their families to one or the other of the Amish farms serving as the host “church home” of the week.

To this very day in my sixty-sixth year my favorite food is scrapple and liver pudding, bott boi, snitz und knept and homemade raspberry ice cream! And oh yes, if I get frustrated with a project, I let fly a line of well-recalled “Grandfather-speak” which I imagine shocks my West Virginian confessor as I begin, “Bless me Father, for I have sinned in Amish-Dutch…again!”