10 Unusual Amish Communities

i've picked out 10 amish communities each with something about them that makes them distinct or unusual the amish are not a one-size-fits-all group and what i mean by that is that while amish communities have certain things in common like the horse and buggy plain clothing pennsylvania dutch as a first language there are often differences between communities so i'm going to run through these and give you briefly what makes each of these communities unusual number one somerset county pennsylvania this is actually the second oldest amish community it's not a big community it only has about a half dozen church districts what makes somerset county unusual now most amish when they have church they practice home worship they don't build separate church structures they have church service which is typically about a three hour service every other sunday they'll have that at a member's home that could be held in the basement amishams tend to have large basements or in another space in in the actual home or could be held in like a workshop outside or even in a barn that's typical for for amish the somerset county amish are among the few that worship in meeting houses so it's a very plain structure sort of resembles the amish school you know has like a front porch generally amish don't build churches looking at other denominations who build really big and expensive churches the amish see that as unnecessary maybe not practical maybe not the best use of funds a few communities develop this tradition of having meeting houses and somerset county is one of them so number two adams county indiana the settlement around the town of byrne this community is a so-called swiss amish community and swiss amish have different sort of cultural aspects or customs from kind of the majority of the amish which we might call the pennsylvania dutch amish one example of that would be that the amish at adams county don't use covered buggies they only use the open top buggies so you need to have an umbrella if it's if you know if the weather looks like rain another custom that's unusual in this particular swiss amish settlement because there are other swiss amish communities is the custom of yodeling so this is an old swiss tradition that the amish have maintained in america although in an article by kevin williams looking at this practice there was concern among the older generations that the younger generation there was not taking to the practice of yodeling when do they yodel one woman said that they tend to yodel whenever they feel it coming on which may be when they're working in the garden or doing the dishes chad thompson a professor of linguistics pointed out that it tends to be done in groups in this amish community rather than individually so it's kind of more of a group practice like a lot of things amish so not something you're gonna see in most amish communities number three milverton ontario so this is the oldest canadian amish community by far it was founded way back in the 1820s which actually makes it one of the oldest of all amish settlements and so this community has some very old traditions that it's capped this also includes the buggies without tops which is similar to the swiss armist although these are not swiss amish they have an older style of dress and they've also got some specific last names that you generally won't see in other places like yancy or coopfur number four dover delaware why is dover on this list well i put it here because they have an unusual buggy style they actually have kind of a rounded side buggy you can notice amish that have moved from this dover settlement because they've started a number of communities in other states and places including virginia and kentucky and new york if you come across one of these communities in another state you can kind of tell that it originated in dover just by looking at a specific style of buggy number five pinecraft florida now there are a lot of things that kind of make this community unusual but just in the context of buggies this is probably the only amish settlement where the amish here don't use the horse and buggy now they get around by bicycles or tricycles the reason is because this settlement is actually essentially located in the city of sarasota this is not a community with farms and you know big areas of green open land this is basically a neighborhood of sarasota not a lot of amish live here year round but it gets a lot of um issue vacationers who come from northern states like ohio and indiana and illinois and pennsylvania to spend a week or several weeks here in the winter months and there are some people that live here year round there are some amish retirees this is probably the only amish community that doesn't have the horse and buggy makes it unusual number six harrisburg virginia this is a community tucked away in the mountains of western virginia what makes this place unique well it's what you might call a seeker-friendly community and that means that it is fairly open to outsiders who are interested in joining the amish or it has at least attracted outsiders over the years and it's pretty friendly in that sense and one particular aspect that's quite unusual here is that for visitors they have been known to provide a live interpretation of the pennsylvania dutch language service that's something that you don't normally get when you go to attend an amish church service so it's usually in pennsylvania german or pennsylvania dutch and i've heard occasional english thrown in but 99 plus percent of it is going to be not not in english number seven garnett kansas this might be one of the most surprising if not the most surprising on this list although number 10 is pretty surprising as well but in this settlement members of this community may actually drive cars for work purposes now this is an amish you know settlement it's one of the more progressive ones as you might guess but uh they don't own the cars they don't use the car for personal purposes but they have an allowance there that members who need to drive the vehicles for their work purposes are able to do so now this exception has occurred in other places is a very kind of rare exception most notable places the community of arthur illinois donald crabble and steven mill discussed this in their book amish enterprise in the mid-1950s amish had acquired driver's license and were driving work trucks and that practice grew from that point although it eventually declined quite an unusual one this is not something that's common and i would guess this would probably surprise amish people if you told them that this is something that's permitted in this particular community so they're kind of still holding a line there of not owning the cars and not using them for personal purposes but they're allowing some kind of let's call it practical use for for work purposes so you see amish draw lines when it comes to technology in some interesting places sometimes other amish churches are not going to agree with this but this kind of underscores the idea that there are many different ways of being amish within the horse and buggy amish world number eight elmer ontario so a couple interesting things about this community in canada this is the home of arguably the most influential amish publishing house pathway publishers they're responsible for a number of widely read publications among the amish and plain people best known of those would be family life which is a publication that started in the late 1960s you'll find that in amish households where you have you have stories that teach morals you have people writing in with questions issues in their community amish consider this to be very wholesome inappropriate reading elmer's interesting too because it's part of what you might consider the reformist amish who emphasize high moral standards which would mean like being maybe more restrictive on some of the dating practices courtship practices that might also include you know not using alcohol for example or or tobacco while at the same time keeping quite low levels of technology sometimes you have the first part but also having higher levels of technology and that's more common in what you'd call the new order amish churches that kind of combination number nine indian valley pennsylvania and this is a very small community also quite old it's actually been around since i think 1924 so nearly 100 years old but it's only i know a dozen a dozen and a half homes there what makes this community unusual is the color of their buggies they're actually an unusual kind of yellow hue it's sort of a brownish yellow this is the least common amish buggy color the most common amish buggy color is black that's seen in hundreds of communities while this is really only seen in one but i talk a little bit more about that in my video on the six amish buggy colors and i'll put a link to that in the video description finally number 10 colonia narendrita bolivia there have been a community actually two communities in south america because there's a there's also a community in argentina that have existed there since 2015. and that's a pretty unusual story of how that happened in an ap article on this stephen nolt of the young center at elizabethtown college described what happened latin america has quite a significant population of what's called old colony mennonites who are similar to the amish in some ways they speak a german dialect that's not the same one but they have a quite a plain lifestyle they wear distinct let's say plain clothing and they have a number of similarities with the amish so they're not they're not amish so these old colony mennonites in bolivia and argentina in recent years have had some problems some basically being isolated from other groups had some financial problems they actually wrote to an amish publisher in canada which i suspect is the pathway publisher that i mentioned in the elmer ontario item on this list and which eventually helped them get in touch with amish in ohio from the new order amish group which permits air travel in certain circumstances and they were able to go down and visit them in south america and so what happened was that after this trip they actually sent two families to settle there to help create amish communities that the mennonites living there could join and that's what ended up happening and so you've actually got two settlements you've got the one in bolivia that i've mentioned in this list and also the one in argentina thousands of miles away from the majority of amish way down in south america which definitely makes this community qualify as unusual so that's my list of 10 unusual amish communities i also did a video on the 10 largest amish communities and one on the five friendliest amish communities in my opinion so you can check those out here thanks talk to you next time

Channel: Amish America

Views: 82,483

Keywords: Amish people, Amish communities, Amish customs, Amish buggies, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Virginia, Florida, Delaware, Ontario, Amish places

Id: p1e5UIpKLVo

Length: 11min 38sec (698 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 23 2021