5 Friendliest Amish Communities (and 2 NOT-so-Friendly...)

all right so i'm going to tell you today about the five most friendly in my opinion amish communities i'm also going to tell you about one very large and famous and popular amish community that didn't make this list and why and at the end i'm also going to give you a couple two communities that are i found to be not so friendly and why that was so let's do it so the first community i put on my list was davis county indiana this is in a community in southern indiana this is actually the second amish community i ever really spent a lot of time in this is way back in 2004 i i lived in this area for three weeks i sold books to the people in this community i visited just about every amish home that had you had children the books i was selling were bible story books so that was kind of their market the amish people here uh now i may be a little bit partial to this but you know i grew up in the south i'm from north carolina and the amish in this part of indiana actually speak with fairly thick southern accents and that's a little surprising when you think of like the amish accent that you might hear in some other communities like lancaster county pennsylvania people they're just very cordial very friendly i found it very easy to to make a connection with very easy to speak with very easy to you know show my books to you when i was selling books i try to take a very laid back approach to people and very very low pressure and easy going so that may have helped but davis county i just have warm memories of this community and other amish i've heard talk about the ambition of this community in similar terms as well so i don't know if this is considered this is southern indiana it's not technically the south it's fairly close to kentucky i don't know if this is considered southern hospitality but you could think of it maybe as a southern hospitality type thing among the amish number two this next community is a very tiny community you probably haven't heard of it before but it's a small community in ohio the community is hicksville ohio i first found out about this community before i even visited because i was in the northern indiana community elkhart lagrange county selling books there and i would every now and then i'd run into a person who came from hicksville ohio they were always the friendliest person that i'd met all day and it was just always like like clockwork uh and the northern indiana people are not unfriendly themselves the el carte lagrange communities are actually quite friendly they're not on this list but i found them to be also quite friendly but the hicksville ohio people tended to stand out so this community kind of stuck out stood out in my mind i said i gotta visit this place someday to to see for myself i later visited the hicksville community and definitely confirmed my impression i spoke with a lot of people there it's just a very uh nice nice community but must be something in the water there that's the community it's been there a very long time it's been there since uh the 1910s i think 1914 or something like that it's a it's a neat little community friendly and this is one that i had i picked up on before i even visited there number three and by the way these are in no particular order the third community i have on the list is homes county ohio and holmes county is a place that you know you're going to find all types of amish here again this is a very diverse settlement you'll find again very conservative honest very progressive very predict traditional you'll find the new order i'm assure who tend to be tend to have a reputation to be very kind of open outsiders the presence of the new order here contributes to my impression of this community as a friendly community but they're actually a pretty small percentage of all the amish here in general i find it to be a quite a laid-back community it's again more rural area uh it's it's a very amish area like it's quite you know it's the second largest amish communities the amish people are everywhere so it's a very very heavily amish settlement just has a nice atmosphere you've got a lot of small towns the people there are just just have a friendly vibe in general i find this to be one of the most friendly of all the amish communities number four is somerset county pennsylvania and this is one that's similar to the hicksville ohio example i started to form my impression of this community as a very friendly one even before i had visited there it happened that i had to make a series of phone calls to the to amish in the community in search of a certain amish business there and i just got the impression that these people were really just really friendly because they were just i was a random stranger calling and i just time and again i'd have people wanting to talk to me and they were just make small talk and just kind of a just felt like a friendly openness when i got him on the phone there and and i i also remember that they do they actually do have kind of a southernish draw here too i mean it's southern pennsylvania maybe there's a thing of the southern ends of states pick up southern drawls i don't know but but uh that's something that's something i picked up here too and again that may be influencing my my bias here but uh but in general i found them to be very friendly on the phone with me and then later when i went to visit the community i also found it to be quite a friendly place so that helped to confirm my impression i spent some time i visited some businesses i spoke to a good number of amish here it was a small sample size but the impression here was strong enough for them to make the list finally number five on my list of most friendly amish communities is pinecraft florida this is a unique community it gets a lot of attention it's a it's a it's an unusual amish settlement place it's destination we could call it this is actually a neighborhood really of sarasota even though it's technically not in the city limits of sarasota but it's just a like a grid street neighborhood where amish live in florida and this was started way back in 1927 this community and it over the years became a destination for amish retirees in amish vacationers from ohio indiana pennsylvania illinois in the colder months you'll find amish from all over here they'll come down and stay for a week or two and this will be kind of a place to get away from the cold and to enjoy the florida sun in a plain community in a plain amish and mennonite community you won't see any horse and buggies here except you'll see like i think you'll see maybe one horse and buggy like mannequin or whatever outside one of the restaurants but there's no horse and buggies here amish get around with bicycles and large tricycles or like adult-sized tricycles that they use to pedal around the streets and and of course walking the i i guess it's a factor of maybe the types of amish that this place place attracts uh the fact that people here are tend to be on vacation or retired or whatever it might be these tend to be more of the more progressive amish that come down here business owners so they're more used to dealing with a non-amish public you know they're also coming to a unique sort of community they're they're in like basically in like a city i think all those factors may combine to you know of course the florida sun and the good atmosphere combined to make this a very friendly community i recently watched another youtube video by a guy named peter santaniello who went down to this community and just visited and he had a lot of impressions of the ambitious closed and you know very you know didn't want to talk to outsiders and of course you know surprised he visited there and he kind of had his impressions flipped upside down because people were very willing to meet with him and talk with him and be on camera even and so forth so pinecraft one of the most friendly communities so one community i left out one very big famous well-known community is lancaster county pennsylvania and why did i do that well it's not that these the people here are not friendly or kind or or anything like that i have a number of amish friends here and uh close friends where i i'll stay with them i'll stay at their homes i just you know good friends and the lancaster amish also have a reputation for hospitality and this is something i heard about lancaster county before i'd even visited there from the omission homes county which is on my most friendly list here one of my friends i remember in holmes county was telling me that i told him i was planning to go to lancaster county i remember he said something like well they really roll out the red carpet for you there and he was just kind of amazed at how hospitable the people in lancaster were you know taking care of visitors so they definitely have that recipe reputation for hospitality i think that on account of all the tourists and being under the spotlight more than any other amish community in lancaster county because it's the most again the biggest the largest it's close to new york city so whenever someone's doing like uh an article on the amish the the obvious choice to visit is lancaster county so they get a lot of attention that way so i think because of all the tourism and media attention your average amish person in lancaster county is probably not going to be as immediately sort of cordial and you know welcoming to strangers as maybe not amish people in some of the midwestern communities i can't say i blame them either you know you've got i don't know if it's 10 million tourists go through there every year people taking pictures people you know from all over so you know you're kind of under the microscope there so i can't really say that i blame them for that but again it's funny that you know i don't put them on my most friendly list but they do have a reputation for hospitality so i've been treated great by my amish friends there and it may be a question of just once you get to know people there it's a little different so finally the not so friendly amish communities in my opinion and when i talk about these communities i'm just generalizing and sometimes we generalize even though we say we shouldn't generalize uh you know we do it if we you know even we don't admit it to ourselves i don't mean to put everyone in this category if not friendly i actually met a lot of nice and warm and friendly people in each of these next two communities i'm going to tell you about just that kind of the average impression that i had the average experience i had was definitely uh not as friendly and i met i met more people that were that were i would say rude uh just outright rude to uh to me right now i should say this was in the context of me doing a job of selling bible story books door-to-door and oh my a door-to-door salesman but i want to also say that my approach in selling was very non-pushy and i got comments from from amish people about this too they're kind of surprised like wow this guy is really low pressure and that was something that i guess i prided myself in so just with that context the first community would be joga county ohio and that's the fourth largest amish community i can say that in dragon county i was blasted off the front porch on a number of occasions in a way that i definitely wasn't in holmes county ohio and northern indiana or you know many other communities i was in so um ran into some quite rude people there that was that they were exceptions i don't want to say like everybody was rude there definitely not the case i met some really cool people there too and i actually sold a lot of books there too people liked the books i was selling but yeah that was one where i found them to be a little bit more more rude in my time there i spent about two and a half three weeks there so i had a pretty good sample size there the second community i wouldn't include on the not so friendly list in my experience is allen county indiana and this is a swiss amish community kind of like adams county indiana these are two two very big swiss homage communities this i would consider as the toughest amish community that i've met or tried to make a connection with i just felt when i when i was when i was approaching amish in this community basically completely cold i remember my first couple days there talking to people that it just felt like there was a shelter that was tough to crack almost like something in the body language or the tone of voice kind of like go away i remember i just i remember one one amish guy that i spoke with actually he agreed to take a look at my books but the whole time i was showing them to him he kind of felt like i it kind of felt like he was he was like just get out of here guy you know i just felt i felt this level of go away which was weird because i don't know why he would have agreed to look at the books it's just totally silent just kind of like you know almost like he was angry at me but but eventually i must have cracked the code because i ended up selling a lot of books in that community in in the how long was i there a couple weeks basically so i met a lot of my ambitions community as well i'm actually it's funny in allen county i met i can think of examples of some super nice families that i met within the community i think that that could be a characteristic of the swiss amish in general um at least at least in this community so when i was there the guy just i just felt like he didn't want me to be there which was weird and you know i never wanted to be anywhere that i didn't want to be when i was selling books i would typically ask people is this looking okay or should i go to the next house because i didn't want to waste their time i didn't want to waste my own time and i didn't want to be somewhere where i wasn't wanted so um but in this case it just kind of i i think it was just completely silent when i would ask that that question so it was just kind of weird so that one guy did help form the impression of this community but it was it wasn't just him it was repeated and again i i don't say these things as criticisms it's just the way that some communities are some you know cultures are some are different some are some have kind of have a culture or a custom or a or a you know their own demeanor to not be so open to non-amish people and and that's fine and others are others are different so i've got another video on the 10 largest amish communities i'm going to put it here in the end screen and if you haven't watched that yet i encourage you to check it out so let me know your opinion which communities have you found to be very friendly do you agree with this list would you put other communities on here were there any communities where you found the amish to be maybe not as friendly you can throw those in the comments as well too thanks for watching leave a comment subscribe like i look forward to talking to you next time [Music]

Channel: Amish America

Views: 227,056

Keywords: Amish communities, Amish Country, Amish places, Best Amish places, Amish settlements, Lancaster County, Holmes County, Visit the Amish

Id: M1dCvnAJh5I

Length: 14min 9sec (849 seconds)

Published: Thu May 20 2021