Growing Up Amish

hi we're just gonna have some fun we're gonna have fun tonight and we're going to just share our experience of growing up Amish Priscilla and I both were born in very conservative Old Order Amish communities and as time evolved as we were married things change and we're not very traditional or I said we called non-traditional at this point but we still value our heritage in our roots very much and so we thought we'd share a little bit with you about how we grew up what it was like to grow up Amish and what it was like to grow up without electricity with with running water which means you have to run and get it and no indoor plumbing no indoor toilet is the way I grew up until I was around 12 or so so let's start in my beautiful wife Priscilla I'm joeís we have five wonderful children ages 4 through 13 and they're tucked in bed and now is our time to make a little movie about our life so go ahead Priscilla tell us well you where you were born and tell us a little bit about your story okay so this I actually have still some of my old traditional Amish clothes so I wanted to show you so this is my this is a shawl that we would wear to go to church we put it on put it around us and just use like a big safety pin to close it and here is this cap we we called it in German we called it Coppa or a cop which means cap so and it was very you can see in the back it was really it was a real skill to be able to make these I never was I never was good at it but what my oldest sister would make him and then also this who was our bonnet that we would wear we would put on to go to church see if it still fits so there you go isn't she cute so cute cute little Amish a girl I was born in Missouri and just I was just a little still a little baby when my parents moved out there was in Missouri it was a very conservative Amish community there was no running water in the house unless they had like this pump right a hand pump a hand pump thing no indoor bathroom it was just a outhouse and but I don't remember much about living there but we moved to Pennsylvania and then a little later we moved to Michigan and that's where I grew up how old were you when you moved to Pennsylvania out of Missouri I was just I don't think I even was one so no memories of Missouri and then how old were you when you moved to Michigan seven years old I was seven when we moved to Michigan and I lived there until I was 18 so that was my childhood home Michigan was yeah and then I I was born in Montana my parents moved from a large community in LaGrange northern Indiana LaGrange Indiana where a lot of my relatives still live and my parents moved in 1974 to a little unknown place called Rexford Montana and it's just our home was one mile from the Canadian border we lived 30 miles from town and the only way to get to town we never took a horse and buggy was just too far as we'd hire a driver to go to town and we hardly ever went to town I would go to town you know maybe once a year or so just didn't go to town I grew up you know out in the in the sticks we were very poor I was born there actually I was born in the town of whitefish in the hospital and then I want to tell you a little funny story about that I want we're gonna interject some stories because I know we like stories and I'm sure you guys like stories so I'll tell you a little bit this is some of the culture we're gonna share with you some of the cult the Amish so we love the Amish first of all we're just gonna tell you that we love the Amish people there's their heritage their culture yeah there are people and and I have years ago I read a quote in a book it says if you don't know where you come from you'll never know where you're going and so that's been very important to me anyways as part of the culture I was the youngest of eight children eight living children my mom had 10 children the first one was stillborn and it had a nine year old brother that passed away both in horse and buggy accidents but when mom brought me home from the hospital that a neighbor's came over and said you know mom's bringing something home from the hospital to my older brothers and sisters which my my next oldest sibling my sister is six and a half years older than I am and my brother is 10 10 years older so he was 10 10 and a half years older than me and my others next sister was 12 years older than I was you know since I was just born and the neighbors asked him you know your mom's bringing something home from the hospital can you guess what it is and they didn't know what mom was bringing home from the hospital they didn't know she was pregnant so elevate my brother Elma guessed a new bike and a pony you know so anyways they were really surprised when I came from her home from the hospital not even knowing that that mom was expecting a baby so that's that's pretty normal in the Amish culture it's we lived in a little home up by the Canadian border that my dad and my brothers built and that's where I grew up so tell us a little bit more Priscilla about like your school and how that tell me a little bit us a little bit more about that your growing up years in Michigan okay yeah in Michigan just growing up as an Amish girl it was there was a lot of work children worked a lot but there was also a lot of hard play and I remember spending many hours out in the mulberry trees there are mobile trees in Michigan and as children after the work was done or in the afternoons when we had time we would run up to the mulberry trees and sit in in there and eat mulberry in the branches in the branches yep up in the branches and but as far as just everyday life we had theirs just for the girls it was housework we did sweeping mopping washing windows we learned how to we learned how to clean house we leaned we learn the basics of keeping a home we learned how to cook so and can tell us how you did how you wash your clothes well we had this there's no electricity so we had this well we had a generator we used the generator you did okay at that time we had like this but it was this ringer ringing a washer it was electric I mean it was the plug started a motor yeah and then you plugged it in and it was ringing washer oh and you so you put the the laundry through this right Maytag Maytag bring the washer so the way that I grew up until my mom even is until a few years I just a few years ago matter of fact she liked her Maytag wringer washer and we had a little Honda motor with a belt we'd start the motor you know exhaust on the basement try to pipe it out but it always was exhausting and this ringer washer on a belt a little Honda motor and she would you know run all her clothes through the through the Maytag washer and then rinse them in the tub and then sweep running through again to squeeze him then hang him out on the line now my mom my parents are both in their 80s so we finally insisted she get a an electric washer and dryer which she does use that now yeah we always hung all the washout on the line and I'll still say there's nothing that smells better than fresh laundry from the wine it smells so good folded it and I came from there was nine children I had eight siblings and so we had loads of laundry and how often did you do laundry twice a week everything yeah Mondays and Thursdays or something like that yeah yeah and school the school was just we it was a one-room schoolhouse and it was from grade 1 to 8 we always had an art class in a German class and by the way I grew up Swift so I spoke us with dialect plus I was German Swiss German dialect plus I learned another German dialect my my dialect of German which is Deutsch but people have coined it Dutch which is not Dutch yeah but you probably know it as Pennsylvania Dutch but it actually came as Doge which means German and came from the Pennsylvania so it's a it's a German dialect actually called schwäbisch which they still speak in Germany and my brother actually has visited Germany where and he was able to communicate exactly in our language in our schwäbisch dialect that we speak so yes Priscilla grew up Swiss German I grew up waving with the pennsylvania deutsch dutch dialect yeah and then we also learned english yeah so we still speak because there's fewer swiss people in our community so we have chosen to speak to teach that to our children but they have a lot of cousins and friends that speak the schwäbisch so they also speak that and then of course they speak English as well so our children are what we call trilingual or something but they it's funny because they have kind of developed their own language and so we'd have to help them with that because they've come up with these words that don't exist which is kind of funny between the English and German like jinglun or something and swinglish I don't know what it is anyways yeah and I also grew up in a one-room schoolhouse grades 1 through 8 and we always reverie you know ran ran to school never took a school bus or anything to school school was always less than for me was always less than a mile away about a mile or less so I always ran to school and ran back home and when I was in third grade I remember waking up in the middle of the night and the neighbor was beating on her door said rrose which is my dad wake up wake up the school houses on fire and I remember running in my PJs with my sisters down through the woods and during the dark was like 4 a.m. and I we watched the whole school house cave in just the whole walls and the roof and everything just implode and so that was that was quite amazing and we didn't we built another school house then a few weeks about six weeks later we we started school again it was kind of towards the end of the season so I believe we started school earlier that year our school typically it goes even now from the beginning of September through the end of April and there's only about one week off total during the whole school year and the reason that we've shown the Amish have chosen that is so when the children go to school they're focused on school and then they have all the way from May June July and August for months to spend at home with their parents apprentices working on the farm or the family business so that's a really good way of you know for us it's worked out well where your children are in school they're doing their studies and then then they're working with their dad or their mom during the summer so that's how we do that I'll tell you a little story that I thought that I thought about just now and that was when I was um we always had we always went everywhere in the with a horse and buggy and why don't we say buggy we didn't we didn't have a buggy way we called a spring whack and it was an open and open a wagon so it had like a seat at the front a seat at the back and then you know you would classify it almost like a truck because you could carry things in the back with two seats it could it could hold like six people plus room for like stuff in the back so an open spring wagon but so we go throughout the community in the West Cody and the Rex for Montana they're in that open spring wagon to church in different places wherever we needed to go we had some faithful horses that would always take us there but I remember one evening coming home from from church in the evening on every Sunday evening that would be what we call the hymn singing and all the community would gather and there would be a dinner together and then we would sing for an hour so hour and a half and just singing first it was usually sing German songs for 30 minutes and then seeing English songs for the remainder of the time but this particular evening was a winter time I was about eight or nine years old I remember and we had a horse named Rufus and we took the sleigh to the singing but on the way home we took kind of took a shortcut through the woods it was like an old trail and there was this Kelly hump was bump in the trail and something happened that that I don't know what happened but the sleigh ended up overturning and I remember I fell out and it was like I had probably think to my two or three of my siblings along with me my dad and my mom dad was driving the horse and the sleigh and this thing overturned and threw us out as a win over this killing him and mom was stuck underneath the sleigh and I always think of the horrific thing that could have happened had the horse panic and taken off dragging the sleigh and mom underneath it had been awful but the horse was a good horse and somehow he dad was able to hold him or something in you know the Shatt the shafts that the horse was in was all twisted up and everything but the horse didn't run away and we were all to hit the sleigh back up up and mom got out of there so you know bumps and bruises but just you know there's so many things that happen and like you mentioned you know I had a brother that I never knew at 9 years old fell off the back of a wagon and hit his head on the pavement and he passed away as well as my oldest sibling that was a stillborn when mom was still pregnant she fell out of a runaway horse and buggy and and that causes the the baby dude to die inside her so yeah mom and dad have known you know multiple deaths and her family their family so the horse and buggies are you know it's always it's so it's a dangerous thing a good place to grow up I think the Amish it's a very very good culture as far as growing up in that culture about family and work ethics there's many things that are not good about the Amish one of you know one of them being just another religion but there's many good hearts many good people and many of them they all want the truth they all want to know the Lord they all want to follow follows of the best that they know how there's just you know a number of miss information that they are not fully aware of God's love for them and in that type of thing so we're thankful that God has brought us to a place where we've you know know his love and and believe that he came on the cross for us and many things like that so very thankful for that good memories that I have growing up his life was in a way slower pace because you didn't have vehicles you didn't have a media yeah you didn't have phones you you just you were very creative you became very creative and I remember us children and youth we would have many skating parties we'd be out in the pond skating in the winter time and like there was a town about seven miles from us and that had a Walmart and sometimes we would literally take the whole day take the buggy and go to Walmart as the horse and buggy and take the whole day to go to Walmart and you know we eat out because we rarely ate out yeah and and so that was so special we go to McDonald's sometimes and just walk around in Walmart and sometimes yeah that was just those were good memories can I never got to go to town yeah we never got we didn't get to do that much of it so tell us about some of the first jobs he had or did when you were growing up as far as outside the home right a lot of Amish girls will mostly stay at home and just help with the family farm or help in the house or sometimes they will become a teacher or you know be a babysitter or stuff like that but my dad was a little different in that way he encouraged us to go out and get jobs and so at 14 years old the first job I had was picking asparagus and it was behind a wagon and the owner drove the tractor and we lay on the wagon and picked picked asparagus we got really our backs got really tired but that was my first job and then then I started working at this guy's fruit farm he had a fruit farm where we cut up a whole bunch of different fruit and put it in packages and it sold in grocery stores like for fruit fresh fruit ready to eat and so I worked there for two years and then after that I worked out a harness shop at a it was we sewed racehorse harnesses so I learned how to had these big commercial swings yeah commercial sewing machines and so I I worked there probably another two years and after that I had I had a teacher job where I taught first grade class and then after that I worked at a bakery and that was my favorite job I love baking and she was good at it too yeah so I my dad started metal art love homes when I was at that time was called Kootenai log homes when I was the year I was born essentially a few years before I was born my brothers actually build a little log cabin out in the woods and that kind of birth the idea of a log home business but in 1980 dad started the company the year I was born actually and so I grew up all my life building log homes so I still I am my dad is retired out of metal art log homes we sold the business it when we moved from Rex from Montana to where we currently live in Libby Montana and we restarted another company here now it's called Meadowlark lock homes so I grew up I remember some my first memories were when I was six years old peeling logs with a draw knife which we still do that today fortunately I don't need to do that anymore but that's a it's a hard job but the reason I remembered doing that at six years old because I got a very bad sunburn that day so I just during the summer I would operate when I was about nine nine years old I started running the crane to set the log with the log houses now you're probably thinking crazy nine year old but that was just what we did all this children work my sister's ran the cranes that was like my first thing I could do that I was you know and I was good at it I ran the crane for years and years so I was sick and tired the crane it was a mental mental job but it was good it was good for me to do that peel logs for a lot of time then everything in metal our homes but growing up that was just that was working hard as what we did after school we do our chores which included at one time we had a hundred chickens that we raised four eggs and we always had a coward too so it did the doing the chores and then I always would have to go help run the crane until the you know in the workday and then of course during the summer time that was just we didn't have to start early necessarily like usually I think around eight or nine o'clock I would go back to the mill but then I would have to work all day running the crane and it was really tiring for it you know nine-year-old and I'm sure I played more than I remember but nonetheless that was something that was just expected of us was to work yeah and then some of our hobbies growing up I I was always more I guess of the entrepreneurial type a so talking about jobs let's talk about that our money hoarded our money go to in a typical Amish community family even nowadays the way we grew up you're the children are just expected to work in the family business and therefore don't receive wages and then when you turn a certain age then you know maybe you get a little spending money here and there or whatever but you typically just you you're part of the family business until you reach a certain age of twenty twenty-one years old and then you're able to receive a full wage and start saving your money in that way so I always worked in the family business so that means if I wanted extra spending money I had to make my own money so I did all kinds of little jobs and one thing I always did was raise rabbits and I always had rabbits that's something I enjoyed it I raised rabbits butcher rabbits I raised ostriches for some time raised exotic birds pheasants and when I met him he had this this huge cages of all these different birds and I love birds I still do actually but yeah exotic pheasants and those type of things and then I did taxidermy work for a while I started on a little taxidermy business and mounted deer and elk and stuff like that so that's yeah always did little odds and ends and tried to you know have little businesses for myself he had so many hobbies but he was so creative so one thing every time I had I had a lot of hobbies going into marriage so every time I had a child had to lay down a lot two hobbies so know I'm down to like what hardly any obviously my hobbies are not my wife or my family so yeah very good I hope you can get into which he just did he mounted a deer with yeah Ethan and Justin I mounted Ethan's deer recently I just made a video of that too that was kind of fun doing that so anyways to conclude we just want to give you a little snapshot of our life growing up there's so many more things we can spend I feel like there's an hour we can spend talking about you know I'm just trying to so many different things we push a lawn mower for example we pushed a lawn mower that had blades okay you know that home alone movie where the guy there's a humble hungry where the guy is like pushing this lawn mower through the attic and mows the guy's hair off okay it wasn't one of those lawn mowers you push the lawn mower and no motor no it's manually driven the wheels drove the blades and it was hard work you had to push in and then stop push and stuff so some Amish people would just put their horses in the lungs yeah so you never had manicured lawns hardly when you know so just a lot of things yeah we got running water and propane lights in our home when I was around 10 years old I believe otherwise we always went to the outhouse and we had to go about a quarter of a mile and we had dug well and then we had to start a motor which pumped the water about half of I went up to a tank a large holding tank which then gravity-fed it down to our house so we did that for action until the time we moved I believe it about 12 years old we always had to do that several every couple days we started the motor and pump water so yeah just a lot of a lot of things we could talk about life growing up Amish but it was it was a good a good safe place to grow up for for myself it's not yeah there's the Amish range from very conservative to you know driving cars on the other end so you know there's it's very different each community has its own set of rules and and you know good things about it and maybe not so good things about it but here's the thing we're all people and we all struggle with the same issues everybody else struggles with and so yeah there's a lot of difference you know it depends how you grew up but we had good lives growing up I think you know it was a safe place it was a good place yep so next time we might make another video of how we met oh we met and maybe our love story you can leave a comment down below if you want us to do that yep so we might not until you tell us so yeah if you want if you want to hear more about us I hope this was interesting to you I'm not sure how interesting it is it's old news to us but yeah we just want to give you a snapshot of our life and take a little bit more about us [Music]

Channel: Montana Haven

Views: 185,238

Rating: 4.9150414 out of 5

Keywords: amish, amish meadows, meadowlark log homes, montana haven, libby mt, amish community

Id: H2J72qEOc7M

Length: 27min 22sec (1642 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 04 2020