I’ve picked out nine 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, and Pennsylvania Dutch as a first language, there are often differences between communities. So I’m gonna 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 and that could be held in the basement.
Amish homes tend to have large basements or in another space, in the actual home, or could be held in a workshop outside or even in a barn. That’s typical, 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 developed this tradition of having meeting houses in Somerset County is one of them.
Number two, Adams County, Indiana.
The settlement around the town of Berne is a Swiss Amish community. 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 would of that 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 the weather looks like rain
Another custom that’s unusual in this particular Swiss Amish settlement community is the custom of yodeling. So this is an old Swiss tradition that the Amish have maintained in America. 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 kept. This also includes the buggies without tops, which is similar to, to the Swiss Amish, 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 Cofer.
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, 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, Pine Craft, 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. They get around by bicycles or tricycles. The reason is that 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 vacationers who come from northern states like Ohio, Indiana, 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.
Number six, Pearisburg, 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 German, or Pennsylvania Dutch. And I’ve heard occasional English thrown in, but 99 plus percent of it is not in English.
Number seven, Garnet, 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 settlement. It’s one of the more progressive ones, as you might guess. But they don’t own the cars, and 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 and is a very kind of rare exception. The most notable place would be the community of Arthur Illinois. Donald Kraybill and Steven Nolt, discussed this in their book Amish Enterprise. In the mid-1950s, Amish men had acquired driver’s licenses 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, in this particular community.
So they’re kind of still holding a line 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, Aylmer Ontario.
So a couple of 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 will 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, and issues in their community. Amish consider this to be very wholesome and appropriate reading.
Aylmer’s interesting too because it’s part of what you might consider the reformist Amish who emphasize high moral standards, which would mean being maybe more restrictive on some of the dating practices and 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 have 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, Kishacoquillas Valley, Pennsylvania.
And this is a very small community, also quite old. It’s actually been around since 1924. Kishacoquillas Valley is also known as Big Valley.
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 this area.
