I’ve not seen any Amish people, but they don’t live around her. We do have a sizable Mennonite community, and several run businesses in town. There’s a salvage grocery store and bakery, as well as a restaurant nearby. And you’d often see them at the local college training to be nurses, or at a doctor’s office–though you only really recognize them by the women’s headwear and the families wearing identical, patterned simple dresses.
That’s surprising, not to have seen either Amish or Mennonites in the Finger Lakes. Well, not so much no Amish, but Mennonites, I see all the time. My next door neighbor had a bunch of work done on his house. I’m just outside Ithaca. It was obvious there were some rules I don’t get, like someone else had to start the generator to run the tools. And on runs up the lake I often see horse drawn buggies, or at least evidence of them.
Texan: I’ve literally never seen an Amish person in my life.
I run into EMIC followers occasionally though (Kenneth Copeland). Talking to them is surreal.
Yep, whatever group hangs out in the old Union Station building, I see them every time I shortcut through there.
I grew up in Philly, but still I rarely saw them outside of the Reading Terminal Market, or if I was driving near Lancaster when I would see their buggies. I did have one calc student who was Mennonite (although devout Amish don’t do higher education). In Montreal, I ran into a Mennonite who was a medical student. When my son lived in a building at the corner of 58th St. and 8th Avenue in Manhattan, there was a Mennonite supermarket over on 9th Ave. (and maybe 57th St.). At least some of the employees appeared to be Amish.
Anabaptism began on the European continent, notably in Holland and Switzerland.
Menno Simons, founder of the Mennonite religion, was a Catholic priest from Friesland of the Low Countries.
Jakob Amman was a Mennonite preacher from Switzerland whose controversial teachings led to the schism which was the beginnings of the Amish religion.
I just got back from a bike trip in Wisconsin, and stayed with friends near WIlton, WI. I saw some buggies on the road and several people in plain dress. There are Amish, Mennonites, and Old German Baptists in the area. They all have different views of technology, though I gather it can vary within each sect, depending on the Bishop.
Thanks for the correction. The Amish originally were German speakers, leading to their being called Pennsylvania Dutch (for Deutsch). How could I have forgotten that?
I travel to La Farge, WI and vicinity on occasion and see Amish (and Amish adjacent) folks fairly often when I am there.
Brian
Union Station sees everything from “liberal” Mennonites to Old Order Amish. If you are having trouble navigating the Amtrak system I’ve found asking the Amish to be very helpful. I’ve often see them helping someone else there. They don’t generally mix with others but they’re not rude, either. A lot better fellow travelers than many others.
I believe there’s another rail hub in Boston, which probably accounts for their presence there. And yes, Amish also do take vacations. Mostly it seems to be to visit relatives and friends in other communities but some of them do visit tourist attractions and the like.
I haven’t seen any actual Amish in Missouri, but I’ve seen Mennonites in lots of different places, particularly along I-44 and up and down U.S. 63. They come into the larger towns to shop, buy a lot at once, and return to the farms for another few weeks.
One thing I learned when I worked in agriculture is that the Mennonites are very respected as farmers. If you ever go to an agricultural show, you’ll see groups of farmers trailing behind Mennonites, watching carefully to see what they seem to be paying the most attention to.
We have a small house in the Poconos, and the Amish run a farmers’ market that we frequent when we’re up there. So, pretty regularly.
Lots of Mennonites in our area of Bucks County, PA, but I couldn’t really pick them out of a crowd.
None here in Hawai’i, but at various times in my life I’ve had reasons to spend time in rural parts of Pennsylvania and Ohio, while visiting relatives. In certain areas it was common to see buggies which were attributed to the Amish, but for all I know they were actually Mennonite.
My late mother-in-law used to complain that the Amish sold fruit pies and of course the expectation was that they’d be delicious, since the Amish have a reputation for being great producers and consumers of pie. (*) She’d sniff, “Their pies are terrible. They don’t put very much fruit in them.”
In fact, I was born in Lancaster County and my adoptive parents raised me to believe that I’m descended from Amish stock; from what I know of my birth family I’m guessing that a more accurate statement is descended from Mennonite on my mother’s side (she was lapsed and considered a shame to her family).
(*) Regarding pie and the Amish, I make mouthwateringly great fruit pies, if I do say so myself, though I doubt it’s genetic. However, while my son was growing up I would occasionally, to his enormous delight, let him have pie for breakfast, the rationale being, “We’re descended from the Amish, and they eat pie for breakfast, so you can too.”
You must not take Amtrak very often. I can’t recall a single ride on the Cascades where I haven’t seen at least one family.
Genuinely curious as to how the Mennonite farmers are differentiated from other farmers?
Where I live, there’s one sect of Mennonites in which the men wear beards and the women wear black caps or shawls, but the other Mennos in the area are no different from anybody else.
Extremely rarely in Boston. We do see Mennonites when visiting relatives in western NY, but that’s about it.
In the colonies around here, they look different. In addition to beards, they dress differently, like twill pants instead of jeans, and button-down shirts instead of t-shirts. No baseball caps. The wives and kids also dress more traditionally. Plus, at local events, people generally have some long-term experience with each other, at least enough to know who’s who. YMMV
Two-thirds of U.S. Amish live in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. I have been to a local store called the Dutch Country Market dozens of times. The majority of the people working there are Amish (or Hutterites or Mennonites or whatever).
Gotcha, thanks. Probably one of the more conservative branches of the Mennonite faith; there are probably a dozen or more different strains.
When I worked for Legal Aid our service area included Holmes County, Ohio, so I saw quite a few Amish. One of my colleagues handled a lawsuit in which his Amish client’s ex-husband, a man who had left the faith and been shunned, was trying to get custody of their children. The court ruled against the man. The client, her father and a friend stayed with my colleague during the trial; I learned later that they absolutely loved orange juice and drank it like it was going out of style.
Our paralegal was raised in Amish country but was not herself Amish. She had a jaundiced view of them and once said Amish men valued sons, cows, goats, sheep, wives and daughters, in that order.
I still see Amish buggies on rural Ohio roads now and then.