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CHAPTER 3. The Swartzentruber Schools
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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K chapter 3 L The Swartzentruber Schools If you wish to be seen, stand up. If you wish to be heard, speak up. If you wish to be appreciated, shut up. —A hand-lettered saying hung on the wall of Line Road School, Heuvelton, New York The Swartzentruber Amish O n cold winter mornings, the teacher must be the first to school so that she can light the fire in the woodstove. When her pupils arrive, she will have some of them fill the wood box and others fetch water. If the pupils are lucky, the pump will not be frozen. Otherwise , they might have to take the bucket to the nearest Amish farmhouse to fill it so that there will be water for drinking and hand washing. To non–Old Order eyes, perhaps no schools reflect the Old Order desire to remain “strangers and pilgrims” in the world as well as those of the Swartzentruber Amish. Constructed plainly of wood painted white, or sometimes with corrugated tin siding, they are often set in the corner of a farmer’s field. During the summertime, a visitor to a Swartzentruber school finds the schoolyard reconverted to cow pasture, with the path to the schoolhouse blocked with barbed wire, cows grazing by the entrance to the woodshed, and cow pies dotting the area where children play ball during recess. Often untidy and shabby looking, and with no playgrounds, these little schools hardly seem a force for social resistance. Nevertheless, reflecting the community’s distrust of those outside the church and dread of “drift” or increasing worldliness, Swartzentruber schools are different not only from their public counterparts but also from the schools of most other Old Order church-communities. The so-called Swartzentruber Amish, a general term for three distinct groups of Amish, are the plainest of the plain people. The Swartzentruber churches trace their origin to disagreements in the Old Order Amish community in the Holmes County, Ohio, area between 1913 and 1917 over the practices of excommunication and shunning (Bann und Meidung). Bishop Samuel E. Yoder of Apple Creek in Wayne County argued unsuccessfully that joining the church was a lifetime commitment and that one who had joined the church and then left must be placed under the Bann and shunned until he or she repented and returned to the church. David Luthy notes, “This interpretation is called ‘streng Meidung’ (strict shunning ) and was not held by Sam Yoder alone” (1998, 19). Yet the Yoder faction was in the minority, and by 1917 a permanent division had taken place between the Sam Yoder people and the other Old Order Amish districts . After Yoder’s death, when both bishops for the community had the last name Swartzentruber, the Yoder group came to be called “Swartzentruber Amish.” “Not only does the policy of not allowing members to transfer to other Old Order Amish groups (except when a division occurs) separate the Swartzentruber Amish from other Amish,” Luthy writes, “so do their more traditional or conservative practices in clothing, buggies, house architecture and furnishings, farm machinery, and employment.” (1998, 20–21). Only in an emergency or when there is no bus service available and the distance is too impractical for horse and buggy will Swartzentruber Amish ride in automobiles. Change, when it comes to Swartzentruber communities, comes slowly and may be in the direction of increasing conservatism. For example, a young Swartzentruber mother in the Heuvelton, New York, settlement refused to accept a baby-food grinder as a gift from a non–Amish friend because, she said, “We don’t use those.” When asked why a baby-food grinder would not be permitted by the Ordnung, even though meat grinders , for example, are permitted, the young woman’s mother explained that in Ohio baby-food grinders had been permitted when they had been reK the swartzentruber schools L 41 [13.58.82.79] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 07:59 GMT) 42 K train up a child L ceived as gifts, but in New York “we couldn’t have them anymore.” Similarly , when the Swartzentruber settlement in the Heuvelton area was first established in 1974, many Swartzentruber farmers took their produce and baked goods to village farmers’ markets; however, roughly twenty years later, the Swartzentruber community decided that this practice violated the longstanding prohibition on “working in town” and forbade it. This has led to a proliferation of Swartzentruber Amish farm stands on the back roads. Since the initial schism in 1917...