Plain Diversity: Amish Cultures and Identities

7 Transplants from Lancaster, Pennsylvania

            Transplants from Lancaster, Pennsylvania Late in the evening the moving trucks rolled into the Wayne County, Indiana, farm lane. The new owners—an Amish family from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania —were one of more than a dozen households in  to relocate to this fledgling Lancaster outpost in the Midwest, begun just a year before. The entourage unloading that night had brought the household goods, farm animals, and equipment that the family needed to begin a successful farming enterprise; but the new arrivals also carried critical cultural baggage, including commitments to a Lancaster Ordnung and a set of assumptions that kept them closely linked to those they had left behind. The Wayne County Amish, like a similar settlement of Lancaster Amish begun in Parke County, Indiana, in , were recreating Lancaster life from southeastern Pennsylvania, five hundred miles away. From the use of gray buggies that contrast strikingly with the styles and black color found among Amish in the Midwest , to the less visible but more significant network of kin connections and business transactions that weave the lines of travel and trade into particular patterns, these two young and demographically thriving settlements were obviously Lancaster transplants. Yet these “daughter settlements” (or, in Lancaster Amish parlance, “sister settlements ”) were not simply clones of their churchly parent, nor were they isolated from their new regional contexts. For example, from the start they received some help in constructing barns and homes from Hoosier Amish in the Adams County, Milroy, and Daviess County settlements, and they instinctively turned to those same places for their initial blacksmithing, harness supply, and buggy repair needs. Then, too, the migrants differed in some significant ways from those they had left behind in Pennsylvania—not the least of which was their willingness to move away from the stable Lancaster settlement. Indeed, the establishment of these new communities highlights the roles of context and culture in shaping Amish life. In this case, a new Midwestern environment absorbed, bolstered, and transformed deeply etched memories of a distinctive Lancaster heritage.   Without doubt, Lancaster is home to the world’s best-known Amish population. The subject of popular travelogues already in the nineteenth century and for most of the twentieth century a focus of East Coast tourism, the area known as “Pennsylvania Dutch Country” annually receives some four million visitors.1 Moreover, the Lancaster Amish have captured a disproportionate share of academic attention as well, and almost all popular interpretations of Amish life come through a Lancaster lens. For the Amish in Lancaster—and elsewhere—the southeastern Pennsylvania settlement carries a distinctive reputation. Accurate or not, Lancaster Amish are thought to be religiously traditional, technologically progressive, and financially well-off. Due to its public notoriety and its proximity to Washington, D.C., the Lancaster settlement also has traditionally taken the lead in diplomatic dialogue with the federal government, and a Lancaster Amishman has always chaired the National Amish Steering Committee, the group’s liaison on church-state matters. Though they share a Pennsylvania German dialect and an eighteenth-century immigrant past with a majority of Midwestern Amish, the Lancaster church has in some ways become an ethnic group in its own right. While Midwestern Amish history was marked by inter-regional migration and marriage that link settlements across space, the Lancaster church remained remarkably settled, self-contained, and self-sustaining, so that today many customs (such as gray-topped buggies) and surnames (such as Stoltzfus or Fisher) have become Lancaster exclusives. The Lancaster sense of self reflects and is also reflected in the southeastern Pennsylvania settlement’s structure. Strikingly less congregational in organization than most of their Midwestern counterparts, the Lancaster Amish typically grant each bishop oversight of two church districts, halving the number of top leaders in the settlement and creating a leadership pool that has—thus far—been small enough to maintain something of a consensus around a settlement-wide Ordnung. Controversy in  and  resulted in minor schisms, but the seceding party in each case was very small and never seriously threatened the health of the mainline Old                      Order church.2 Indeed, when Lancaster Amish speak about “the church,” they just as often mean the whole settlement as their local district. The published church directory of the Lancaster Amish illustrates this sensibility. In contrast to Midwestern settlement directories that are organized by district and then list families within those district divisions, the Lancaster directory alphabetizes all households...