Selling the Amish: The Tourism of Nostalgia

CHAPTER 2. Tourism in Amish Country

:฀฀chapter 2฀฀; Tourism in Amish Country Just eating my way through Amish Country. Goin’ buggy in Amish Country. —Confessions of Amish Country T-shirts T he Amish remain a peculiar people. Most of them live in the heartland of the United States, yet in many ways they defy the very character of American culture. They resist much of its wisdom, challenge some of its most sacred values, and reject many of its practices. Still, they flourish. They are growing in number as they find new ways to prosper even while they reject the speed, competitiveness, individualism, and much of the advanced technology of American culture. Even as the Amish contest the ways and beliefs of US culture, Americans are attracted to them. It is not too much to say that many Americans are captivated by the Amish.1 Many non-Amish Americans seem to like being around the Amish, watching them and partaking of their culture. A trip to Amish Country is the primary means by which the non-Amish encounter these peculiar people. Locations and Numbers There are three major Amish Country tourism areas in the world, and all of them are in the United States.2 They are: Lancaster County in Pennsylvania , Holmes and Wayne counties in Ohio, and Elkhart and LaGrange counties in Indiana. These three areas correspond to the three largest Amish settlements in the world: the Holmes-Wayne settlement has 227 church districts, Lancaster County (which is the oldest settlement) has 179 districts, and the Elkhart-LaGrange settlement has 137 districts.3 Lancaster County attracts the greatest number of tourists, for reasons of location and history. Just 65 miles west of Philadelphia, 135 miles north of Washington, DC, and 165 miles south of New York City, Lancaster County is a convenient destination for tens of millions of potential visitors seeking to escape city life and suburban sprawl.4 Lancaster County is also the longest-standing destination for Amish Country tourism in North America; its first explicit efforts to attract tourists date back to the mid1940s .Finally,theLancasterCountyterrainisbeautiful,withrollinghills and lush farmlands. Given these factors, it is not surprising that as many as 11 million tourists visit Lancaster County each year. With these impressive numbers, Amish Country tourists bring a lot of resources to Lancaster County, including $818 million in direct economic impact.5 WhilethenumbersforAmishCountrytourisminOhioandIndianaare notashigh,theyarestillimpressive.Approximately4milliontouristsvisit Holmes County each year, accounting for $154 million of direct economic impact annually.6 The volume of tourists is about the same in the Elkhart area, with more than 4.2 million tourists visiting each year, resulting in $243.9 million in direct economic impact to the county.7 While both the Holmes-Wayne settlement and the Elkhart-LaGrange settlement are, like Lancaster, located in fertile, rolling farmland, neither is near such large population centers as is the Lancaster County settlement. Moreover, efforts to promote the Amish in the Holmes-Wayne and Elkhart-LaGrange areas did not start until the late 1950s and 1960s, respectively, fifteen to twenty-five years after similar efforts in Lancaster. A Brief History of Amish Country Tourism In the early decades of the twentieth century, the Amish received little attention from outsiders. What notice they did get, whether on postcards or in travel magazine articles, portrayed them as a backward religious sect that did not fit within the progressive landscape of US culture.8 All that changed in the late 1930s when national news outlets got wind of a group of Amish in Lancaster County who were resisting the state’s effort to eliminate their one-room schoolhouses in the process of consolidating school districts. As the Amish appeared frequently in the pages of the New York Times and other national publications during the years of the dispute (1937–1938) and were characterized as defenders of the one-room 26฀ :฀selling the amish ;฀ school and the old-fashioned American virtues for which it stood, outsiders became increasingly interested in learning more about the Amish. That growing interest received a hearty response in what one scholar has called a “surge of Amish-related literature” that “helped pave the way for a full-blown tourist industry.”9 Novels, children’s books, feature articles, and the like appeared that further encouraged not only public interest in learning more about the Amish but in visiting their home in Lancaster County as well.10 By the mid-1940s, tourism had developed into a wellrecognized phenomenon in...