Horse-and-buggy days survive

Press, 21 July 1984, Page 19

Horse-and-buggy days survive

National Geographic News Service

When William Penn invited Amish and Mennonite people to settle in his New World colony more than 250 years ago, there were no electric lights, telephones, or automobiles.

Step into the Pennsylvania homes of those who today most faithfully cling to their European religious roots, and it seems as if these modern inventions still have

not happened. Their use is forbidden. Old Order Amish and the most conservative Mennonites live the plainest of lives. In their horse-and-buggy world, days are measured out in planting and harvesting the land, family activities, and church worship. Clustered in Lancaster County, these plain people have been

blessed with some of the richest soil in the country and an ideal climate for farming. Rural Lancaster, nestling in south-eastern Pennsylvania, is the most productive agricultural county in the east. The driving ambition of most Old Order farm boys is to follow in their fathers’ footsteps—and farm the land.

Perhaps the most important principle laid down by the six-teenth-century Dutch Anabaptist leader, Menno Simons, from whom the Mennonites take their name, is one calling for a spiritual community living apart from the world and close to the soil. Anabaptists believe in adult baptism.

In the late seventeenth century, Jacob Ammann took his followers, the Amish, out of the Mennonite church, primarily because it no longer shunned nonconforming members in daily life as Simons had taught. Both groups have remained close in spiritual beliefs, and within both, those congregations that have most resisted change in worship and lifestyle are today known as Old Order.

Among people for whom privacy is part of religion, it (3 rare to get

an inside glimpse of Old Order ways. Outsiders are called. “English.” For an article in the April “National Geographic,” a writer, Douglas Lee, and a photographer, Jerry Irwin, were permitted to visit some plain family farms.

On the Old Order Amish farm of the Stoltzfus family, they found six-year-old Samuel already adept at steering a mule straight down the furrows of the garden; his 17-year-old cousin Lloyd was guiding the harrow. Lloyd lives and works on the farm as a “hired boy.” An arrangement used on many farms, the hired-boy system provides needed labour for the farmer and work for boys old enough to be out of school (formal education ends after eighth grade), but too young to farm or get full-time jobs. Wages ate paid directly to the boy’s parents. Parents start bank accounts for children when they are bom and turn the money over to them when they come of age. When neighbors gather to harvest wheat on an Amish farm, “the big ones pitch it up,'the middle ones stack it, and the little guys ride,” a “middle one” explains.

In the warmth of an Amish kitchen, lighted only by a butane lantern, a 16-year-old girl presses a dress she made herself, using an iron heated on a propane stove. At her age she begins “rumspringa,” or “running around,” the Amish term for the freedom allowed teenagers before they join the £aith,

marry, and begin their life “in church.”

On the family farm of a Wenger Mennonite, a member of a conservative congregation, 13-year-old Ella Shirk, had not had her picture taken, except for formal family portraits, until Jerry Irwin arrived. Many Old Order people avoid posing for photographs because they might seem proud rather than plain in the eyes of others.

When a Reidenback Mennonite boy becomes 17, he starts going to hoedowns—gatherings in church members’ homes where boys and girls sing and square dance to harmonica music. His father buys him a “courting buggy” and a horse, and pays his expenses until he reaches 21. Then he is expected to marry someone from the church and settle down in the area. Now, the unhurried Old Order world is being pressured by Lancaster’s growing industry and housing developments, a booming tourist market for handcrafts that brought some five million visitors to the county last year, and by higher land prices. Many Old Order farmers who try to bid for nearby land for their children are forced to subdivide or watch their children move away from home to take jobs.

Success for the plain people of Lancaster, Douglas Lee writes, “means children who join the church and carry on raising the most important crop on the farm: the next generation.”