New York Amish

Quilts with “a black-and-white checked” pattern “for the NASCAR market” are stitched together by an Amish woman whose family uses an outdoor privy because church rules stipulate “no indoor plumbing”; an Amish man delivers cans of his milk to an Amish-owned neighborhood collection tank cooled by electricity because state laws require the refrigeration of milk. These are just a few of the images Karen Johnson-Weiner presents of the New York State Amish and their continuing effort to maintain a life disconnected from the surrounding society upon which they are, to varying degrees, economically dependent. The Amish's struggle to preserve separate-from-the world communities and the diversity among the various Amish subgroups are themes Johnson-Weiner examines along with her primary focus: the impetuses for Amish families’ migration to New York.The quilt-making woman and milk-delivering man above, despite their acquiescence to the buying public and to state laws, belong to “the ultra-conservative Swartzentruber Amish” (54). Johnson-Weiner explains the origin of this and other Amish groups in her first chapter, “Who Are the Amish?” which also outlines the European origins of the Amish, in particular focusing on the various schisms of the Anabaptists, who themselves had broken from the Catholic Church in the 1520s in Zurich: “By the end of the sixteenth century, the Anabaptists were widely known as ‘Mennonites’ after Menno Simons (1496–1561), a Dutch priest turned Anabaptist preacher” (11). The birth of the Amish, a splinter group of these Anabaptists, took place about a century later, under the leadership of “an Alsatian preacher” who “lamented the apparent willingness of Mennonite church members to conform to fashions in dress and to interact with and even marry non-Mennonites” (14).More than an interesting explanation of Amish origins—adherents to this Alsatian leader, Jacob Ammann (1644–1730), came to be known as “Amish Mennonites”—this preacher's break with the Mennonites explains the tendency of Amish groups to occasionally separate from each other, as Johnson-Weiner examines throughout her text. And this tendency to split instead of fight has helped propel the migration of many Amish families to New York State. Although all Amish groups “interpret literally biblical injunctions such as Romans 12:2 (‘and be not conformed to this world’),” disagreements have periodically arisen in the four centuries since Ammann's first objections over the definition of what does or does not constitute conformity (21). As Johnson-Weiner explains in chapter 1, which also presents a twentieth- and twenty-first-century overview of the sect, the many schisms among Amish groups all come down to each community's Ordnung, a German word meaning the rules of that particular community, or Gemeinde. The rules in an Ordnung, more often than not, focus on the degree of the community's separation from the surrounding world: the use of wooden or rubber tires on farm equipment, upholstered or unupholstered furniture, limited use of the telephone or no use whatsoever. These are just a few of the issues that have led to schisms. If a member of a community disagrees and violates a particular rule, she or he might be excommunicated (placed under Bann) and shunned (face Meidung) by the group's other members. If, however, a minister sides with parishioners, as one did against a tobacco-chewing bishop, then a schism is likely to occur (129). Families within one church district who side with the rebellious faction will decide not to dien, or fellowship, with the group from which they broke, and sometimes they will move physically away from the original group.Such disagreements, along with the attraction of “affordable farmland” (32), serve as the impetus for many of the Amish migrations into New York. In the middle chapters of her study, chapters 2 through 7, Johnson-Weiner examines particular New York counties and regions, the various Amish families’ resettlement in these areas, and their reasons for leaving Ohio, Pennsylvania, and other states. In chapter 2, for instance, “Cattaraugus and Chautauqua Counties,” the Troyer Amish (those initially led in a schism by a Bishop Abe Troyer) left the Ohio counties of Holmes and Geauga “to distance themselves from the dissension that had afflicted the large Ohio Amish settlement[s]” there “since 1913” (32). A lighter form of dissension, however, followed these groups to New York. Readers learn that Amish groups who settle in close proximity do not always dien, or fellowship, with each other, as is the case of one community of Amish who moved to Conewango Valley and another who moved to the town of Clymer, only about thirty miles apart in these western New York counties. The Conewango Valley Amish's Ordnung prohibits “linoleum floors, carpeting, sofas, ... indoor toilets and ... gas or battery powered lamps,” making the community “seem more a part of the nineteenth century than the twenty-first” (35), but “all of these things can be found in a Clymer area Amish home” (41). The Amish in the Clymer area, furthermore, occasionally use telephones, providing to non-Amish customers “phone numbers for many of [their] family businesses” (43). The “more conservative Amish groups ... believe that a church that permits telephones in or near Amish dwellings or businesses is conforming to the world in ways it should not” (43). Among the more progressive Old Order Amish, however, limited phone use is often permitted. In fact, as Johnson-Weiner observes, the “use of the telephone marks one's place in the Old Order world. Some communities permit the installation of a telephone booth at the end of a church member's lane for family and Amish neighbors to use,” and among the “most progressive communities, church members may even carry cell phones” (89).Johnson-Weiner minutely describes such surprising and fascinating diversity among the New York Amish and among the parent communities that they left behind in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Indiana. Some differences are large and prominent: The very conservative Troyer and Swartzentruber Amish would never allow the telephone use permitted by the Clymer Amish in Chautauqua County; but the Lowville community, an Old Order group that is more progressive than the Swartzentruber, also does not allow telephone use, even though in the county of their origin, Lancaster (Pa.), “phones are ubiquitous in the commercial center of the district” (90). Other distinctions between neighboring Amish groups are minor. Although all the various factions of Swartzentruber Amish “drive black buggies,” live in homes with “hardwood floors” and “no upholstered furniture,” and use kerosene, not “pressurized gas or propane lanterns,” the women of the various Swartzentruber affiliations admit that with “people we don't know, we have to ask [what group they are with]” because the clothing difference is so inconspicuous: “Asked how one could tell groups apart, two women in [one Swartzentruber] ... congregation suggested that the women in [another] ... made their caps with narrower pleats in the back” (61). Nonetheless, these “different Swartzentruber affiliations,” dressing in similar colors and fashions and living in almost identically furnished houses, “do not dien [fellowship] with each other; there is no intermarriage between the groups, and ministers of one affiliation will not preach at religious gatherings of the others” (60).Although such boundaries, schisms, and narrowly defined affiliations seem to define Amish life in New York, certain events and values reveal the Amish's fundamental homogeneity despite their own propensity to dwell on such fine distinctions. Even communities that would not dien (fellowship) with each other will help with necessities such as barn raising, especially in an emergency situation, as did “other Swartzentruber churches and neighboring Old Order Amish groups” after “a five-year-old Swartzentruber child playing with matches burned down his father's barn” (151). One common value found among all the diverse groups, from the most conservative to the most progressive, is the desire for farmland. Johnson-Weiner reiterates in almost every chapter, as she does in the first sentence of chapter 7, that “the Empire State is spacious and the Amish have arrived to take advantage of its rich and plentiful farmland” (141). And although the properties are “rich ... farmland,” they are also cheap real estate, at least compared with the land in Ohio and Pennsylvania, the largest feeder states for New York settlements. The first subheading in chapter 5, which focuses on the Amish in central New York just west of Albany, reads “In Search of Cheap Land” (100). As Johnson-Weiner explains in chapter 3, the Swartzentruber Amish found in St. Lawrence County in the early 1980s that “the region offered lots of cheap farmland when the first settler arrived from Ohio” (76). In chapter 2 we discover that both the conservative “Troyer Amish in the Conewango Valley” and the more progressive “Old Order Amish ... left Geauga County, Ohio to settle in the Clymer region” because of their “desire for cheap farmland” (39).An agricultural way of life is important to all the various Amish groups, and “finding affordable farms meant saving a lifestyle threatened by overcrowding” and “industrial growth” that had made land in Geauga County scarce and expensive (39). Although Johnson-Weiner's study does not often touch on gender issues in the patriarchal Amish society, there is one interesting, slightly feminist twist to this desire for families to return to an agricultural lifestyle. In the Amish families that no longer lived on a farm, the fathers were away during the day, perhaps building cabinetry for non-Amish clients or undertaking similar occupations. For instance, “by 2000, two-thirds of the Amish men in Lancaster County were no longer farming, and 40 percent were working away from home” (86). A farming family, however, could “work together at home” (39). In the words of one Amish woman: “My boys say they didn't know their father til they moved [to New York] because he worked away.” She was pleased to have resettled as a farm family in New York because, as she explained, “I didn't want to raise my boys by myself” (145).Such dedication to family and to a church society separate from the world unites all factions of Amish, a homogeneity that leads the outer world to view the Amish groups monolithically. Unfortunately, this perception sometimes produces confrontation. All the various groups, Johnson-Weiner observes, have had to negotiate with local governments and institutions on such issues as education for Amish children (78, 82), building codes (95), and safety lights or reflectors on buggies (96). The post-9/11 “USA Patriot Act” required banks to obtain from those desiring loans or new accounts social security numbers, which many Amish refuse to secure. Johnson-Weiner, however, also examines the positives of the Amish's relationship with their worldly neighbors. Some non-Amish have actually sought the immigration of Amish to an area, hoping that they will contribute to the economy. In fact, one “headline in a 1990 Albany Times Union report” testified to such a result, stating, “Amish Resurrect a County” (104). In Otsego County, officials welcomed the Amish because they would help preserve “the rural character of the region” (106). A writer to a local newspaper “specifically thanked members of the Amish community for their assistance” during “flooding in the Mohawk Valley in 2006” (116). And when power lines went down after an ice storm in “New York's North Country,” the electricity-eschewing Amish “pitched in to help non-Amish neighbors milk cows and do other necessary farm chores” (155).Such engaging stories Johnson-Weiner has gathered from undertaking personal interviews, poring through large- and small-town newspapers, and even researching the Business Directory of Lewis County and other such local and regional websites. She has also extensively researched and cited various more highbrow texts on the Amish, such as Kraybill's The Amish and the State, published by university presses and scholarly periodicals such as the American Journal of Sociology (214). She has also consulted and cited less scholarly but still quite useful regionally focused book-length studies such as Haas's Readings from Mennonite Writings (213).The only drawback to this wealth of knowledge about the Mennonites and the Amish is that it occasionally leads Johnson-Weiner into discussions of Amish theology in the middle of a chapter that, for instance, is ostensibly describing the Amish “On Franklin County's Western Border” (chapter 7). Such extensive discussions about “biblically based metaphors that shape Amish life” and other beliefs that define all Amish life seem as if they should not be hidden in a chapter on the Amish in just one county (153). Although these overarching observations about the sect's tenets, practiced by all the factions, might better be placed in chapter 8, an overview chapter, or in additional similar summary chapters, Johnson-Weiner's study certainly provides readers with an extensive and well-researched panorama of the various Amish settlements around the state. New York Amish will provide readers with a thorough understanding of the various groups’ motivations for migrating into the state, these groups’ distinctive beliefs that separate them from neighboring Amish groups, the challenges that each group faces, and the successes realized (and occasional failures experienced) as they preserve or recapture an Amish way of life in the Empire State

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