“A great deal of what we see depends on what we are looking for.” -- traditional Amish quote
A trip to Pennsylvania cannot be complete without a visit to Lancaster County. I anticipated this part of my trip with much delight and was not disappointed. The farmland around Lancaster is truly beautiful and is quite different from the Mississippi soybean fields that I am more accustomed to.
I took an Amish tour to better understand the people and their culture. The tour was extremely helpful, and I highly recommend it. Click here for the tour group I used. I chose the premium package which included a 90 minute bus tour, a guided house tour, and an unguided farm tour. Sidenote: the gentleman who lead the house tour was a non-Amish Christian believer. He witnessed about the Lord and His Word throughout the tour, and I was very blessed by his tour.
I have some beautiful pictures to share below but also want to give a small list of what I learned about the Amish. Some of the facts were very surprising!
- Lancaster County grows more tobacco than any other US county. (This tobacco is mostly sold to cigar producers in other countries. It is all hand harvested by the Amish farmers.
- Lancaster County has more laying chickens than any other county.
- Some Amish raise camels for their milk, which is sold for $18/pint. The milk is said to have numerous health benefits.
- Some Amish have white-tailed deer farms. They then sell the horns, urine, and semen.
- There are fewer Amish who solely farm now. Many of them are involved in craft or wood related businesses.
- The Amish women almost always have bird/bee attracting flowers in their gardens. Cut flowers are then sold on the roadside.
- The Amish often have phone booths at the end of their driveways. They don't believe in having phones in their homes but want one accessible in emergencies.
- At convenience stores (and probably Walmart), there are rails for the Amish to hook their horses to when they "come to town". The tour group I used is near a Target, and they have some barns available for the Amish to use when they come to shop! 😊
- They usually have many (some up to 13) children in a family.
- The Amish children attend one-room schoolhouses and only go to school through the 8th grade.
- A young woman who wants to teach will apprentice after "graduating" and when the district leaders decide she is ready, they will give her a school of her own. She cannot teach after marrying.
- The children cannot ride bikes but can ride Amish scooters -- pictured below.
- You can tell a farm is Amish by the lack of power lines and by the presence of solid-colored clothes hanging out to dry. (Sometimes the clothesline is closer to the ground and has smaller clothes on it. This is usually a daughter-training clothesline for young Amish girls.)
- I originally thought that the Mennonites were an offshoot of the Amish but discovered that it was the other way around, way back in the late 1600's, due to the influence of Jacob Amman.
- There are many Mennonite families also living in Lancaster County and in the surrounding counties. The Mennonite groups have a greater range of liberality than the stricter Amish. Some Mennonite factions are closer in beliefs to the Amish, while some are more similar in culture to the "English."
- The prayer caps in Lancaster County are heart shaped.
- As a whole, they are self-sufficient and self-reliant for the most part. They are not against interaction with the "English" but seek to limit technology because of the temptations it can lead to.
