Posted on 07/05/2009 1:35:10 AM PDT by Daisyjane69
TOPEKA, Ind. -- Dan Bontrager is a 54-year-old Amish man with flecks of gray in his long beard. He's also treasurer of the Tri-County Land Trust, an Amish lending cooperative created to support the Amish maxim that community enhances faith in God.
This past spring, Mr. Bontrager was startled when a number of men he has known most of his life tied their horses to the hitching post outside his office and came inside to withdraw their money from the Land Trust.
"We had a run," Mr. Bontrager says. "I don't know if you know anything about the Amish grapevine, but word travels fast. Somebody assumed it was going to happen, and it started a panic."
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Yes...we are all just pilgrims here.
I come from a farm background and the rural grapevine can be downright vicious at times.
I absolute love the Amish people. Truly salt of the earth if there ever were any.
A proud moment in my life was some years ago when I had the audacity to enter my blueberry muffins in the county fair. (This isn’t just any old fair, btw. One of the largest and oldest in the nation. Tons of Amish ladies!)
Now, these women produce awesome food for a living. I happily came in 3rd, of about 250 entries. Not bad for a “yankee,” eh? :)
http://www.geaugafair.com/geaugafair_history.html
This fair has NEVER changed, even since the 1800’s. They give out prize checks in the SAME dollar amounts as they did in the 1800’s. I know this after being a prizewinner and getting the $ 2.00 check in the mail a month after the fair. LOL It has become traditional, however, for prizewinners to sign over their prize checks and return them to the Fair Committee. The amounts are tiny in today’s dollars and it gives the fair a head start on the following year.
If you live in the midwest and want to treat your kids to a true slice of Americana (before the nutjobs destroy it), I suggest a trip to the Great Geauga County Fair. Tons of livestock, a real demolition derby, midway food, flower contests, homemaker craft competition,including the disappearing table setting contest (ask your grandmother about that one!). There’s even the traditional rooster toss!
It’s great enough that although I live in S. Utah right now, I time my flight back home each year to coincide with a couple of days at the fair. Yep, 2000+ miles every Labor Day weekend.
It’s cheaper than a psychiatrist. ;)
I worry about the people who don’t know how to “Go Amish.”
When the sicko took Amish school children hostage to sexually abuse and hurt them one girl pleaded with the perp to let the others go and she would stay. It was really ugly and after he was killed the Amish, in the true spirit of Christ, reached out to console the perps family...These people are an awesome witness of Christ’s redeeming love for mankind.
I know how to go Amish. I don't shower for a couple of days and don't use deodorant!
Okay, I'm only joking, but good humor involves truth.... I like the Amish community. They work hard around here and don't charge near as much as contractors. I had them reroof my house for $55/square less than the next bid.
I lived in an area with Amish farms all around me. The guys kept bottles of whiskey under their buggy seats and the local general store was where teen age boys with hot cars would go to pick up Amish girls. Best carpenters around though, would do a quality job for half the price of the “English”.
But remember one thing, there is no such thing as a “dumb” farmer.
$30 and $50 per hour jobs. And people wonder why there are lay offs.
The author of the article failed to note that the Land Trust survived the run on its cash. This means that a significant number of depositors played by the traditional Amish rules—care enough about the entire community to trust the Trust, take the risk of losing one’s own deposits in order to avoid bankrupting the whole Trust. In secular society, with non-FDIC deposits, you can be sure that the Trust would have been emptied out in no time.
Sociologists who study the Amish have noted for a long time that changes in farming have forced half or more of the families to take up non-farm occupations. It was inevitable that a major economic downturn would affect them in this way. What’s truly interesting is that the bishops approved applying for unemployment benefits. Those who think the Amish never change are uninformed. The elders evaluate possible changes and approve or disapprove depending on their best guess as to whether the change will ruin their way of life.
My guess is that the bishops reasoned as follows: we are in a new situation, what with heavy dependence on RV and manufactured housing wages. Those who worked in those industries and who lost their wages can legitimately receive funds from the unemployment system, funds paid in by their former employers to make the system work—emphasizing the “insurance” aspect of the system. (I once worked in Northern Indiana and discovered that my employer, an educational institution did not participate in the unemployment insurance system and I was ineligible when my job came to an end. I lived off savings and tooled up for a new job and survived.)
So this is not a change in the Amish practice of avoiding entanglement with government, rather, it is a slight enlargement of their “self-insure” approach—consistent with the change in the source of their income, they are participating in the employment insurance system. But the bishops would certainly not approve, for instance, of people applying for general state or federal welfare payments. (Most would probably not qualify anyway, since they probably have too many assets in terms of land or homes. Still, the Amish who were working in factories may not have the same assets that those living from farming normally have.)
Donald Kraybill and Steven Nolt and others have long pointed out that the Amish adapt thoughtfully and carefully to the changing economy around them. They are not just naysayers, they are prudent interactors with the larger culture. They have always been that way. Until the late 1800s, they did not dress differently than the rest of the culture. The rest of the culture changed when “fancy” clothing could be bought off the rack instead of having to be made by a tailor—they opted out of the change and kept wearing home-made bonnets like all women had once worn, before the Industrial Revolution.
Ditto for schools—as long as schools were run on the township level by local trustees, in Amish areas, they ran the public schools and all was fine. But when schools were consolidated and “English” folks with PhDs from hoity-toity state universities began to run them, the Amish began organizing private religious schools. Before mandatory school attendance to age 16 became law, their kids stopped at grade 8 like most farmers’ kids did. When the laws were passed, they went to court to argue for exemptions.
When laws requiring electrified milk-cooling equipment for public health reasons were passed, they adapted by permitting power take-offs on tractors to generate enough electricity to power milk coolers and cream separators; some went further to propane refrigerators, for instance but not to wholesale electrification. Managed adaptation is the key word.
The rest of society changed around them; they did not remain unchanged but carefully managed their own change instead of mindlessly adopting new trends or having changes forced on them.
We live about 10 miles south of Topeka. This is a VERY accurate article (my kudos to the writer). Amish “living it up” has to do with new home construction— the largest, nicest looking homes in the area (white, of course), and the grounds look nicer than any government-run park. The “young folks” live at home until married and financially stable, so it was not unusual for 4, 5, or 6 wage-earners to live under the same roof (at $30-50/hour and 40-60 hours per week, you do the math). The Amish are re-discovering their agricultural roots, and families are joining back together to farm the ground, raise dairy, etc.
By the way, we are “english” here to the Amish. A few years ago, a friend that I worked with in California and originally from Pakistan, came to visit. He was amazed by the Amish. “I can’t believe people drive horses and buggies and farm with draft horses!! We see camel carts and horse-drawn carts in my country, but this is America!!!” It was pretty funny....
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Still true today. The rule of thumb here is that farm land drops $1000/acre in price for every mile you move away from Topeka. Bidding for prime farm land in the county was reaching $12,000/acre in Amish areas— if developers wanted to buy it they were going to pay a pretty price. We are only now beginning to see Amish families moving this “far out” because the land is much cheaper. Another consideration for land re-sale value is that you never keep less than 5 acres on a farmstead, so that it remains attractive to Amish buyers...
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“kept bottles of whiskey under their buggy seats...”
Of course they did. I’m not Amish, but I do have an Anabaptist background. A lot of the “plain people” have German roots, and that includes imbibing and enjoying alcoholic beverages. One caveat though - each group is different. And, the terms “Amish”, “Mennonite” and even “Brethren” covers a lot of ground, in terms of lifestyles, but we all share our Anabaptist roots.
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