by It’s the long lines of clothes drying in the wind that alert you that you’re entering Amish country. “Every day is laundry day for the Amish women,” says Jim, our driver and guide. “Every day except Sunday.”
Staying with friends in Pennsylvania last month, I wanted to visit the super fertile farmland of Lancaster County, about an hour west of Philadelphia. This is where this broken religious sect first settled after escaping persecution in 18th century in Europe, and still the largest single group of America is 367,000 Amish.
Their belief in simple living, simple dressing and Christian peace also avoids modern technology. In most households, there is no telephone, internet, television or washing machine. There’s no mains electricity at all, really – so the tell-tale washing lines.
Like many people, I first became aware of this particular branch of the so-called “Pennsylvania Dutch” (actually a corruption of Deutsch – in other words, German) thanks to a film filmed 40 years ago this summer this. In 1984, Hollywood came to Lancaster County in the form of a Peter Weir thriller witness.
Harrison Ford played John Book, a big city cop assigned to protect a young Amish boy who witnessed a murder while visiting Philadelphia. Book found himself attracted not only by the Amish lifestyle but also by the lad’s mother, played by Kelly McGillis.
I watched the film again recently and it’s still as good as I remembered – albeit a bit idealized (those beautiful wooden barns we see being built in communities are mostly replaced by metal and fiberglass structures more). To assimilate him, Harrison Ford’s policeman was made to wear the trademark Amish trousers held up by braces (belts are considered horrible), a jacket and a wide-brimmed straw hat. The women wear ankle-length dresses that cover their shoulders and upper arms, along with bonnets (black for unmarried women and girls, white for wives).
As distinctive as their clothes are their horse-drawn buggies – the Amish are forbidden to drive cars. And there were a fair number of buggies squeezing onto the bypasses around the nearby towns, Bird in Hand and Intercourse (yes, really, and my teenage daughter took a photo of the road sign to amuse her friends back in the town).
I noticed two companies that offer tourist tours on Amish buggies, but instead we opted for a 90 minute minibus tour organized by The Amish Experience, an established company based in Bird in Hand. Pottering along the back country lanes at a slightly faster pace than the buggies, Jim kept up a steady stream of facts and figures.
We learned, for example, that all non-Amish people, regardless of nationality, are called “English”; and even in death, they avoid mockery – their tombstones being small and equal. However, we had to postpone a scheduled visit to the Amish cemetery because a funeral was taking place. There were some buggies outside, a poignant sight that could have been there 200 years ago.
Jim pointed out the “phone santies”, the upright garden sheds that looked like outdoor toilets, but actually have a phone used to do business with the “English” (no phones allowed in the house itself). Then there were the tractors with metal wheels – and therefore too uncomfortable to go beyond the farm yard. Horse-drawn implements are still widely used in the fields.
We also passed several one-room schools, where children under 14 (when formal education ends) could be seen through open doors – little bonnet heads turning to repay our curiosity as we grappled with the past approx. They are not lobbyists outside these tiny schools – bicycles are banned as they might encourage long journeys.
Amish women are often married by the age of 21, and bear an average of seven children – and, of course, washing all that clothing. Most anti-wrinkle washers tend to use the tub-style that would have been common in homes in the 1940s.
This domestic drudgery may appeal to the elite attracted to today’s “traditional” subculture, and its view of wives as homemakers. But broader interest in the simple, communal ways of the Amish seems to stem from concern about our high-tech, consumerist society and the isolation felt through our phones and our individual, increasingly atomized lifestyles.
To understand the people behind the traditions, The Amish Experience offers an immersive, three-hour VIP (Visit-in-Person) tour, including a visit to an Amish home (visitors are asked to dress modestly) , and it is also possible. stay in Amish-run bed and breakfast guesthouses. Expect a hearty fried breakfast: the Amish like to work hard in the morning.
If our minibus tour was seen as a nuisance – a sort of “Amish Safari” – it seemed that the objects of our curiosity had long been accustomed to ignore diseases. Tourists are asked not to shove their cameras in people’s faces, as (besides being sincerely rude) it is fundamentally Amish to glorify the opposite through photography.
When I asked Jim how the Amish feel about the tourists, he told me about another guide who was invited to an Amish wedding – the only “Englishman” among the 500 or so guests. Feeling self-conscious, a church elder finally approached him and asked: “Well, then, and how does it feel to be stared at?”
Basics
British Airways (ba.com) flies twice daily to Philadelphia from London Heathrow from £560 return. Various trains run daily from Philadelphia to Lancaster (1 hour), with return tickets from $21.
Greystone Manor Victorian Inn, in Bird in Hand, is an ornately decorated 1800s farmhouse offering double rooms from £127 per night. More than 30 Amish-run bed and breakfast farm stays are also available through amishfarmstay.com.
The Amish Experience’s In-Person tours depart daily from April to October, and cost $61.95 per adult (over 13) and $51.95 per child (ages six-12).
