Amish roll with change

MILLERSBURG, Ohio - Amish life always has moved at the pace of a horse and buggy. Yet the Old World tempo masks the rapid growth and economic pressures that have forced the Amish to make lifestyle-alter

ing compromises.

More Amish are working off the farm, operating small businesses and coming into contact with an outside world obsessed with speed and convenience. The Amish also are opening up to once-banned forms of technology — all changes that will influence generations to come.

“The old adage was you had to have a wife and a Bible and 80 acres,” said Sam Stoltzfus, who lives in Lancaster County, Pa. “Now you can have two acres and a wife and a Bible and a shop.”

With an average of seven children per family, the Amish population has been doubling about every 20 years since at least the 1940s, said Donald Kraybill, a sociologist at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. By comparison, the U.S. population has doubled since 1948.

The Amish, numbering about 180,000, have settlements in 25 states and Ontario with 70 percent of the population in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana. The largest settlement — numbering about 29,000 — is in Holmes, Wayne and Tuscarawas counties in northeast Ohio.

Their faith dictates that they place the community before the individual and keep a distance from the outside world, often avoiding the use of technology — such as electricity and automobile ownership — to do so.

Emanuel Hershberger, 80, has lived through the changing times in Holmes County, a region of rolling hills, dusty roads and bucolic vistas. When he was younger, 90 percent of the Amish there were full-time farmers. Today, about 10 percent are, he said.

Mr. Hershberger wears a traditional Amish beard with a clean-shaven upper lip. His gray whiskers reach three buttons down on his shirt. He lives on a 163-acre farm, but his family no longer works the land. Mr. Hershberger sold the farm to his son-in-law, and the land is rented out.

“The cost of farming got to a place where they couldn’t make a living anymore,” he said.

Today, many Amish own roofing companies, fabric stores and other businesses or work for non-Amish businesses, such as factories and construction companies. Farm machinery and telephones have become part of Amish life.

“Cultures that are so rigid that they can’t adapt don’t survive,” said LaVina Miller Weaver, a mental health therapist from Holmesville who left the Amish faith at 17 to pursue a college education. “The Amish have had an amazing ability over the years to adapt and let themselves to some extent be shaped and influenced, but not totally.”

It has become more difficult for the Amish to distance themselves from outsiders, but the interaction has opened up more opportunities to earn a living.

“Frankly, it’s just easier to be Amish today economically. You don’t have to have a farm,” said Steven Nolt, associate professor of history at Goshen College in Indiana.

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