P. L. Gaus’s Ohio Amish Journal

In Holmes County, Ohio, the largest Amish population in the world can be found sprawled across the rolling hills and down in the narrow valleys that so much reminded the first Amish settlers here of their homelands in Germany.  It’s a diverse Amish population, and we have everything from the most conservative Schwartzentruber Amish to the rather more urbane and liberal sects who interact extensively with the non-Amish, or English, population.  Modern conveniences range, according to sect, from the very slight accommodations to modernity that the Schwartzentrubers practice (such as sometimes using Coleman gas lanterns, instead of the more traditional oil and wick lamps), to the use by other sects of sophisticated electronic devices such as phones and computers.  And the “discernments” that make one accommodation agreeable to the Amish – whereas another accommodation is not yet agreeable – can be puzzling to say the least.

One of the nods toward modernity that most makes me chuckle is the neighborhood phone booth, often parked near the road where no one has to admit to owning the thing.  Here is a photograph of one such “neighborhood” Amish phone booth, and right away I suspect you’ll notice the most astonishing aspect of the thing.  Right, you got it.  That’s a solar panel mounted to the side of it.  Inside, there is a phone with an answering machine, and a fax machine, too.  Once you know what you’re looking at, you’ll begin to spot hundreds of these little phone booths peppered around the county.  Some are quite nice, and others are nothing more than little roofed enclosures attached to the back side of a barn.  I know one Amish fellow who has a phone mounted to a tree some hundred yards back into a stand of timber, so nobody can see it.

So there is progress in Holmes County.  Slow progress to be sure, but measurable nonetheless.  Who knows?  Maybe one day we’ll see radio-controlled airplanes for the kids to play with.  No, wait – I’ve already seen that.  Go figure.

In my Ohio Amish Mysteries, soon to be republished as the Amish-Country Mysteries by Plume (a division of Penguin Group USA), the old red-brick Holmes County Jail is featured prominently, and I thought my readers might like to see what it looks like. Here is a picture taken just a few years ago, after Holmes County moved its real jail to a modern facility in the countryside north of town.

Just inside the main door to the right is where I placed Ellie Troyer-Niell’s front counter, and that window on the first floor at the right corner of the building is where I put Sheriff Bruce Robertson’s large office. Many of my characters (Professor Michael Branden, the sheriff, and Pastor Caleb Troyer) have stood looking out from that window, to think or talk about a case.

The rest of courthouse square is taken up by the sandstone courthouse (off-camera to the left) and the tall civil war monument (off-camera to the right), and I’ll soon post photographs of those, too, so you can see the locations where many of my Millersburg scenes are set. In months to come, I’ll try to post photos of other scenes from my novels.

Courthouse square in Millersburg, Ohio, is often a setting used in my Ohio Amish Mysteries. On a prominent block in the center of town, there is a red-brick jail, a civil war monument, and the ornate sandstone Holmes County Courthouse, all surrounding a central lawn. I thought you would like to see pictures of these landmarks, and I have already posted a photograph of the jail. Here is one of the courthouse. They say that when it was first being built, you could see the gleam of the shiny copper top from the high ground in Salt Creek Township, twelve miles to the north. Today, that roof has gone the way of all such copper domes – oxidized to dull green – and it is not nearly as pretty as they say it used to be. Even so, I think it is an impressive building.

In what has lately been a very hard winter here in Ohio, we got a break in temperatures these last few days, and I made a trip to Holmes County to see what the Amish people there were doing with the respite.  In typical fashion, they were out using the day to good purpose, mucking out the stalls and loading up manure spreaders.  Almost everywhere we turned, we saw teams hitched to red spreaders, walking slowly over the fields, pitching manure left, right and aft, preparing the soil for spring planting, or working over a field planted earlier with winter wheat.  At one farm, the lad had used a front loader to stack manure outside the barn, and he had a pile of aromatic fertilizer that was easily eight feet high and thirty yards long, all of it destined for the fields across the way.  I got this picture of him bringing his team back for another load, and I thought how remarkable it was that he’d do little else that day.  Move a pile of manure as big as an eighteen wheeler?  There’s only one way to do that – one trip at a time.

Where is Amish country?  If you were to ask that question in Ohio, the answer would be Holmes County.  There we have the largest Amish settlement in the world.  In truth, this region of Plain People sprawls out over all of the adjoining counties, too, but Holmes County is the center of it.  Its rolling hills and secluded pasture lands reminded the earliest Amish settlers of their lands in the foothills of Germany and Switzerland, and the first group settled here in the Killbuck Valley in 1807, led by Jakob Miller, who brought a group over from Somerset County in Pennsylvania.

But “Amish Country” now could be just about anywhere in America.  It seems almost every state and region has its own Amish/Mennonite population.  And new settlements are springing up in far-flung places.  For instance, I met an Amish bishop at a library talk I gave in Batavia, New York last March.  He had brought a group of Old Order Amish people up to New York from the area around Mt. Hope, in Holmes County, Ohio.  They needed cheap land, and they wanted to start a more conservative church in a remote part of America, someplace where they wouldn’t be bothered by the in-press of us English or Yankee folk.  Holmes County Amish have settled as far north as Ontario, Canada, and as far south as Florida, all looking for good land to farm and quiet, untroubled places to live.

But there is one interesting exception to that notion, in Sarasota, Florida.  In that sprawling coastal metropolis, parked right in the middle of the most English of worlds, sits the little Amish community of Pinecraft, Florida, where small homes and trailers cluster around a few Amish establishments, most notably, Troyer’s Dutch Heritage Restaurant and Gift shop, on Bahia Vista Blvd.  It is a quintessentially Amish community, but there are no farms and no horses and buggies like we have in Ohio.  Instead, this is rather more like a sleepy retirement community of mixed Amish and Mennonite persuasions, and the people there ride around on bicycles and tricycles.  Then when the buses pull in from Ohio each week, everybody comes out to see who has made the trip.  It will be retired Holmes County farmers and whole families in winter, going down for a visit with friends and relatives.  The buses from Ohio travel straight through, with one driver taking a three-hour shift at the wheel, while a second driver sleeps in a small compartment built at the front of the bus.  A friend of mine drives that trip quite often, and he says that the whole Pinecraft community meets the bus, everyone curious to see who has come down for a seaport vacation near the beaches at Longboat and Siesta Keys.

So as to my original question?  Where is Amish Country?  Well, it seems now, it is anywhere a Greyhound bus can travel.  Amish people on a Florida vacation!  What a picture.

It started in Wal-Mart about ten years ago – Amish men stepping to the cash register with their checkbooks, after all the items had been scanned.  Before that, all such purchases would have been done with cash.  And an Amish father might typically carry several hundred dollars in cash to town, enough at least to cover all of the stops the family wanted to make.  You’d see the fathers and grandfathers clustered just inside the doors, or outside on the Wal-Mart parking lot, passing the time of day, while the women shopped for food, or shoes, whatever.  Maybe they’d buy enough staples to fill up what room there was in the back of the buggy after all the kids were loaded for the trip home.

So that was the new thing I spotted, the checkbooks.  There just had been too many robberies of the Plain People.  Everyone knew.  An Amish farmer on a trip into town with his family might have $1500 cash in his pocket.  I’ve heard of greater sums, as astonishing as that may seem.  But not anymore.  Where a bishop allows it, the men and many of the women now have checking accounts, and we see them writing checks in Wal-Mart all the time.  It is not even remarkable, unless you remember the day when such a thing never would have happened.

Then the next change happened about two years ago.  We see it in Wooster quite a lot now, since Amish families have to travel so far to get to Wal-Mart.  They come ten to fifteen at a time, whole families, or two families together – as many as can fit in an extended-length window van driven by some enterprising English fellow, who makes a living driving these long fifteen-passenger “Amish Haulers” into town.  And if you count the little kids sitting on Mom or Dad’s lap, it can be upwards of twenty Amish souls packed into one of those big vans.

But that is not all.  Now the vans are showing up with cargo trailers hitched to the back, and the women and children will spend several hours in Wal-Mart, carting out load after load of groceries and goods to pack into the trailer.  And they fill them up!  The littlest children don’t help.  They sit on father’s lap in the van and wait for the rest of the family to finish shopping.  Sometimes the fathers get out for a smoke.  Sometimes they wander inside to look around.  But the women have the checkbooks these days, and that seems to suit the men well enough.

So that’s the change I’ve seen at the Wal-Mart here in Wooster.  Amish-hauler window vans with English drivers pulling cargo trailers.  Women with the older children, shopping for everything from sunglasses to snow shovels.  Men who wait.  And the checkbooks.  That’s quite a change for people who think that the Bible teaches that God would have us all live on a farm.

If I extrapolate into the future, I have to predict that we’ll see credit cards one day.  It is not likely, but when it happens – seems inevitable, doesn’t it – I’ll have all the evidence I’ll need to write an Ohio Amish Mystery in which some unsuspecting Amish man is swindled out of the entire credit limit on the card.  It’s progress, you see.  It has been coming on for over thirty years.  The Amish people of Holmes County, Ohio, constitute the most urbane collection of Anabaptists anywhere in the world, and such a swindle, as bad as it would be, probably wouldn’t be any worse than getting robbed of your $1500 in cash that used to travel in your pants pocket.

Maybe the Schwartzentrubers have it right, after all.  They’d say that if you really are living Amish the right way, you just don’t need to go into town at all.

Now, to update this posting, here is a photograph of an Amish-hauler van and its trailer at Wal-Mart today (Jan 12, 2010)  in Wooster, Ohio.

Our Miata sports car is featured in my Ohio Amish Mysteries, and in those stories, the professor’s wife Caroline drives it over the blacktopped and gravel lanes of Holmes County, Ohio.  My wife Madonna and I do that too, as often as we can arrange it, and the curves and hills of the countryside offer up great sport for the little two-seater.  Amish kids are drawn to the car, and sometimes adults, too.   They often take an interest in motorcars, even though they will never own and likely never drive one themselves.   So when we pass a softball game at one of the parochial schools, or a family out for a buggy ride, we always wave.  And we always get a friendly wave in return.  Summer and autumn days in Holmes County are custom-made for this type of trip, and every turn of a bend delivers something new.  When we got to this bend in the road, I stopped, backed up, and took a picture, because it so much captures the essence of autumn touring in Holmes County.  Caroline’s Miata really makes the roads sing.

The seventh Ohio Amish Mystery will take place along Salt Creek Township Lane 601, in Holmes County, Ohio.  It’s a quiet and peaceful Amish corner of the county, with a few English (or Yankee) homes sprinkled in among the farms.  At one point, one can look out over the horizons to three different Ohio counties, and on few of the farms near there can one find evidence of modern American culture – there are no phone lines, no electric poles,  and no TV antennas.  Nothing modern like that scars the vista.

I like to visit this short stretch of 601 where it crests on the high ridge, and I like to watch for the glory of the fall colors there, because it rarely disappoints.   Here is a picture I got in October, with an Amish homestead in the foreground.

I took this photograph today in Holmes County, Ohio, showing a young woman driving home from the market in Fredericksburg.  I love the deep teal hue of her dress and the obvious good health of the horse.  I covered about 50 miles of country road on this trip, looking for the color in the trees, and then saw this shot on my way home.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

For the aggravated murder of Barbara Weaver, Barbara Raber of Millersburg, Ohio, has been sentenced by Judge Robert J. Brown to twenty-three years to life in prison.  This happened several days ago in Wayne County (Ohio) court, and I’ve taken the time since then to think about this.

At the time the verdict was announced on September 22, 2009, Raber said time and again that she didn’t do it.  Her attorney presented the plausible alternative scenario that Weaver’s husband Eli actually killed his wife in the early morning hours of June 2, 2009, before leaving on a fishing trip with friends.  The coroner’s best estimate of the range for time of death does fit this theory, but the jury still convicted Raber, and the judge at sentencing said, “You were involved in the death of Barbara Weaver.  There is no evidence to contradict that.”  The judge also expressed the opinion that Raber’s sentence ought to have some “parity” with that of Eli Weaver (fifteen years to life), who earlier pleaded guilty to the charge of complicity to commit murder, before testifying for the prosecution.

Is that then a clean verdict and a reasonable sentence?  Maybe so, but also maybe not.  Holmes County residents have expressed the opinion to me that this case is more complicated than it appears.  That certainly is what the defense presented in court.  But Judge Brown said at the time of sentencing, “You and Mr. Weaver had a strong role in the death of his wife.  Without your cooperation, she would still be alive today.”

I think he was right. I think we have justice.  But is it flawless?  Probably not.