P. L. Gaus’s Ohio Amish Journal

In Holmes County, Ohio, Amish people and others know well the benefits of purple martins and swallows, and many of the yards sport white martin houses on tall poles, often two or three at a time, because a colony of purple martins is very effective at keeping the mosquito population in check. And martins and swallows are the best aerial acrobats, darting and swooping through the air, especially in the evening, to nip mosquitoes in flight. I could sit for hours watching these birds fly.

The martins nest in large communities, in special houses built to accommodate them. Barn swallows nest in the eaves and rafters of barns. A smart farmer knows to encourage their numbers, and the design and construction of martin houses is a highly advanced practice among Amish. Typically, there will be a tall white pole with a pulley at the top and a crank at the bottom. The martin house will hang from a wire that loops over the pulley, to be sent up to the top in summer and cranked down to ground level in the fall for cleaning, after the martins have left. Once they have been cleaned out, the houses are cranked up half way for winter, to discourage intruders. That’s the sure sign of fall in Holmes County – the martin houses have been taken down and cleaned, and they sit about half way up their poles, waiting for spring.

My wife Madonna and I were down in Holmes County a week ago in our Miata with the top down, on a country lane east of Calmoutier, and we found this house where the front lawn sported five of these martin poles. The first photograph was taken from the west, and it also shows a sixth pole in the back that hangs the smaller gourd houses. You’ll also see in the second photograph (a closer shot taken from the east) that there is a TV antenna standing right in the middle of the whole thing.

Curious? Right. Amish people don’t have televisions, and this antenna is not wired into the house. So why the antenna? If you were to visit in the summer, you’d see right away why it’s there. Care to guess? Right again – it’s a perch, and a very good one at that. You’ve gotta love this type of thinking. Why spray with insecticides when you can put up a martin house instead? And why put up a martin house without nearby perches for the birds? That’s down-home ingenuity if I ever saw it.

I‘ve been nosing around Holmes County, Ohio, for twenty-five years, looking for those little insights and memories that so often go into one of my Ohio Amish Mysteries, even though I didn’t start writing the mysteries until 1995. So I’ll admit to you that when I started exploring the Amish communities there, I didn’t know I would eventually write about Amish culture. I was just curious, like so many people are, and I would have to say that at first I was no different than any of the thousands of “English” tourists who go there every year. But Amish culture is more popular than ever these days, and Holmes County has become a favorite destination for day trippers in Ohio - so much so that the place is overrun with a congestion of cars and tour buses – all traveling up and down the blacktop roads that used to be quiet country lanes. In fact, in the last twenty-five years, tourism has changed Holmes County more than anything.  But that is a topic for another day. My point here is that I learned long ago to get off the blacktop roads onto the lesser-traveled gravel lanes in Holmes County, and unlike the average tourist, I have learned how to find those special little gems of culture and lifestyle that are necessary to my stories.

That’s how I got this photograph of new buggy wheels stacked against a wall in a wheel shop west of the little town of Benton, Ohio. The young Amish lads who worked there were taking a lunch break when I arrived, and none of them got up to talk to me. Plainly they could see that an English tourist like me was not going to buy a wheel. If they ignored me, maybe I’d go away. After all, it was their lunch time, and I was just a nosy tourist with my camera. But there against the wall was this stack of unfinished buggy wheels, and for my own satisfaction, I grabbed a shot of it before I backed out the door and went on my way.

I’ve been saving that memory for one of my stories. I’ll send Professor Branden into the shop to interview an Amish boy about a murder of some English miscreant, and there they will have a chat while standing beside the buggy wheels that are stacked there for finishing after a lazy lunch. I’ll make the lads in the shop mildly disdainful of the Professor’s intrusion, and it’ll all tie in nicely with the theme of the story – maybe something about a local fellow who grew weary of the tourists. Maybe it will even be a tourist who ends up murdered, with an Amish lad who is suspected of doing it. Of course the professor won’t believe that – no Amish person would ever be a murderer, and my readers all know that when they start one of my mysteries.

So, I’ll just stay off the blacktop roads. I’ll travel those narrow gravel lanes that stretch out over a hilltop meadow or run into a stand of timber. That’s where you find the authentic Amish insights and memories, anyway. If you go to Holmes County, I suggest you do the same. Maybe you’ll find that wheel shop. Maybe those lads will have learned that tourists like to buy authentic Amish goods. You could put the buggy wheel in your garden, and you could put your memory of the purchase in that special, authentic place in your mind where you remind yourself that you explored Holmes County the right way, at least that one time.