Amish Kids Take Sleds to School These Days
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
We have had about a foot of snow on the ground in Northern Ohio since Christmas, and today we are getting another eight to ten inches. In truth, it has been one of those harder, colder winters, very much like the ones I remember from fifty years ago. The warming trend that we have known in the last several years notwithstanding, it seems that this year will set some records for cold temperatures and snow fall.
So I was out in Holmes County a couple of days ago to see how Amish people there are coping with the snow and cold, and I got this shot of a new parochial school on Salt Creek Township Road 601, just south of Fredericksburg, Ohio. There is an outhouse in the background, and the two-room building sports its plumbing on the outside front left corner, namely a hand spigot. Note also the belfry and the chimney for the wood-burning stove. Then the school has an anteroom or mudroom for coats and boots, attached to the front of the one-room school. This is one of the newer schools in the area. Its neighbor Leeper School has been there since the thirties, and with the Amish population in Holmes County growing as it is, I expect there will someday be still another school nearby.
But have a closer look at the left front corner of the school. See the sleds? Right. The Amish kids take sleds to school these days. Did you ever do that? Like me, you may have ridden a bicycle to school, but I doubt you took a sled. There might be twelve to fifteen scholars attending this new school, and there are six sleds left outside in the snow. So, that’s a good percentage of the children from that neighborhood. Take a sled to school? If you were Amish, you wouldn’t think anything of it.
