Berlin, Ohio: Center of the World's Largest Amish Community
Near Berlin, Ohio
Berlin is a small village in the rolling hills of Holmes County, Ohio, and by almost any measure it should not be famous. Its permanent population is a little over one thousand four hundred people. It has no celebrated landmarks, no natural wonders, no historic battlefield or presidential birthplace.
What Berlin has is the center of the largest Amish community in the world, and that has made it the single most visited village in all of Ohio Amish Country. Holmes County and its neighbors Wayne and Tuscarawas counties contain an Amish population estimated at nearly forty thousand people, the highest concentration of Amish anywhere on earth. The Amish make up roughly half of Holmes County's total population.
When you drive through the county's hills and narrow valleys, you share the road with black-painted horse-drawn buggies. You pass farms with no power lines running to the barn, fields tended by horse-drawn equipment, laundry drying on lines between wooden posts. The landscape looks, in many ways, like rural American farm country of a century ago, but it is not a museum exhibit.
It is the living present of a community that has chosen its relationship with the modern world with great deliberateness. Berlin itself is the oldest village in Holmes County. Its first lots were laid out on July second, eighteen sixteen, by John Swigert, a native of Berlin, Germany, who had made his way to the frontier of the young United States.
Another early settler, Joseph Troyer, had come from Berlin, Pennsylvania, a community named by earlier German emigrants for the same European city. The two men agreed to call their new settlement by the name they both carried with them. Amish settlers arrived in Holmes County beginning in the early eighteen hundreds.
The first and most celebrated was Jonas Stutzman, who established himself near the present community of Walnut Creek around eighteen oh eight, coming from Pennsylvania as most of the early Ohio Amish families did. The rolling hills of eastern Holmes County reminded these settlers of the landscape of Switzerland, where the Amish faith had been born in the fires of religious persecution nearly three centuries before. Today Berlin's business district holds more than forty shops, ten hotels, and forty restaurants and eateries.
The Amish and Mennonite Heritage Center on the edge of town houses the Behalt cyclorama, a two hundred sixty five foot painting that circles the room and tells the entire history of the Amish and Mennonite people from sixteenth century Switzerland to the present day. More tourists come here than to any other community in Amish Country, and the people whose story draws them are still here, living that story in the hills just beyond the shops.
