The Divisions Within: Old Order, Andy Weaver, and Swartzentruber
Near Berlin, Ohio
The Holmes County Amish community is not a single uniform group. It is a collection of related but distinct orders, each with its own standards about what the community permits and what it forbids, and those divisions are the products of two centuries of disagreements over how strictly the faith should be practiced. The first major split in the Holmes County community occurred in the eighteen sixties, when a progressive faction broke away toward the Mennonite tradition, a less conservative branch of the Anabaptist tradition.
A series of conferences in the following years solidified the separation between those who became known as Old Order Amish and those who called themselves Amish Mennonites. A later division produced the Andy Weaver Amish, which formed in nineteen fifty two and took a stricter position than the Old Order. The Andy Weaver group occupies a place between the Old Order Amish and the Swartzentruber Amish, who maintain the strictest rules of any order in Holmes County and reject nearly all modern technology in both home and barn.
The diversity of these groups can be read in the landscape itself. Different orders paint their buggy tops different colors. The presence or absence of rubber tires on farm equipment, of propane lines running to a house, or of a telephone in an outbuilding all indicate which order owns a property.
The differences look small from the outside. Inside the community, they define everything.
