The First Amish Settlers Come to Holmes County
Near Berlin, Ohio
The first Amish settlers who came to Holmes County, Ohio, in the early nineteenth century came not from Europe but from Pennsylvania. By that time, the original Amish communities in Lancaster and Somerset counties in Pennsylvania had grown enough that some families were looking for new land on the frontier. The most celebrated of the early Holmes County settlers was Jonas Stutzman, known in community memory as Der Weiss, meaning the white one, to distinguish him from other men of similar name.
Stutzman settled near the present community of Walnut Creek in eighteen oh eight or eighteen oh nine and established one of the first sawmills in the area. The land he and the settlers who followed him found in eastern Holmes County reminded them of the hills of Switzerland and the river valleys of Germany and Alsace where their ancestors had lived before generations of migration. The community grew steadily through the first half of the nineteenth century as more families came from Pennsylvania and, occasionally, directly from Europe.
The land was fertile and affordable, the distance from larger settlements offered the separation from the broader society that the Amish tradition valued, and the community established itself in a form that has persisted and grown for more than two hundred years. The rolling hills of Holmes County, which reminded those first arrivals of Switzerland, now contain the largest Amish settlement in the world.
