The Tourism Paradox: More Visitors Than Any Amish Town
Near Berlin, Ohio
Berlin was, by most accounts, the first community in Holmes County to actively market the Amish way of life to outside visitors. That decision, made sometime in the mid-twentieth century, transformed a quiet agricultural village into the most visited small town in Ohio Amish Country. Today Berlin's permanent population of fewer than fifteen hundred people hosts more tourists each year than any other community in the region.
The business district that serves those visitors is disproportionately large for a village of this size. As of the second decade of the twenty first century, Berlin counted more than forty shops, ten hotels, and forty restaurants and eateries clustered in and around its small downtown. Products range from handmade quilts and hand-built furniture to specialty food items, baked goods, and the craft goods typical of any destination economy.
The relationship between the tourism industry and the Amish community is not a simple one. The Amish residents of Holmes County are generally not the people working in Berlin's shops and hotels. Many of those businesses are owned and operated by non-Amish neighbors, whom the Amish call the English regardless of their actual ancestry.
The Amish benefit from the tourism economy indirectly, through demand for their furniture, food, and crafts, while keeping some deliberate distance from the commercial machinery that displays their way of life to the outside world. It is, in this respect, a tourism economy with a very particular structure: the attraction is a community that has chosen not to perform itself for visitors.
