The Amish of Lancaster: Three Hundred Years of Deliberate Separateness

The first Mennonite settlers arrived in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in sixteen eighty-three, twenty-three years before Benjamin Franklin was born, fifty-four years before William Penn's sons would betray the Lenape through the Walking Purchase. They had come from the Rhine Valley of present-day Germany and Switzerland, Anabaptists who had been expelled or threatened across most of Europe because they refused to swear oaths, refused military service, and refused to baptize infants, practicing instead a faith built entirely on adult consent and community accountability.

Their descendants have been farming Lancaster County ever since.

The Old Order Amish, who came later and separated from the mainline Mennonites in the late seventeenth century, around sixteen ninety three, under their bishop Jakob Ammann, do not use electricity from the public grid, do not own automobiles, do not use tractors in most cases, and conduct their worship services in private homes rather than church buildings. These are not primitive holdovers from a less sophisticated era. They are decisions made and remade by community consensus across three centuries, based on a theological framework that holds technology to be a separation force: the more connected a family is to the broader technological world, the less connected it is to God, to each other, and to the specific community that makes Anabaptist life possible.

The language spoken in Old Order Amish homes in Lancaster County is Pennsylvania German, called Deitsch by its speakers. It is not standard German. It is a distinct language that emerged from the mixing of Palatine German dialects, Swiss German, and English over three hundred years of relative isolation. An estimated three hundred thousand people in the United States and Canada speak Deitsch. Because the Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities are growing, the language is not dying. It is expanding.

The farmland of Lancaster County, maintained without tractors or chemical fertilizers in most cases, is among the most productive agricultural land in the eastern United States. What looks from the road like a pastoral remnant of the past is, by most agricultural measures, a working model for something else entirely.