The Pennsylvania Dutch, Deutsch in America

The name is a linguistic accident that stuck for three hundred years. When German-speaking immigrants, mostly from the Rhineland, the Palatinate, and Switzerland, began flooding into Pennsylvania in the early seventeen hundreds, English-speaking neighbors heard them call themselves Deutsch and wrote it down as Dutch. The confusion endured.

Pennsylvania Dutch country has almost nothing to do with the Netherlands. What it does have is one of the most distinctive regional cultures in North America, rooted in a combination of religious seriousness, agricultural tradition, and deliberate separation from the broader world. The first wave arrived in sixteen eighty-three: thirteen Mennonite families from Krefeld, Germany, who settled Germantown, just north of Philadelphia.

They came because William Penn's promise of religious tolerance was not hypothetical. In Europe, Mennonites and other Anabaptist groups, the Amish, the Brethren, the Schwenkfelders, faced imprisonment and execution for their beliefs. Pennsylvania offered something they could not find at home: the right to worship, farm, and raise their children without interference from the state.

By seventeen fifty, the Pennsylvania German population had grown to roughly one hundred thousand people, perhaps a third of the colony's total. They settled the valleys west and south of Philadelphia, Lancaster, Lebanon, Berks, Dauphin, York, and transformed them into some of the most productive farmland in the British colonies. Their barns, often painted with colorful geometric designs called hex signs, became an architectural signature of the region.

Their food culture, shoofly pie, scrapple, souse, chow-chow relish, persists in diners and farm markets across south-central Pennsylvania today. The Old Order Amish, the most visible of the Pennsylvania Dutch communities, began arriving around seventeen forty, the Northkill settlement in Berks County was the first identifiable Amish community in the New World, and eventually settled most heavily in Lancaster County. They remain.

Lancaster County today has one of the largest Amish populations in the world, with more than forty thousand Old Order members. They farm with horses. They refuse electricity from the grid.

They negotiate with modernity on their own terms, in ways that have been debated and adjusted continuously within their communities for three centuries. They are not relics. They are a living argument, still being made, about how a community chooses to exist.