My Amish Research Links
Amish of Lancaster research: The start of my Amish research pagesSecond page of the Amish of Lancaster: More research on living the Amish life
My first web pages on the Amish: Research and personal experience on the Amish way of life
Amish Life: Articles primarily about the Amish of PA as well as personal experiences.
edited by Donald B. Kraybill and Marc A. Olshan
page 251
Ohio has 33 settlements of Amish. It has 258 congregations. The
reason for the large amount of congregations is that Amish are home
church people. They divide their congregations when they get much
larger than two hundred. Their homes are constructed so that every
family can host the church once during the year. The rooms are
separated by removeable, or sliding walls. If a home is not constructed
this way, perhaps purchased from a Non Amish, then they might break
through a wall to combine the living room and dining room, or set
up church in a cleaned out barn.
p 250
"At the end of 1992 there were 220 settlements in 22 U.S. states and
7 settlements in Ontario. That the Amish are spreading into new
areas is best illustrated by the fact that of the 227 settlements
existing in December 1992, 63 percent or 144 were founded since 1971 as shown.
p247
"...new settlements are generally founded by individual families
desiring to move elsewhere rather than as a well-organized, church-sanctioned
migration, many settlements do not take root."
Example:
p 248 (While there still are Ohio Amish here is some which expired)
Degraff, Ohio 1976-1977
Andover, Ohio 1976-1990
Piketon, Ohio 1984-1989
The reason for a congregation to expire would be not enough Amish to keep
the church community going. The Amish in these areas would either
sell and move to where there were other Amish, or have to travel by
buggy long distances to attend services at another settlement.
The Ohio Amish are not as well off as the Lancaster Amish, in fact,
many are poor. The Lancaster soil is much better suited for farming
due to the natural irrigation of the earth in that area of PA.
In the book
Published by Roy Reiman, Editor Bob Ottum, there are chapters on the
Ohio Amish. I will include excerpts here.
Are you doing a paper on the Amish? Please check out my research
sites first. While I am happy to help those studying the Amish I
can't be responsible for short deadlines. Please allow enough time
for me to research the answers.
Bea Sheftel
author:
AN OUTSIDER'S VIEW OF THE AMISH
Amish research visited