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If you live in Colorado, say, or Maine, maybe you’ve noticed a new kind of traffic: Amish horse buggies. They’re appearing in areas they’ve never been (or haven’t been for a very long time), as Amish farming communities take root in states far beyond their traditional heartland of Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Ohio.
According to Donald Kraybill, a sociologist at Elizabethtown College, the Amish are moving partly because they’re growing. Over the past 16 years, the population has nearly doubled to about 230,000, with roughly five children per family. But Kraybill explains that Amish adherents, who practice a form of Christianity emphasizing simplicity and separation from the world, also are feeling hemmed in. As towns near their farms and small businesses expand, Amish families have found themselves surrounded by things they’ve always tried to avoid—roads, automobiles, real estate prices that prohibit them from acquiring farmland—fueling a modern migration to greener, and more rural, pastures. —Neil Shea
Photo: Johnny Nicoloro. NGM Maps. Source: Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies
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Comments
Jul 8, 2009 4PM #
I am curious to know more about the Amish people. Was there not an article in the Natl Geog magazine some years back on this subject? Could you let me know the particular issue (mth/year)in which this article appeared?
Thanks.
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