Witness to a Simpler Life : Finding beauty and plain truths on the road through Pennsylvania’s Amish country

LANCASTER COUNTY, Pa. —  I was new in Amish Country, but I was well-coached. So when I hit the Pennsylvania state line this spring, I looked over the family-style restaurants, the quaint quilt shops, the country stores and the weather-beaten farmhouses with the woodwork in the front yard. But I kept driving.

Soon I stood in a farm exposition building crammed with quilts, crafts, cider jars, sausage sandwiches and homemade pretzels, and resounding with the noises of an auction in progress.

“Five?” asked a man with a microphone, launching into Lot 671. “Five? Diggadiggadiggasix. Six?”

Around me in folding chairs sat several hundred potential bidders--city folk, country folk and scores of sober, bearded men in black hats, their wives in plain dresses, daughters in bonnets, sons in suspenders.

This was the Mennonite Central Committee’s 36th Pennsylvania Relief Sale and Quilt Auction in Harrisburg, an annual charity event that raises hundreds of thousands of dollars. Rachel Pellman, curator of the People’s Place Quilt Museum in the town of Intercourse, had told me the occasion would serve as an ideal introduction to the local culture, and feel “like a family reunion.”

So it did, and what a family: The Old Order Amish farmers--those who keep utility wires and the English language out of their homes--stood alongside their more worldly cousins, the Mennonites. And alongside the Mennonites stood bargain-hunting urbanites from Philadelphia.

“Six?” barked the auctioneer. “Diggadiggadiggaten. Ten. Ten? Diggadiggadiggadiggadiggadig. Sold for nine dollars.”

I didn’t bid on Lot 671, whatever it was. But this was only my first day in the neighborhood, and in the end I took home from Amish Country exactly what I’d come for.

The idea was to step into the countryside, sound out the people and their circumstances, savor some simplicity and tranquillity, and stay off the tourist treadmill. Instead of booking roadside hotels, I stayed as a paying guest in Amish and Mennonite households. Instead of lining up for standard roadside attractions, I stood on the fringes of community commerce.

I happened to be traveling alone in springtime, but a couple or family could easily trace the same course in summer or fall, when Amish country is busy with harvest and weddings and the occasional barn-raising. My trip was a bracing experience, and illuminating, and cheap, and occasionally just a tiny bit challenging.

One night, my 86-year-old Amish host pointed into the refrigerator and with great amusement told me about the city-bred guests he’d had the day before, a couple who actually brought store-bought milk on a stay at a dairy farm.

The next morning, looking into the same refrigerator, I faced a choice between their tidy carton and a pitcher that had been filled out back just two hours before.

The pitcher smelled . . . like cows. The liquid seemed . . . kind of viscous.

But who wants abuse from an 86-year-old farmer? I drank, and I lived.

I passed my first buggy about five miles west of Intercourse. This was on Route 340 in the heart of Lancaster County: two clopping horses in front, impassive driver at the reins, the familiar red reflecting triangle affixed to the back.

The further I drove into Amish Country, the more common the buggies became, rumbling past the Amoco station, waiting for a traffic light to change in front of Kinmo Motel, parked in a driveway by a mailbox marked STOLTZFUS. Stoltzfus, I thought. Unusual name.

At the Bird-In-Hand Farmers Market I pulled over, and was pleased to see a few bonnet-bearing clerks and cups of fresh cider for a quarter. But the chocolate-chip cookies were suspiciously upscale at a dollar each, the aisles were crowded with ersatz antique signs and one of the merchants was vending “Intercourse University” T-shirts. There are no colleges in Intercourse. I was not long in the market.

The driving, however, was grand. Freshly turned fields on both sides. Horse-drawn ploughs raising dirt in the late afternoon sun. A cemetery. And on Snake Lane in the community of Spring Garden, three women in plain dark dresses, chatting and ambling up a long, slow hill. That sight could have been 2 years old, or 20, or 241, as are the words that follow:.

Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our own Anglifying them?

So wrote Benjamin Franklin, to little effect, in 1751. That was about 40 years after William Penn’s pledges of religious tolerance lured the first German Mennonite immigrants to the state.

The first Mennonites followed a 16th-Century renegade Roman Catholic priest named Menno Simons. They took their Scripture literally, especially its calls for pacifism and plain living, and suffered persecution by Catholics and Protestants both.

Their prospects were further complicated in 1693, when Jakob Amman established a faction of more conservative Mennonites, the Amish. Various divisions and re-groupings have followed over the years, usually on the question of how plain to remain, but in central Pennsylvania the Amish and Mennonites remain closer to each other, spiritually and geographically, than to anyone else.

Once darkness fell on that first day, I followed a few roadside signs to my dinner: The Stoltzfus Farm Restaurant, a medium-sized operation on a working farm, offering a daunting family-style meal. Homemade bread. Applesauce. Ham. Sausage. Candied yams. Fried chicken. And shoe-fly pie, a concoction of molasses, brown sugar and vanilla ice cream. The fixed-price bill was $11.95 for far more than I could eat.

Then came a crisis.

When I called the guest house I had booked into for the evening, a recording answered (obviously, this was not an Old Order household) and I found that the owner had been called away. No one was home. I was stranded, and slow-witted from overeating, in central Pennsylvania.

At that moment, the restaurant hostess, Mrs. Stoltzfus, stepped forward to deliver a fast lesson in how a close-knit community works. She called a second Mrs. Stoltzfus, not an immediate relative but a neighbor who takes boarders at her home.

Half an hour later, I stood in the drawing room of Elmer and Rebecca Stoltzfus, perhaps five miles away in the community of Ronks. For $28 nightly, I would have two evenings in a spotless upstairs bedroom of their home, which is also known as the Hilltop Tourist Home. My room had wide rural views in two directions, and a shared bathroom down the hall. The neighboring properties were Amish farms, freshly fertilized and spread like blankets on the hillsides.

This was a Mennonite household, with electricity in every room and cars in the garage, but an early check-out time on Sunday, so that the proprietors could get to church on time. “If a thunder storm,” warned a note on my bedroom’s wall, “pull TV plug from wall outlet.”

All this clean living, and still they worry about being struck by lightning.

I left my television off and peeked out the window. In the distance I could see a late-returning farmer urging his horses along a country lane, buggie lanterns aglow, hooves filling the night with clips and clops.

About these names. Stoltzfus, it turns out, is a surviving name from the original German settlers of Lancaster County. Consulting a county phone book in the Stoltzfus residence, I found 18 Amos Stoltzfuses, followed by column after column of Stoltzfus residences and businesses. A visitor could arrive in Lancaster County, chat with strangers, do business at a dozen stores and restaurants, and encounter only Stoltzfuses.

Once I began paying more attention to names, I began to feel more and more like that visitor.

“Stoltzfus,” said the lettering on the house along an Intercourse side street. “Stoltzfus,” announced a mailbox along a country road.

But that’s not to suggest the place is monotonous. The relationships among Amish, Mennonites and the neighbors alone are enough to keep an outsider speculating into the night.

Mennonite and Amish farmers unite to raise barns for anyone who needs the help, but lines have been drawn. Inter-marriage between factions is discouraged. Distinctions among the Old Order Amish, New Order Amish and Mennonites of various stripes show up in habits of worship, style of dress, buggie construction and beyond. “Black-bumper” Mennonites, for instance, drive automobiles but cover the chrome because they consider it too showy.

On the first morning of my stay--a Sunday morning, with sheep untroubled in the pastures and the roads busy with church-bound buggies--Delmar Neff discovered me outside the Old Road Mennonite Church, and invited me in to see his brethren at prayer.

I sat quietly near the back as the congregation sang “Extol the Love of Christ” in rich tones; the men lowly murmured “grace, grace,” while the women piped in with the phrase “marvelous grace” in harmony above them. All faced an altar decorated with fresh flowers, the words “in remembrance of me” and no crucifix.

And all joined in the laying-on of hands.

One man was struggling with chemotherapy. Another faced a biopsy. A third had a chronic bad back. Each was surrounded by neighbors, who placed hands on shoulders, backs and arms, bowed in prayer, and silently concentrated while the prayer leader, speaking in calm, even tones, called on God for healing. After a guest speaker and a few more hymns, we filed out into the light of day.

The Old Order Amish are far more severe than most Mennonites, and are less likely to invite a stranger to the Sunday services they hold in their homes. But they are no endangered species.

Donald B. Kraybill, author of “The Puzzles of Amish Life,” estimates that high birth rates pushed the Lancaster County Amish population from fewer than 500 in 1900 to more than 16,000 in 1990. By some estimates, the average Amish family includes seven children.

The big question for today’s Amish is how to reconcile self-preservation with emerging technology, and sorting the issues out is a mind-bending exercise. Some Amish, Kraybill reports, keep telephones outside their homes but not inside. Others use calculators but not computers. Many disdain electricity from public power lines, but freely use batteries and generators. Most Amish see doctors, but refuse life insurance.

On a morning stroll past a country schoolhouse, I discovered that while the tradition-bound rulers of Major League Baseball resist aluminum bats, Amish children swing them daily at recess.

And though the Old Order Amish are forbidden to own or operate motor vehicles, they accept rides. Some of them, in fact, accept rides to Florida, where they pass their winter vacations in Pinecraft, a suburb near Sarasota, fishing and playing shuffleboard.

Most Amish tolerate tourists bearing cameras but, in keeping with church teachings on humility, are offended by efforts to photograph their faces.

Tourists complicate their lives in more ways than that, of course. The Amish are exploited--no passer-by of the elaborately advertised Amish Barn restaurant on Route 340 could deny that--but many capitalize themselves by selling quilts and crafts to supplement their farming income. Quilt production, locals say, is at an all-time peak.

“In many ways, they need the tourists to sell a lot of what they produce,” said Dale Gehman, a Mennonite from Mount Joy whom I met at the relief auction. “But then the tourists come and love the tranquillity of rural life . . . and pretty soon those people start moving into the area.”

And then property values rise, and farming becomes steadily less cost-effective, and younger generations could be forced to seek cheaper land elsewhere, and around and around it goes. The people may be plain, but their lives are plenty complicated.

One day on the road to Leola, I saw a tall column of smoke rising from a field, and two men standing by it. A barn had burned, and while their brethren were pouring cement to raise a new structure nearby, these two were incinerating the detritus. I introduced myself.

“California,” said one. “That’s where all the money is.”

I told them all the money seemed to be in the hands of the real estate and insurance companies.

“Sounds like farming,” said the man, gazing out at the brown fields and smoky sky.

On Monday mornings at the New Holland Horse Auction, animal smells hang in the air. Scores of farmers crowd the lot, buying and selling horses and hay. Peddlers offer spurs and bullets. Pickup trucks vie with black buggies for the right of way.

This is a weekly custom, and a largely undiluted one: For every outsider on the morning I went, there seemed to be at least half a dozen farmers.

One old man with an eight-inch beard pulled at stray hay stems, then muttered in German over the prices. An Amish father strode past, arms full of rakes and shovels. His son, perhaps 5 years old, trailed behind, swinging a tiny hammer. On the shoulders of the farmer’s plain black jacket, loose hay sprigs accumulated like so much scarecrow dandruff.

“That there’s good hay. It’s not stemmy like some,” allowed one straw-hatted Amish man, poking a finger into a bale.

The auctioneer barked through a portable amplifier slung over his shoulder, urging on bidders who stood in a ragged semicircle of skepticism. Most of the sellers were getting $100 to $115 per ton for their hay, but in the bidding behind one truckload, the seller wouldn’t take less than $125. The high bidder wouldn’t pay more than $115. Both turned away in disgust, and the auction moved on to the next truck-bed.

While the men trade horses and hay, women in Amish country traffic in quilts. A few miles south of New Holland and a few hours after the prime horse-trading was done, Delores Flynn of Paradise and Mary Cummings of Leola sat in Nancy’s Corner, a quilt shop in Intercourse. They were on duty to buy wholesale and sell retail, but mostly they were still reeling from a national quilters’ convention that had taken over the town the previous weekend.

Business is certainly good. In Nancy’s and several other quilt stores around Lancaster County, visitors pay from $50 (for a small piece of simple work) to $1,000 and more (for a complicated bedspread). To keep its inventory up, Flynn said, Nancy’s buys wholesale from about 300 Amish and Mennonite quilters, often paying quilters by the yards of thread they use.

Flynn was still explaining the business when an Amish woman, a newcomer, stepped in the shop. She was weighed down by fabric, trailed by two silent children and an older woman.

“I have a few quilts here,” the fabric-bearing woman said. “And I wondered if you’d take a look.”

“What’s the pattern?” asked Flynn.

“Colonial star.”

That was evidently the right answer, and when the woman spread out a pair of bedspreads, Flynn and Cummings oohed and ahhed .

“How much would you want?” asked Flynn.

“I guess what I could get,” parried the woman. She was plain, but she wasn’t simple.

After an offer and a counter, they settled on a price between $300 and $400 for each bedspread. Starting paperwork, Flynn asked the quilter’s name.

“Stoltzfus,” she said.

My last stop in Lancaster County was on the farm of Jonathan and Lydia Lantz, home of the aforementioned milk pitcher, the carton, and Lydia’s 86-year-old father, Elam Stoltzfus.

The Lantzes are New Order Amish; though they use electricity and depend on their son and his car for long-distance travel, they keep a buggy in the barn for trips to town. They favor plain clothes, and live in a farmhouse that is at least 120 years old.

“I guess if we weren’t crazy,” said Jonathan Lantz, “we’d take $500,00 or $600,000 for this place, and live the easy life.”

The farm is 100 acres, and the house is roomy enough to accommodate the Lantzes and Lydia’s father downstairs and seven guest bedrooms upstairs, but it is no luxury lodging. Carpet colors evolve from room to room, Christian literature lies here and there, and the upstairs seven bedrooms share three bathrooms. The price was $25 for a double room, $20 for a single, breakfast included.

“People say we should charge more,” said Lydia Lantz. “But we don’t have the facilities some others do.”

The only other guests during my two nights there were a young couple who run a farm in Ontario, Canada. They were curious about the Lantzes, and the Lantzes were eager to compare notes with another farming couple, and parlor conversation crackled along for two hours or more.

Lydia sat in a blue dress and blue apron, contributing more or less equally with her husband. Jonathan, whose beard was white, wore black pants, black suspenders and a blue work shirt, with spectacles balanced on his nose.

Drawing on my studies of Amish and Mennonite factions, I told them I’d noticed that some Amish men wore black hats; others, straw hats. This, I thought, must hint at a deep schism having to do with the symbolism of headwear.

The Lantzes smiled and gave me the bottom line. The heavy black hats are for winter, the straw hats are for spring, and on cold mornings in early April it’s every man for himself.

Among the other topics addressed: how long to keep a calf before separating it from its mother (the Lantzes preferred a week, but market conditions often force farmers to sell sooner); children (the Lantzes had eight); and the urban poor (the Lantzes were not entirely sympathetic).

The next morning was the last of my stay, and on the way out I left $50 to cover a $42.40 bill and tip. Lydia Lantz insisted on returning at least $3, but couldn’t put her hands on any change.

I was already moving toward the door, with a rental car to return and a flight to catch. The last words I heard in Amish country were these:

“If you see my husband on the way out there, you tell him he owes you $3.”

I didn’t see him, which is fine. This way, I have another reason to go back.

GUIDEBOOK: Ambling Through Amish Country

Getting there: Lancaster lies 90 minutes’ drive southwest of Philadelphia, two hours north of Baltimore, three hours north of Washington, D.C. Flights to Washington can be cheaper than those to Philadelphia or Baltimore, but travelers should check to be sure. In early June, USAir offered the cheapest available tickets from LAX to Baltimore and Washington, D.C. (National or Dulles airports) at $350 round trip; from LAX to Philadelphia the figure was $450.

A rental car is probably the best way to enjoy the countryside. The county seat of Lancaster does have a modest airport and an Amtrak station, however. From New York’s Penn Station, trains leave daily at 7:45 a.m. (arriving in Lancaster at 10:58 a.m.) and 2:37 p.m. (arriving 6:01 p.m.). Fare is $39 one way, $59 round trip; additional trains may be available on weekdays, and advance reservations may be required. From Philadelphia, eight trains a day run to Lancaster ($11 one way, $17 round trip).

Where to stay: Dozens of family farms offer guest accommodations in Lancaster County, at double-occupancy rates of about $25-$60. Request a brochure from the Pennsylvania Dutch Convention & Visitors Bureau (it lists 23 farm lodgings) by writing Dept. 2224, 501 Greenfield Road, Lancaster, Pa. 17601, (800) 735-2629, Ext. 2224. Another brochure, with about 70 farms and bed and breakfast inns listed (including the Hilltop Tourist Home and Clearwood Farm Home Lodging) is offered by the Mennonite Information Center, 2209 Millstream Road, Lancaster, Pa. 17602-1494, (717) 299-0954.

The area also includes plenty of conventional smallish hotels, and some fancier bed and breakfasts with rates in the $100 range. Of the upscale lodgings, the most notable may be the Guesthouse at Doneckers (19 rooms), The 1777 House (12 rooms) and the Gerhart House (5 rooms), three separate properties in Ephrata under the same management (717-733-8696). Double-occupancy rates run $59-$175, and some rooms include such frills as inlaid hardwood floors and Jacuzzis.

Where to eat: Family-style is the rule among Lancaster County restaurants.

The Stoltzfus Farm Restaurant (one block east of Intercourse on Route 772 East; 717-768-8156) is open daily May through October, offering dinners for $11.95.

The Plain & Fancy Farm and Dining Room (in Bird-in-Hand on Route 340, 717-768-8281) offers similar fare for $12.95, but on a vast scale: The place can seat 1,000 at a time. Some summer nights, a waitress confided, “it seems like 5,000.”

The Amish Barn (between Bird-in-Hand and Intercourse on Route 340, 717-768-8886) is another restaurant in the same mold, with dinners priced at $12.95, $4.95 for children under 10.

For an entirely different kind of meal, there is The Restaurant at Doneckers and the Hearthside Cafe, both served by the same French-influenced kitchen at the Doneckers complex in Ephrata (717-738-2421). In the formal restaurant, entree prices run $18.95 (excluding soup and salad) to $54.95 for a chateaubriand that feeds two. In the less formal cafe, entrees run $7.95 (for beef Wellington) to $17.95.

One more food note: Most restaurants are closed on Sunday. One that’s open 7 a.m.-8 p.m. is the Harvest Drive Family Motel and Restaurant (717-768-7186), which offers an all-you-can eat breakfast for $5.85, family-style dinner for $11.95.

Other options:

A guide from the Mennonite Information Center in Lancaster (address and phone above) will join you in your car and direct you on a countywide driving tour, with stops at community centers and relatively uncommercial points of interest, for prices beginning at $22. The center also shows a documentary film on Amish life every half-hour.

The People’s Place (717-768-7171), on Main Street in downtown Intercourse, includes shops, a small movie theater, a quilt museum and an Amish World hands-on museum for children. The movie theater screens the 25-minute documentary “Who Are the Amish?” continuously, Monday through Saturday. Admission to the film is $2.50 for adults, $1.25 for children 7-12. Closed Sundays.

The Strasburg Railroad (Route 741, Strasburg, 717-687-7522) runs from Strasburg to Paradise and back (4 1/2 miles each way) several times daily, May through December. Tickets for the 45-minute trip cost $6 ($8.50 for first-class). The public-address narration is entertaining, and the cars include working stoves and reversible seats. Be prepared, however, for plenty of salesmanship. A color program to commemorate your trip is another $2, and other souvenirs are hawked at the gift shop and the antique picture gallery.

The Central Market in downtown Lancaster (Williams Henry Place, Lancaster, 717-291-4723), one of the oldest farmers’ markets in the nation, houses the stands of several dozen local farmers and merchants. The market is open Tuesdays and Fridays, 6 a.m.-4:30 p.m.; Saturdays, 6 a.m.-2 p.m.

The 43rd annual Pennsylvania Dutch Kutztown Folk Festival (461 Vine Lane, Kutztown, Pa. 19530, 800-447-9269), which celebrates the area’s music, visual arts, food and clothes, is scheduled for June 27-July 5 at Kutztown Fairgrounds on Route 222. The daily schedule runs 9 a.m-5 p.m.; admission is $8 daily for adults, $4 for children. No advance ticket sales. Attendance last year was estimated at 100,000.

For more information: The Pennsylvania Dutch Convention & Visitors Bureau (Dept. 2201, 501 Greenfield Road, Lancaster, Pa. 17601, 800-735-2629, Ext. 2201) sends a free 32-page map and visitors’ guide to anyone who requests it.