(10 miles)
“Today, there are over 25 different Amish, Mennonite, and Brethren church groups in Lancaster County, all holding to slightly different traditions and their own interpretations of the Bible.” https://lancasterpa.com/amish/
I searched the ‘net for an opportunity to tour an Amish house and found the Amish Farm and House on Covered Bridge Drive.
Hmm . . . maybe I’ll also see a covered bridge.
Here’s the house in the context of the surrounding area. The house is circled in red in the upper right of the photo.
A 50-ish non-Amish woman who grew up in the area guided the tour. She recalled when the plot of land next to the house was a tobacco field.
Covered Bridge Drive did not hit the mark of what I expected, but it was very close to the target.
The tour guide said this house was built in 1805 and predates the arrival of the Amish to the area. The last Amish family to live here would welcome visitors into their home, but they moved out in 1955 when too many visitors were stopping by.
It is a beautiful house. The symmetry and proportion of window area to stonework on the second floor is exactly right, as is the depth of the eves and the porch roof, and the shutters appear to be functional. The forest green and white trim colors nicely compliment the color of the stone. I’m impressed.
The furnishing and clothing samples in the house pretty much matched my expectations . . .
. . . but I was surprised by this.
There are differing interpretations of “Be ye not conformed to the world” in the Amish communities. The community depicted in this house is disconnected from the power grid, but a solar system is used to charge a DeWalt battery connected to an inverter to run a sewing machine.
After the house tour I went on a 12-person bus tour of the Amish area.
Here’s an Amish one-room school house. There is a solar panel on a roof of the schoolhouse foyer.
Many of the homes are carefully landscaped and maintained.
The bus driver, who was also the tour guide in the house, offered these comments as we rode through the countryside:
- There are strict dress codes and grooming for men and women. Among other expectations, women never cut their hair and married men never cut their beard.
- The Amish in general are proud of their ancestry and will often have their genealogy posted on a wall in their house.
- The Amish community contains groupings of about 30 – 40 geographically-close families called districts. There are no church buildings. The districts meet every other Sunday at the home of one of the district families for a 3-hour service, followed by a light meal. Men and women sit in separate sections, and there is a specific dress code for the men and women that is dependent on age and marital status.
- Districts are led by a bishop that is elected by the members of the district. When it comes to technology and interacting with the world, some districts are more conservatives/traditional, and some districts are more liberal/progressive.
- Perhaps only 30% of Amish make their living off the farm. The rest are entrepreneurs running small businesses.
- There are millionaire Amish in this county, and it’s creating a class issue. In the Amish viewpoint everyone is equal, and now there are people with money and people without money, and they are struggling to deal with this new reality.
As we continued on Black Horse Road the tour guide said a barn had burned down this past summer, and it was entirely rebuilt within two weeks with donated labor and material. I asked if there was no electricity in the barn, and no fire needed to heat the barn, how could a barn burn down? The tour guide said she had heard from an Amish friend whom she had known for 40 years that rumor in the neighborhood was that it was was arson.
As she finished her explanation, she said that that the large, impressive barn that we were passing our on left is the barn that was rebuilt. It was too late for me to take a photo of the entire barn complex, but I was able to snap the photo below of the north side of the barn.
The top photo below is a 2021 Google Maps photo of the barn. Circled in yellow is a small side-building with two tanks on the roof. The small side-building is directly behind a tall tree. Circled in yellow on the right side of the photo is a yellow, two-story building with a green roof.
I snapped the bottom 2024 photo below as our tour bus passed the barn. Notice all that is left of the tree is the stump, and except for the small side-building with two tanks on the roof, every part of the barn is new.
Here is a close-up of the shed behind the barn. I’m pretty sure that is a late 20th-century tractor with a gas or diesel engine. It looks like this district allows the use of at least some modern non-horse-drawn farm equipment.
I rode the 5 miles down to the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania in Strasburg. The museum features steam-powered locomotives.
I don’t have much interest in steam locomotives, but I do like the unique, mournful sound of the steam-powered whistle: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/frdl8hxXVTE
In contrast, here is the sound of an electric-powered air horn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ptcd5O1i7E
This is an E7a diesel-electric locomotive, one of a series of “E-Units” built by EMC/EMD between 1937 and 1963. These “Art Deco” styled locomotives were used for passenger trains.
Along one side of the museum is a setup of what a 1920’s railroad station town might look like. There are stores, a restaurant, and other businesses, all with obviously manikins impersonating people in the buildings. At end of the row of buildings was this exceptionally realistic setup depicting what I imagined might be grandparents killing time while waiting for their train.
Just as I snapped this photo, the head of the manikin on the left turned toward me, started to laugh, and began speaking in what I thought was Spanish.
The AI demonstrated in this setup was extraordinarily realistic, although the way the manikins were dressed made them look more like present-day tourists just taking a rest rather than 1920’s customers waiting for a train.
Here’s an aerial view of Amish farmland. Each farmer decides how to till and plant his fields.