Tourism has forced many Amish to adapt to a new way of life.
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania is not a traditional Amish community—it’s rife with lines of cars, town centers, outlet malls, hotels, and super-stores like Target. Tourism has taken root. And the usually introverted Amish can be seen acting like salesmen.
Joseph Harasta, a professor at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, has conducted studies looking into the unorthodox lives of the Amish in Lancaster County, which he’s lived nearby his whole life. He said Lancaster County feels like an amusement park for Amish culture.
According to Susan Trollinger, a professor at the University of Ohio, tourists are enthralled by the curiosity of this “strange” way of life that is so different from their own. She says the Amish present a distinct contrast to contemporary life in the United States.
Trollinger says Amish culture focuses on the community and bending one’s will to humility and living simply.
In her book, Selling Amish, Trollinger says for Americans faced with anxieties about modern life, being near the Amish is comforting. They seem to have escaped the rush of contemporary life, the confusion of gender relations, and the loss of ethnic heritage. She says, though, that Amish tourism can at times be a contradiction of their simple way of life.
The 1985 film Witness was partially filmed in Lancaster County. It was one of the first times the Amish were portrayed in popular culture. Harasta says people then and now are captivated by the antiquated life the Amish live.
He says people come to see the Amish like they’re seeing animals in the zoo, which he feels it is exploitative and unfortunate.
But it isn’t all bad—when people come to see the Amish, they also spend their money.
In fact, Tourism Economics estimated more than 8 million visitors annually spend almost $2 billion in Lancaster County. According to visitamish.com, the second largest Amish tourism city is Holmes County, Ohio, where 4 million tourists visit annually. Lagrangecountyedyc.com found reports that the third largest site, Shipshewana, Indiana, welcomes more than 2 million tourists each year.
Citylab.com reports the Amish population has more than doubled since 1989, increasing from 100,000 to 251,000.
Amish are mostly known for selling handmade carpentry and other knick knacks unique to their culture, but that’s not the case in Lancaster County.
In a 2014 study, the Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies found that after 31 Amish merchants were interviewed, 19 agreed their best products were food items. Ten said furniture, quilts, and towels were their mainstays.
Harasta says many businesses operated by non-Amish people sell trinkets, pawning them off as Amish-made. And the Amish themselves have taken hold of the food industry, selling a farmers market atmosphere to many customers. It is less common for Amish to build and sell items from their home or a small shop.
But tourism has made the lives of the estimated 36,920 Amish people in Lancaster County difficult. Harasta says the county is much more expensive to live in: 100 acres in Lancaster County is usually five or six times more expensive than it would be three counties away.
Trollinger says the Amish see tourism as a double-edged sword. The income tourism brings is crucial because land prices are increasing and crop prices are falling. But Amish prefer to be in the background, and tourism thrusts them into situations a traditional lifestyle would not.
The old ways of farming don’t pay the bills anymore. Many Amish turn to carpentry, construction, and produce. They might have an acre or two where they can try to maintain a connection with the past, but they just aren’t self-sustaining farmers anymore.
Harasta says the Amish who choose to remain in Lancaster County often resort to letting everyone look, point, and take pictures.
The Amish in Lancaster County live in a new reality. Nowadays there are Amish people checking their phones as they enter their horse and buggy.
Harasta says the older Amish aren’t particularly happy about their new reality. Some long for a more traditional life, but most just see the tourism as very ironic. They don’t understand why anyone would travel to watch someone else plow a field with a horse.
Harasta says the Amish younger than 30 years old, in particular, have accepted their complicated lives, even though the culture they sell in the stores may not be keeping in the traditional Amish ways.
In the 2014 Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies, when the Amish were asked about the future of Lancaster County, the two most common answers were “fewer farms” and “more families moving elsewhere.”
Things look similar 615 miles away in Nappanee, Indiana. Perry Miller, the Amish president of a local cabinet-making business, says less than half of the members in his community farm, mainly due to a lack of land.
Perry puts out hay or his horses during the summer, but that’s it in the way of farming. The lack of farming doesn’t bother him, though—he’s more passionate about cabinetry, anyway.
While Perry says he thinks the Amish are completely different now than they were 20 or 30 years ago, with the increase in technology and the decrease in farming, he also says the homes in Napanee have not changed and are completely traditional.
Businesses, however, are a different story.
Perry’s community includes both Amish and non-Amish people. The Amish community there must adapt if they want to compete with non-Amish businesses.
Perry says it isn’t difficult to become more technologically advanced as a community. He says the Amish are always the last to relent and get in on the new technology.
Perry says a nearby Amish community in Elkhart County, Indiana, tends to be less “susceptible” to phones and technology compared to Nappanee, but there is no animosity between the two communities. He says there are variations among the rules and guidelines from community to community. They all gather and participate in church, and there are no divisions.
It’s easy to think of traditional things—traditional families, towns, businesses, and in this case, traditional Amish people. But there are no such things.
An Amish community that strictly prohibits the use of any technology is no more Amish than Lancaster County. Many Amish communities fall between the two because they have to in order to make a profit and pay the bills.
The 40,000 strong of Lancaster County might not seem to have much in common with the less than 7,000 in Napanee, but both Amish communities have adapted to the world so they can survive.
Even in their “strange” circumstances, the Amish try to retain their core values and maintain whatever version of a “normal life” they see fit. But profit has forever made it difficult for them to be who they are.
