Westward Ho: Amish in America migrate

January 2, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

SCHUYLER COUNTY, Mo.

The grumbling surfaced not long after the first Amish families moved to this sparsely populated farm region about a decade ago.

Word spread that these Pennsylvania Dutch-speaking newcomers hated the government, didn’t pay taxes, wouldn’t fight in a war.

And then there were the whispers about intermarriage and suspicions of incest.

“People didn’t think too much of them the first few years,” said Robert Aldridge, the county’s presiding commissioner.

Missouri is home to one of the fastest-growing Amish populations in the United States. While the majority of the nation’s 250,000 Amish still live in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana, a westward migration has pushed settlements into 28 states. About 10,000 Amish, drawn in part by cheap land, now call Missouri home.

Among states with more than 1,000 Amish, Missouri trailed only New York and Minnesota in the rate of population growth between 2009 and 2010, according to a study by the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania.

Many new arrivals settled near decades-old Amish communities in places such as Jamesport, Seymour or Bowling Green. But others were the first to put down roots in places like Schuyler, a county of about 4,100 residents along the Iowa border.

Many longtime residents say they enjoy cordial relations with their Amish neighbors. For others, acceptance came more slowly. For some, it never arrived.

“There’s still people that don’t like them,” Aldridge said.

For Amish moving into new areas, conflict with locals is not unusual, said Karen Johnson-Weiner, professor of anthropology at State University of New York at Potsdam, who has studied Amish migration.