Many Amish heading to NY

Associated Press

HARRISBURG, Pa.

Affordable rural farmland and proximity to traditional population centers are driving a recent boomlet in new Amish colonies in New York state, according to a study by Elizabethtown College researchers.

The Amish, many of them from Ohio or Pennsylvania, have established 10 new settlements in New York since the start of 2010 — growth that doubles any other state. Total population there has grown by nearly a third in the past two years, to 13,000.

The first Amish districts in New York were established in the Conewango Valley in 1949, but in- migration amounted to a trickle until about a decade ago. As recently as 1991, there were just 3,900 Amish in the state.

Elizabethtown professor Don Kraybill, who directed the study by the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, said Amish movement into New York has been fueled partially by a contagion effect in which families report back on finding productive and underpriced land, and other factors that are conducive to the way they live such as weather, growing season and congenial neighbors and local officials.

In the 1980s and ’90s Kentucky played that role for the Amish, while more recently it was Wisconsin, Kraybill said. The Amish are currently in 28 states and the Canadian province of Ontario.

New York has lower land prices in rural areas than Pennsylvania and Ohio, states that together account for nearly half of the nationwide Amish population of about 261,000. New York also has more areas of rural isolation, Kraybill said.

“If you want to get away from the suburbs and the high-tech world, there are more places to hide in New York,” he said.

New York, Kentucky, Illinois and Kansas have experienced the largest net gain in Amish households since 2006, the study found.

The largest net losers were Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Delaware and Ohio, although states with large Amish populations can grow in total numbers even if they lose households because existing families normally have many children.

The Amish began arriving in Pennsylvania from Switzerland and Germany nearly 400 years ago, and nearly all descend from a group of about 5,000 a century ago. Though their Christian beliefs and practices can vary from settlement to settlement, or from church to church, they were defined for study purposes as people who use horse-and-buggy transportation, and speak a dialect of Pennsylvania German or Swiss German.

“It’s remarkable that a horse-and-buggy people like the Amish are thriving in the midst of high-tech, Twitter America,” Kraybill said.

Some areas of concentrated Amish populations in Pennsylvania, including Lancaster County, have experienced overall residential and commercial growth that can leave little room for the Amish way of life, so they make the decision to hire a tractor-trailer and head for someplace more remote.

Large Amish families sometimes move into new areas to find farmland for the younger generations, while in other cases, they are more motivated by a desire to preserve traditional aspects of their family life and to resolve disputes about church rules, said Karen Johnson-Weiner, an anthropology professor at the State University of New York at Potsdam.

“The Amish moving to New York are going to be, for the most part, very conservative,” said Johnson-Weiner, whose book on the state’s Amish was published last year. “That means they’re not going to be so willing to compromise or fit in.”

The Amish have been involved in disputes in New York over zoning, construction practices and electronic filing of sales taxes, while some areas have capitalized on local Amish communities for tourism purposes.

Johnson-Weiner said some new Amish arrivals are buying land that has not been farmed since the earlier decades of the 20th century.

“The families farming those farms are ready to retire and there aren’t any young people ready to take the farm over, so you sell to the Amish,” she said. “They’re revitalizing farming, I would say, in many of those areas.”

Kraybill said Amish migration in general often consists of younger couples looking for cheaper farmland or new locations to set up small microenterprises. It can cost just a few thousand dollars to start manufacturing furniture or quilts, for example, he said.

Other Amish migrants can be multigenerational families moving together so they can afford to buy several adjacent farms at the same time.

Kraybill said prime farmland in Lancaster County currently costs about $15,000 an acre, a daunting challenge for a young farmer, along with the expense of buying livestock and farm equipment. That makes land prices of $2,000 an acre in other states very attractive.

Pennsylvania had the nation’s largest Amish population in the new survey, just over 61,000, with Ohio a close second, about 400 people behind. Indiana ranked third, 46,000, Wisconsin fourth, 16,000, and New York, fifth.