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Daniel Bender loads wood onto a conveyor belt and his wife, Debra, cuts it for custom-made pallets in Camden, Mich.
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Amish in an 'English' world

king / blade

Amish in an 'English' world

CAMDEN, Mich. - Martin Steury sits on the front porch of his farmhouse, his gray-white beard and broad-brimmed straw hat nearly shielding his face from view.

His wrinkled, withered hands slowly turn the black handle of an old-fashioned ice cream maker. Two of his 82 grandchildren play at his feet.

Life has not always been this simple for Mr. Steury, 71.

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He and his wife, Effie Mae, 70, moved their family from Grabill, Ind., 31 years ago because they felt the community was becoming too liberal, threatening to seduce their children away from the Amish faith. They were particularly troubled by Saturday night parties where Amish teenagers were smoking and drinking.

Leaving relatives and friends behind, the Steurys moved to Camden, a rural town in southeastern Michigan.

But the move came too late.

"We didn't get out soon enough," he says softly, staring across fields turned rosy by the setting sun.

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"My two sons had seen too much of the world. My two oldest sons left (the faith) and it broke my heart."

The Steurys are not alone. Amish families today are facing the dilemma of maintaining the simple, traditional lifestyle of their forefathers in a rapidly changing, modern world.

Once able to live their lives in near isolation on farms, the Amish are interacting more than ever with the outside world.

The rising cost of land and suburban sprawl is making it increasingly difficult for young Amish families to support themselves solely by farming.

Work outside of the home and ``cottage industries'' are bringing the Amish into closer contact with the modern, “English” world and its conveniences.

That exposure threatens the survival of traditional Amish life.

And a growing number of buggy accidents has left many Amish men and women afraid to ride on major roads. Yet stricter Amish sects still refuse to place safety signals or lights on their buggies.

Seeking religious freedom, the Amish immigrated to North America from Europe beginning in the early 1700s, settling in Pennsylvania. There they established settlements where they could practice the tenets of their religion: devotion to God, separation from the outside world, and self-sufficiency.

Amish communities, called settlements, have flourished. There are settlements in 24 states and in Ontario, Canada, with the Amish population in North America estimated at around 172,000 in 1996. Ohio hosts the greatest number of Amish, followed by Pennsylvania, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

So far, the Steurys and their now-grown children have managed to escape many of the big-city influences their Amish relatives in larger communities encounter daily.

Camden is a sleepy, small town in Hillsdale County near the Ohio-Indiana border. The heart of town is just one road, bordered by a single grocery store, diner, bar, and a handful of other small shops - none of them Amish-owned. Hillsdale, the closest city, is about 15 miles away.

About 60 Amish families live here, in plain houses where horses “mow” the front lawns and laundry dries outdoors on clotheslines.

Because of their religious convictions, these families do not own modern conveniences such as cars, bicycles, telephones, refrigerators, telephones, or inside bathrooms. Dressed in broad-brimmed hats and black bonnets, they travel in horse-drawn buggies, an anachronistic sight among the cars, semi-trailers, and farm machinery that share the roads with them.

Life here is simple - chicken barbecues in the summer, volleyball on Sunday evenings, ice skating in the winter.

“When you have family, you don't need that entertainment,” Mr. Steury says. “You don't need no TV. We have big Christmas dinners and church. And just about every night we have a child come to visit.”

But the tentacles of progress stretch even to Camden, causing some Amish families there to wonder how long they can protect their way of life.

“They are changing in many ways,” says Donald Kraybill, an Amish scholar and sociology professor at Messiah College in Grantham, Pa.. “They aren't a cultural museum or cultural antiques. They're not crystallized relics from the past. It's a dynamic community, changing rapidly in technology and occupational involvement.”

Steven Nolt, a history professor at Indiana's Goshen College, agrees.

“It's something they are really aware of and talk about and think is a problem,” says Mr. Nolt, who has studied the Amish for 12 years.

“But, at the same time, they are continuing to make adaptations and changes. Some of the changes they've had to make to survive.”

Yet change occurs very slowly in Amish communities and must be approved by the church, down to the last pleat in a woman's bonnet. Change is to be feared because it is what the Amish believe will slowly erode their traditional life-style and seduce their youth into the modern world.

“Everything's just changing, you just really wonder,” says Rosina Steury, 47, who ponders what the future holds for her and her nine children. She is married to Emanuel, one of Martin and Effie Mae's 15 children.

“With all the modern, fancy equipment, you'd think it would stop with TVs and electricity. You thought there couldn't be any more. But I don't think it's going to stop.”

Since the first Amish immigrated to the American colonies in the 1720s, they have guarded their interdependence, shunning government interference, refusing to go to war, accept Social Security, or file lawsuits.

They successfully fought to maintain their own schools, which are run individually by local Amish men. They established their own insurance to protect their homes and buildings and take care of their senior citizens at home.

But for the Amish, total independence from the modern world is a thing of the past.

The majority of Amish families still do not have electricity in their homes, own a car, or have a telephone in the house.

But most - including the Camden community - do not hesitate to ride in a car, talk on a cellular phone, or use a public restroom. They regularly hire English drivers to take them to doctor appointments, the grocery store, or construction jobs.

Amish bishops say it is not using those amenities that is wrong, but what accepting them into the home would mean over time.

“It's not cars, toilets, electricity that's a sin but what it can lead to,'' says Camden Bishop Levi Graber.

``Change happens slowly, and fear, and that can lead them away from God.''

AMISH ENTREPRENEURS

A white crescent moon is the only morning light when Silas Eicher rises from bed at 5 a.m. He dresses in the dark and walks out of his farmhouse to go to work.

He doesn't have far to go.

The 35-year-old Amish farmer walks into his family's two-room bakery less than 30 feet away.

A single kerosene lantern hangs from the ceiling, casting a shadowy glow across the cement floor.

He works quickly, anticipating the customers who soon will fill the bakery. He dumps flour, yeast, and other ingredients into oversized mixing bowls, then steps outside to turn on the diesel engine that runs the restaurant-sized mixer.

The sticky dough is turned out onto a floured counter and is kneaded by hands strengthened by years of farm and construction work.

On a typical day, Mr. Eicher prepares six to eight batches of bread dough and huge vats of pie filling. Then he moves on to other jobs: feeding the animals, plowing his 40-acre farm, working in the pig nursery, or traveling to a construction site.

“This is the best part of the bakery, to come out here when no one's here,” Mr. Eicher says, as he kneels to light the burners under four kerosene ovens.

The Eicher family is typical of today's Amish entrepeneurs.

Although all of the Amish families in Camden farm, none of them depends on farming to make a living.

The rising cost of land, falling hog and milk prices, and increased government restrictions on farming have forced them - like other Amish families across the country - to find other ways to support their large families.

And with a population that is doubling every 20 years, the Amish have had to become increasingly creative in their business endeavors.

``I've got about five things going right now,'' says Mr. Eicher.

By 8:30 a.m., the bakery is filling with customers, anxious for a loaf of fresh bread or gooey cinnamon rolls.

They watch as Amish girls wearing white caps and long dark dresses wheel out racks of still warm bread, and place them unwrapped to cool on shelves covered with paper towels.

Occasionally customers peek through the open doors into the kitchen, amazed at the assembly-line speed with which the women work. In between batches, the women grab bites of oatmeal pancakes, washing them down with sips of grape juice.

A large wooden children's wagon holds silver vats of pie filling.

Priscilla Eicher, 10, scoops spoonfuls of fruit filling from kettles into pie shells. She cuts a design into the top crust and expertly shapes the sides into artistic fluted edges worthy of the finest pastry shops.

At times her attention wanders, and she makes handprints in the dough or runs outside to push her younger sister on a wooden swing.

The screen door bangs as young children run in and out. They grab samples of raw dough, giggle, and turn bashful when strangers approach. The smallest ones steal away on the bottom shelf of the metal bread rack. The older boys brush melted oil on the baked bread and fold pie boxes.

“It's too bad we don't live that way any more,” said Rebecca Gerber of Sylvania, as she leaves the bakery. “It's not like Shipshewana, that's so modernized.

“We know of other Amish communities, but this is the one we come to. We love them and how friendly they are. They're just down-to-earth people.”

The sun is still rising when the buggies and trucks begin arriving at the auction barn in Mt. Hope, Ohio, in Holmes County southwest of Akron.

Men, women, and children lug in flats of produce worthy of a museum painting: bright red tomatoes the size of softballs, jumbo purple and green sweet peppers, eggplants, peaches, and cabbages as large as bowling balls.

Dressed in denim, work shirts, hats, and boots, the Amish and English men blend together as they wander the aisles, checking out the fruits and vegetables.

By 10 a.m., they gather in a cluster, ready to begin the auction. An auctioneer wearing a plaid shirt, baseball cap, and ear microphone wrapped over his head, breaks into a nearly unintelligible spiel. “137 has 6 half bushels of large pickles,” the auctioneer chants. “Give me 10, 10 ... 5, 6, 7.”

Some Amish families come to sell their produce in bulk. Others to buy fruits and vegetables to sell at a stand back home.

All come to make a living.

But despite the desire to maintain a farming lifestyle, rising land prices and suburban sprawl are threatening Amish farm families across the country.

When Elizabeth and Levi Graber, Jr., married in 1976, they purchased their 60-acre farm in Camden for $325 an acre. Today, that same farm could bring as much as $3,000 an acre.

In Grabill, Ind., where a subdivision abuts Amish homes, land has hit $10,000 an acre. ``It's really competitive,'' Mr. Graber says. ``Everyone wants to buy there.”

Young men in Camden can readily get a loan at the local bank to buy their first farm, but their parents worry about the financial burden that accompanies the loan.

``It used to be hard to borrow money,'' says Elizabeth Graber, 46. ``Now it's easier to take than give back.''

Mrs. Graber's son, Benjamin, 22, borrowed $200,000 to buy farmland and put up a hog-fattening barn.

``It's easy for the boys to borrow money,'' says his father. ``But no one knows how long the hog-fattening business will last.”

The growing trend of suburbanites fleeing to rural areas has contributed to the decline of available farmland. Consider that it takes at least 60 to 80 acres for an Amish family to make a living and it's easy to understand why farmland is becoming scarce.

“The biggest change they are experiencing in many settlements is occupational shift away from farming into business,” says Donald Kraybill, the Amish scholar from Pennsylvania. “It is the most significant and consequential social change since they immigrated in the 18th century.”

Coming tomorrow: Alcohol becomes an influence on Amish teens.

First Published May 6, 2001, 1:47 p.m.

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Daniel Bender loads wood onto a conveyor belt and his wife, Debra, cuts it for custom-made pallets in Camden, Mich.  (king / blade)
In a blend of traditional and modern lifestyles rejected by some stricter sects, an Amish buggy is used to pull a motor boat in Shipshewana, Ind.  (dutton / blade)
Like many Amish families, the owners of E&S Amish Bakery in Camden, Mich., no longer depend on farming to make a living.  (dutton / blade)
Pumps provide water in an Amish kitchen. The majority of Amish families do not have electricity, cars, or telephones.  (dutton / blade)
Amish women at a produce auction.
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