Garden Spot: Lancaster County, the Old Order Amish, and the Selling of Rural America

GARDEN SPOT

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GARDEN ✸ SPOT Lancaster County, the Old Order Amish, and the Selling of Rural America

D AV I D WA L B E RT

1 2002

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Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and an associated company in Berlin

Copyright © 2002 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Walbert, David J. Garden spot : Lancaster County, the old order Amish, and the selling of rural America / David Walbert. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-19-514843-6; ISBN 0-19-514844-4 (pbk.) 1. Lancaster County (Pa.)—Rural conditions. 2. Amish Country (Pa.) 3. Rural development—Pennsylvania—Lancaster County. I. Title. HN79.P42 L368 2002 306'.09748'15—dc21 2001051008

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

for Kathy, who believes

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✸ Plowing is an expression of faith. Men go forth with tractors and teams and dark ribbons of moist humus curl away from bright metal shares and weave a pattern on the countryside. And when the thick slices are crumbled into a soft seed bed, men place seeds in Earth’s warming breast, secure in their faith that when Time is fulfilled, green shoots will rise to meet sun and stars, and that after Nature’s ordained period of growth, full corn in the ear will be ready for the harvest. . . . Certain things in this world are enduring because they are based on faith. Across a nation these sunny fifth month days, men are plowing, harrowing, and seeding. Whenever you see fresh soil turned to the sun and rain, you know that men with faith are following in the footsteps of those who have lived a life based on verities that shall not die. —Lancaster New Era, May 14, 1955

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✸ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book began decades ago when I was a child in Lancaster County and has been slowly forming ever since, and it has been helped along the way by more people than I can count. I probably owe a great deal to the two or three hundred residents of East Drumore Township who turned out on a fall evening in 1990 to protest a planned development near my childhood home; it was at that meeting, listening to their arguments pro and con, that I began thinking seriously about the issues I address in this book. During the time I spent in Lancaster doing research, the people I met in libraries, at tourist attractions, and even at the grocery store were unfailingly helpful and interested in my work. Anne Kenne of Franklin and Marshall College’s Special Collections Library, Tom Ryan and the staff of the Lancaster County Historical Society, and Carolyn Wenger of the Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society were all tremendously helpful in finding and identifying source materials, and the staff of the microforms desk at the Lancaster Public Library never once complained about the stacks of film I left for re-filing on a daily basis. Elizabeth Logan, Scott Standish, June Mengel, Ivan Glick, and Alan Musselman all lent me materials that I was too slow in returning. Fred Daum gave me a behind-the-scenes tour, both real and verbal, of Lancaster’s farm preservation movement that helped me to understand its personal side in a way that documents and newspaper articles could not. This book would never have taken the shape it did without the advice of my graduate advisor, Peter Filene, who saw the project through its first incarnation. For his thoughtful reading and commentary, his support and enthusiasm, and most of all for his willingness to believe in me and in this project at a time when he had little objective reason to do so, I will be forever grateful. Jacquelyn Hall similarly encouraged me, once upon a time, to take a chance on this project. Others who read drafts, listened, and offered their thoughts include Alison Isenberg, Jim Leloudis, Catherine Lutz, Kathy Newfont, and Deborah Pedersen. No doubt I

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too often ignored their suggestions; I hope they will be kind if the result is not up to their expectations. On a more personal note, my parents provided not only emotional support but also a place to stay on my visits to Lancaster. If I was often too absorbed in my work to be as sociable as they might have wished, I hope they understand. The staff and various directors of LEARN North Carolina, where I worked when I was not writing or researching, were more helpful than they realized by allowing me flexibility and time off for my own work. My basset hounds, Feynman and Toby, will never read this book and could not care less that I wrote it, but they never let me forget what really matters: good people, good food, a comfy couch, and occasionally running around the backyard barking their fool heads off for no good reason. And most of all I thank my wife, Kathy, whose faith gave me the strength to undertake this project and sustained me when my own was flagging. Nothing I could say here would fully acknowledge the many ways she has helped me nor the contribution she made to this book, by reading, listening, offering advice, and simply being who she is. ✸ For permission to reprint copyrighted material I am grateful to Lancaster Newspapers, Inc., for two of their editorials in chapter 5 and for the editorial quoted on page vii; to Leonard Ragouzeos and Lancaster Newspapers, Inc., for Mr. Ragouzeos’s letter to the editor in chapter 6; to the Special Collections Library, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pa., for quotation of unpublished material from the William J. Frey Collection of Pennsylvania Germania; and to Warner Bros. Publications U.S., Inc., for excerpts from “Plenty of Pennsylvania” and “Plain We Live,” from the musical production Plain and Fancy, music and lyrics by Albert Hague and Arnold B. Horwitt, © 1954 (renewed 1982) by Chappell & Co. (ASCAP).

✸ CONTENTS

Introduction: A Fertile Soil, 3 Chapter 1 Cultivating the Garden: The Invention of Lancaster County, 11 Chapter 2 Pride and Progress: Education, Literacy, and the Little Red Schoolhouse, 37 Chapter 3 Dutch Country: The Amish and Tourism, 67 Chapter 4 Domain of Abundance: Food and Farming, 101 Chapter 5 The Landscape of Progress: Urbanization and Planning, 137 Chapter 6 Preserving the Garden: Development and Farm Preservation, 171 Epilogue: The Harvest, 209 Appendix: Farms and Population of Lancaster County, 1900–2000, 219 Notes, 223 Index, 253

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GARDEN SPOT

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✸ I N T RO D U C T I O N

A Fertile Soil

There is almost an inverse proportion, in the twentieth century, between the relative importance of the working rural economy and the cultural importance of rural ideas. —RAYMOND WILLIAMS , The Country and the City

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the “Garden Spot of America,” is a place of contradictions. Since 1950 it has grown faster than almost any county in Pennsylvania, yet it retains a reputation as a rural oasis in a sprawling desert of modern cities and suburbs. Its population has doubled in the past forty years, making the Garden Spot a metropolitan area unto itself. Its agricultural productivity is highest of any nonirrigated county in the nation, yet local farmers wonder whether farming there has any future. The county’s second largest source of income is the tourists who arrive by the millions each summer to see its rural landscape, yet thousands of acres of that landscape are taken each year for housing developments and highways. Lancaster Countians face the same problems and challenges as residents of most American cities and regions at the turn of the twenty-first century: job growth, suburban sprawl, highway congestion, utility regulation, adjustment to changing demographics. Yet residents’ sense of place, their county’s reputation as the Garden Spot, and hundreds of millions of dollars a year from agriculture and tourism all depend on the continued existence of a people seemingly stuck in the seventeenth century, farmers who refuse electricity and telephones and use horses for transportation. And even those people, the Amish and Old Order Mennonites, face changes and pressures that threaten not only their image as America’s quintessential traditional farmers but also their own sense of identity as peaceable children of God.

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INTRODUCTION

Similar contradictions confront many communities, but Lancaster’s place in American culture makes it unique. Its farmland is some of the richest in the world, and since the eighteenth century its farmers have enjoyed both an uncommon measure of prosperity and widespread praise for their productivity and ingenuity. The presence of the Old Order Amish, who still farm the land their ancestors settled, turned Lancaster County from a respected eighteenth- and nineteenth-century farming community into a twentieth-century icon. Lancaster County has become, in the American imagination, the Garden Spot, the quintessential rural America. In the process, rural pride and agrarian ideals have been replaced by symbolic representations of Lancaster as the home of all that was right and good about traditional rural America. Even lifelong residents find it difficult to separate those images from the reality of their daily lives. Indeed, as image and reality have grown more incongruous, residents and outlanders alike have clung more tenaciously to the former. Lancaster County now ranks with Vermont, Iowa, and the Deep South in popular American iconography as one of a handful of quintessentially rural places, places that seem to define rurality rather than being defined by it. Say “Lancaster County” in a group of people almost anywhere in the United States, and someone will respond, almost immediately, “Oh, that’s where the Amish live! What pretty farmland!” I grew up in Lancaster County, a fact that helps only a little in understanding the place. The first time I recall thinking about what it meant to live in the Garden Spot of America was in the fifth grade, when my teacher read us an article from a local newspaper on “How to Tell If You’re a Real Lancaster Countian.” The article’s author listed several questions to which a “Real Lancaster Countian” would answer in the affirmative; the one that struck me at the time—and the only one I can now recall—was,“Do you turn up your nose and hurry past an Italian restaurant, but inhale deeply when driving past a freshly manured field?” At the time it seemed a ridiculous question: manure stank, and I liked spaghetti and meatballs as much as any kid. So, no doubt, did the author of the article. Cuisine wasn’t the point; rurality was. An Italian restaurant was new, a bit exotic (at least in Lancaster in the 1970s), fashionable, very much of the city. Manure, by contrast, symbolized a traditional way of life close to nature. It was a point that even at the age of nine I grasped easily. To be a Lancaster Countian was to live in the country, and to live in the country was better than to live in the city. By the time I graduated from high school that pair of ideas was firmly implanted in me. But my upbringing was hardly so simple, or so rural. Lancaster County was not, after all, a tiny agricultural community that stayed rural because it had neither reason nor opportunity to change. My house was ninety minutes from south Philadelphia, seventy-five from Baltimore. The population of my home township grew by more than half in the first decade I lived there. I had not grown up on a farm, nor had most of my friends. We were inclined to be suspicious of the Amish

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and understood them poorly; we had little more contact with them than tourists did, passing their buggies on the wide shoulders of country roads as we learned to drive. Yet despite our distance from agrarian life—or perhaps because of it—we became, like most Lancaster Countians, firmly and self-consciously rural. We learned to identify in vague ways with the country and proclaimed the superiority of the Garden Spot as naturally as the loudest of tourist operators. If we occasionally snickered at the Amish, we laughed openly at the tourists who inched past cornfields with license plates from New Jersey (the Garden State) and New York. Tales of urban ignorance grew into legend, like the story of the woman from New York who reported to a state trooper that an Amish farmer had refused to stand still while she took his picture: she thought he was an employee of the state tourist bureau and wished to complain to his superior. Lest we ourselves fall into such ignorance, we willed Lancaster County to remain rural. While in college I drove home on a Thursday evening, the night before a physics midterm, to sign my name to a petition protesting the planned construction of an apartment complex on a former dairy farm two miles from my parents’ house—which was itself constructed on a former dairy farm. ✸ The desire to sort out those contradictions—to understand what is rural—was the genesis of this book. Defining rurality recalls the Supreme Court decision about obscenity: most people know it when they see it, yet they would be powerless to name their standards. There are sociological definitions based on population density—a useful marker of rurality, but not sufficient; wilderness is sparsely populated yet not really rural, while the Garden Spot of America is home to half a million people. The small town seems to be associated with rurality; some sociologists define a rural place as a village or small town and its vicinity.1 Yet the resident of a small town is just that, neither an urbanite nor, quite, a ruralite. Agriculture seems another necessary component of rurality, perhaps the most necessary, but only a certain sort of agriculture and a certain sort of farm will do: a “family farm.” The family farm is perhaps the essence of rurality for most Americans, and equally difficult to define. Again, there are sociological definitions. According to one academic study, a family farm is “an agricultural operation that is owned by a family or a family corporation, has gross annual sales of between forty thousand dollars and two hundred thousand dollars per year, and does not hire more than 1.5 person-years of labor.”2 But while this definition may be appropriate for agricultural economists and government planners, it hardly explains the role of the family farm in American culture, or why rural America remains so vital in our culture despite its practical distance from the lives of most Americans. Our ideas about family farming are part of a bundle of ideas about rurality that has been at the heart of this country’s culture and politics since before its

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INTRODUCTION

Farmland in Drumore Township, Lancaster County, 1997. Photograph by the author.

founding. From Thomas Jefferson’s proclamation that “those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God,” to the agrarian republicanism of early proslavery thinkers, to the antebellum Republican hope that homesteading could prevent social ills, to William Jennings Bryan’s fiery reminders that “the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies,” Americans have seen theirs as a uniquely rural nation, and as one therefore uniquely blessed and virtuous. It is not hard to see why. Nearly all of the first settlers in the British North American colonies were farmers, or became farmers out of necessity upon arrival. Even by the time of the Revolution, the new United States was an overwhelmingly agricultural nation, with fewer than one resident in ten working off the farm. Looking for a way to separate themselves intellectually as well as politically from Europe, the first American political theorists developed and expanded upon the ancient belief that small farmers were the bedrock of a free society. Owning their land made farmers economically independent and therefore free from political influence, able to speak and vote their consciences. As independent landowners, they were wedded to the liberty and interests of their country. Labor in the soil made them virtuous—industrious, frugal, moral, supportive of the common good—in a way that was vital for the citizens of a republic. These yeoman farmers, as they were most often called, made up a free, stable, strong, and classless society. By comparison, the cities of Europe were hotbeds of poverty, vice, and social and political strife. Not only was the American republic an agricultural one; it must be agricultural to survive as a republic. Over time, the strength of that idea has faded, and many Amer-

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icans of the past century have debated not only its truth but also the harm it may have done to the nation’s development. Yet remnants of it still survive. Ask most Americans today to define a family farm, and they will describe something like an idealized nineteenth-century midwestern homestead: corn, wheat, beans, vegetable garden, hay, hogs, chickens, cows; a white clapboard house and a red barn. The family wakes to a crowing rooster, works together, eats heartily, and produces nearly all of what it needs. There may be a few modernizing touches: the farmer rides a tractor, though probably not a large one; his wife cans fruits and vegetables in Ball jars. (That the picture shows a farmer and his wife, rather than co-farmers or a farmer and her husband, goes without saying.) This is the way farming is presented to children, at least to those who don’t experience it firsthand. The farmer is somewhere between Old MacDonald and Noah, tending every kind of animal imaginable, all of them mooing and cock-a-doodledooing in perfect harmony. In this happy land there are no sharecroppers, no droughts, no production quotas, no banks threatening foreclosure. Bacon is transported from a living pig’s belly to the breakfast table directly, painlessly, like a virgin birth. Animals do not, miraculously, produce manure; the farmer’s nose is greeted only by the scents of wildflowers and freshly mown hay. If the thunderhead on the horizon brought manna instead of rain, no one would be surprised. Ask them to think a little harder and they may mention images from the farm crisis of the 1980s (Places in the Heart, Willie Nelson, crying women in Kentucky, or was it Kansas?) or characters from Steinbeck novels, farmers dispossessed by hard times, bad weather, government policies, or agribusiness, impoverished and heartbroken but still heroic in their suffering. They may think of Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic, of a farmer with face closed, jaw set, taciturn, puritanical, probably none too bright, wielding his pitchfork as a weapon as if ready to gore us should we venture too close. They may recall portrayals of country bumpkins and rubes: the Beverly Hillbillies, the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. Or they may see farmers as repositories of a special wisdom that only country folk have, which they frequently use to embarrass city slickers. Come to think of it, even the Scarecrow turned out to be wise enough when it counted, and the conservatism Wood portrayed is as often praised as “family values.” Farmers are simple, but their simplicity is a necessary antidote to the absurdities of modern, urban society. Farm country is God’s country, a place where miracles can occur, a “field of dreams.” Shoeless Joe Jackson would not have returned to life on a street corner in Chicago. All of this is rurality, and yet the jumble of icons brings us little closer to defining it. ✸ If Americans in general have struggled to find a satisfactory and sensible definition of rurality, rural Americans have not necessarily had an easier time of it.

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INTRODUCTION

Lancaster Countians have spent much of the last century trying to define what it is to be rural by way of defining what it is to be a Lancaster Countian, what it means to be the Garden Spot of America. Countless places in America have faced this dilemma of self-definition in an age of mass culture, and in this sense Lancaster’s problems have not been unique. Yet Lancaster County, because of the way it has been defined, provides a unique window into the American fascination with rurality. The tension between rural and urban is heightened by Lancaster’s historic connection to agriculture—the name “Garden Spot of America” was coined before the Revolution—and by the metropolitan pressures of nearby Philadelphia and New York. Lancaster County is a remarkably productive patch of agricultural land within a few hundred miles of a hundred million people; its annual produce, until recently, easily outstripped that of the entire “Garden State” of New Jersey. Its residents remain devoted to farming both economically and culturally long after most of the northeastern United States has abandoned agriculture. That many of those residents are Amish or Old Order Mennonite, members of Christian sects that see farming as an act of devotion to God and Creation, only heightens the tension. They live much as their ancestors did three centuries ago, without cars or electricity or telephones, selling their produce to urbanites and suburbanites who have cell phones and sport utility vehicles and Internet connections. The contrast between old and new serves as a constant reminder of the rural past and makes Lancaster County seem even more, by comparison to the rest of America, the Garden Spot. The public fascination with the tensions between rural and urban, past and present, has given birth to a hundredmillion-dollar tourist industry that ranks second only to agriculture itself in Lancaster’s economy. The area is now more famous as the home of the Amish and for Disneyland images of rurality created for tourists than it is for its agricultural productivity. Because of these tensions, and because of the public scrutiny Lancaster County and the Amish receive, residents’ efforts to define their home and to maintain it as rural have been unusually public and explicit. Largely because of the presence of the Amish, Lancaster Countians have been forced to confront the nature of rurality more directly than most Americans have in the twentieth century. When Amish and non-Amish residents argue over efforts to modernize schools, roads, and agricultural practices, their differences force deeply held beliefs about rurality to the surface. The attention drawn to the Amish by the tourist industry provokes the resentment of other Lancaster Countians, particularly mainstream Pennsylvania Germans who find themselves identified with their backward cousins. Attempts to rein in the tourist industry, to make it more “authentic,” lead to public and private debates about what authentic rurality really is—or was. And as tens of thousands of people from more urban backgrounds have moved into Lancaster County over the past thirty years, the erosion

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of farmland and of the county’s agricultural heritage has also become a source of public dispute. It is these efforts to define Lancaster County—and by extension rurality—that are the subject of this book. What follows is the story of those who have stepped forward to enter the public debate about what Lancaster County was and should be. Some of those people were lifelong residents, others occasional tourists. Some made their arguments explicitly, through travel guides, letters to the editors of local newspapers, or government planning documents. Others made them implicitly, often without even realizing they were doing so, in pageants, arguments about education, even recipes for traditional foods. Many stood to benefit from their own definitions of rurality: agribusinessmen who wanted to consume and control it, planners who wanted to control and direct it, tourist operators who wanted to market it, tourists and homeowners who wanted to consume it in less obvious but equally destructive ways. Yet few held their beliefs any less sincerely for their hidden agendas. All of these people have faced the same basic dilemma, and it is one that I, too, face in writing this book: it is the question of whether rurality and progress can coexist. A century ago, Lancaster Countians believed that they could. Rural Americans blended the two ideals fairly successfully until the early twentieth century. Since then, however, Americans have come to identify rurality with the past, and the ties between rurality and progress have come undone. This is in part a simple recognition of existing trends, of historical fact—the nation is urbanizing—but it has had the result that rurality and progress now seem to be mutually exclusive ideals. Even ruralites have, over time, unthinkingly accepted this equation of the rural with the past, for they have been and remain unable to define rurality on their own terms. Tourism in Lancaster County originally evolved from rural self-marketing, but this “authentic” approach (as ruralites called it) rapidly lost out to the negative symbols of rurality—backwardness, ignorance, hidebound conservatism—that rural boosters had meant to combat, creating an irony that has played out in other arenas, as well. The problem, for ruralites, has been that urbanites usually control the terms of the debate, whether it involves the suburban family vacation, the popular press, or public policy. As a result, twentieth-century debates over the future of rural America have generally broken down along lines of progress and preservation. Neither ideal is static, and supporters have often seemed to change sides depending on the issue at stake. Progressives—by which I mean, literally, advocates of progress—have ranged from Progressive Era activists urging social reform to business progressives urging laissez faire and economic growth. Whether liberal or conservative, all progressives tend to believe in the American creed of progress, the belief that life can and should continue to improve and improve and improve, ad infinitum. Tradition tends to be swept away in the winds of change, and believers in its value

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INTRODUCTION

are left with the creed of preservation, the cry of “Stop! Enough!”—which is no more tenable in the real world than a belief in infinite progress.3 In Lancaster County today, the two sides fall out behind real estate developers and farmland preservation groups; earlier preservationists have focused on education, language, and agriculture. But both progress and preservation in their purest forms have always come from urbanites, or at least seem to bear the city’s stamp. Both creeds assume that rurality is essentially of the past. And both have been used to justify the consumption of the country—physically, economically, socially, voyeuristically—by the city. It is too easy, however, for ruralites to blame the city or big business or government or economics for their woes. I argue that the problems facing rural America are fundamentally cultural. At their root lies this problem of rural progress— which is really the problem of whether there is a future for rural America. Cultural problems are far less tractable than economic ones, less easily solved or defined—and worse, we have no one to blame for them but ourselves. Before the country was consumed physically and economically, it was consumed culturally. And that is a feast in which we have all partaken.

✸ 1

CULTIVATING THE GARDEN The Invention of Lancaster County

At the age of ten each Amish boy was married to the soil, and to it he dedicated the remainder of his life, rising at four, tending his chores before eating a gargantuan breakfast at seven, labouring till twelve, then eating an even larger meal which he called dinner. He worked till seven at night, ate a light evening meal called supper, after the tradition of Our Lord, and went to bed. He worshipped God on Sundays and in all he did, and . . . he would pause sometimes to give thanks that fate had directed him to Lancaster County, a land worthy of his efforts.—JAMES MICHENER, Centennial

Each summer, millions of tourists flock to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in search of America’s rural past. The Lancaster County they seek, the Garden Spot of America, can be found a few miles south of the borough of New Holland. There, on a warm morning in early June, the farmland spreads out on gently rolling hills around the crest of a country lane. An Amish farmer, identifiable even from this distance by his dark clothing and his mode of work, drives a team of horses through a field of newly sprung corn, the lines of cultivation visibly curving around hillsides and farmstead. By the white clapboard farmhouse, jeweltoned clothing hangs from a line; a young girl tosses feed to chickens; tomatoes gather strength in a garden plot; a windmill slowly turns, pumping well water to the house. Across the lane, black and white Holstein cows graze—one longs to say contentedly—in a verdant meadow. Beyond it are more meadows, more farms and farmhouses, more Old Order Amish and Mennonite farmers and families, in a patchwork stretching to the horizon. The view from this hillside is much like the

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GARDEN SPOT

view from any other hillside in this region, and it seems not so different from the view here fifty or a hundred or two hundred years ago. But scratching the surface of this landscape reveals a very different Garden Spot. The cow pasture to the west of our country lane reveals itself upon close inspection to be the abandoned roadbed of a four-lane restricted access highway, twin raised arcs now covered with grass, waiting for workers to return—which they may yet do, when the money and the will are found, to speed commerce with Philadelphia. The cows that graze there in the meantime are milked by diesel power even on these nonelectric farms, and their milk is carefully refrigerated until the dairy truck arrives. Many of these farms grow tobacco, though religious restrictions prohibit their owners from smoking. On the farm across the way, a retired Amish man, having turned over the daily operation of the farm to his son, works in the barn, adapting an old John Deere engine to crank ice cream, twenty gallons at a time, for a barbecue next weekend. His work is interrupted frequently by customers: in his retirement he builds outdoor furniture and wholesales canning supplies to small businesses and owners of farm stands. Farther into the valley the landscape hides a network of sewer lines, laid to facilitate housing development and the construction of a complex of retirement condominiums. In New Holland borough, a few miles away, reside a poultry processing plant and a producer of farm machinery, once locally owned but now part of national or international corporations, and smaller producers of boxes and other industrial goods. Where once farmers retired to grossdawdi (grandparent) houses on the farms their children inherited, now farms are paved so that the farmers’ descendants can work and retire in separate comfort. Tourists who avoid the narrow country roads south of New Holland can see the produce of the changing landscape at Central Market in downtown Lancaster. In continuous operation for two and a half centuries, it is today a curious jumble of new and old, rural and urban, foreign and local. Old Order Amish and Mennonite farm girls in aprons and bonnets sell fresh produce in season from local farms; they also work Saturdays at the Jewish bakery stand. A few stands still cater purely to locals with deep roots in Lancaster County: here a woman sells celery and (incredibly to the outlander) only celery; across the aisle a sign announces homemade cup cheese, a spreadable and notably strong-smelling cheese that some compare to Limburger. Butchers’ stands sell traditional favorites—souse, ring bologna—alongside chickens and roasts. A few vendors cater primarily to tourists, selling crafts and books about the county and its Amish residents. Some reveal the city’s ethnic diversity: a German immigrant sells imported wursts; a woman from Greece sells dolmades and baklava. Others blur the distinction between rural and urban. A man scoops herbs, spices, and teas from jars into plastic baggies at a customer’s request: is this an old-fashioned market stand or a fashionable operation catering to environmentally conscious foodies? The same

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figure 1.1. The Herb Shop at Central Market blends old and new, rural and urban. Photograph by the author.

question might apply to vendors of organic fruits and vegetables or to the bakery stand selling “rustic” breads made from organic flour. Along the highway east of the city crowd attractions beckoning tourists: the “working” farms and museums purporting to show how the Amish really live; the all-you-can-eat “family style” restaurants; the purveyors of postcards and hex signs and Amish dolls. Attractions compete over which is most authentic—and over which is loudest. “Authentic” shoofly pie is sold from a giant windmill; a hotel in the shape of a steamboat reminds visitors that Robert Fulton hailed from Lancaster County. A children’s amusement park, forgoing any connection to the Garden Spot or the Amish, looms behind the facade of a giant white castle. To keep tourists coming in the off-season, outlet malls fill the gaps between tourist attractions, advertising their low prices as evidence of Pennsylvania Dutch frugality. The Amish avoid these areas when they can; the heavy traffic and busy intersections make it difficult to navigate a horse and buggy. Though most tourists come to see the Amish, they are as unlikely to see them near the largest tourist attractions as anywhere in the county. Residents have other images of Lancaster County. Miles of housing developments fill the townships north of the city, linked by clogged highways still dotted with eighteenth-century stone barns. A suburban shopping mall is one of the largest in the state, and the city’s Franklin and Marshall College is an old and prestigious liberal arts college. Portions of downtown Lancaster, historic and beloved

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by lifelong residents, are now populated primarily by Latinos whose own small businesses may succeed where successive waves of urban renewal have failed. The county’s non-Amish farmers, indistinguishable from the rest of the county’s rural population when not at work, find new ways to make a living; some succeed with organic or no-till methods, while others expand dairy operations to meet rising costs. Small towns survive throughout the county, some growing, some failing: the former river port of Columbia continues to fade; Lititz and Strasburg renew their main streets with antique shops; Quarryville and Ephrata keep their downtowns alive with residents and small businesses. Diversity and confusion about identity are nothing new to Lancaster County. The area has always blended old and new, rural and urban. Even in the eighteenth century, its population of English, Scotch-Irish, Welsh, a variety of Germans, and a few Africans was as diverse as any in the colonies, and its economy blended a highly productive agriculture with growing industries. Today, nearly half a million people live in Lancaster County, with backgrounds, occupations, and homes more diverse than ever. Yet the notion of a single place called Lancaster County, and residents’ identification with that place—an unusual thing for a county— persists into the twenty-first century. The idea of Lancaster as the Garden Spot of America, prosperous seat of agriculture and repository of rural heritage, somehow unifies its residents. For them, the county’s ruralness is a source of identity; for outsiders, it is a source of fascination. That the reality of the Garden Spot has changed dramatically over the past century matters little; its reputation has only grown stronger despite those changes. And this, perhaps, is Lancaster County’s greatest conflict, for just what it means to be the Garden Spot of America has been a subject of continual debate. Through two centuries of debate and diversity, however, the idea of the Garden Spot as the seat of all that is right and good about the country—and of the country as the seat of all that is right and good about America—has rarely wavered. Until the twentieth century, the Garden Spot was also a place of progress, an idea that helped to unify it further. The Europeans who settled Lancaster County were mostly farmers, and they saw in farming great hope for the future. Their Garden Spot was no biblical paradise, the pristine gift of God to be spoiled by man, nor some poor backward substitute for a European metropolis. It was instead a new model of community, a middle ground between nature and metropolis, where the soil was married to the city it fed, the spirituality of religion to the logic of material progress, the traditions of the past to the needs of the future. For Lancaster County in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, rurality was not merely the past but the present and the future, and this was the key to its success. The idea of the Garden Spot never entirely lost its Edenic roots, but by blending those roots with the American desire for progress, it became a model for all of rural America and the hope it represented.

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The Garden For the settlers who arrived here from Europe in the eighteenth century, the word garden conjured up images of the Garden of Eden. Indeed, the New World had often seemed, to early explorers and especially to Europeans who listened rapt to their tales, an Edenic garden or an Arcadia in which man had not yet fallen from innocence and all was harmony and abundance. The tropics of Central America displayed a variety and bounty of flora and fauna that dazzled Spanish conquistadors, and native Americans who wore little clothing and lacked the other supposed benefits of European civilization must surely (thought their conquerors) be remnants of man’s existence before the Fall. By the time the English and Germans arrived in Pennsylvania two centuries later, most of the original human inhabitants had died of European diseases such as smallpox, and the relatively unoccupied land appeared as God’s gift to its new inhabitants. Rivers teemed with fish; deer ran freely in the woods; giant hardwoods—of the kind German farmers knew to mark good soil—towered over the landscape. The name of England’s first colony, Virginia, suggested tribute not only to the Virgin Queen but also to the virgin land of America. Certainly the vision of a New World garden for men to till and keep without toil was a tempting one, and the association of its natural bounty with Eden colored the early labeling of Lancaster County as a Garden Spot.1 Another tradition entered into the European thinking about America here as well, that of the pastoral, of a well-ordered and cultivated but still peaceful and harmonious garden. The pastoral ideal, which appeared in the writings of the Roman poet Vergil and was revived in Renaissance Europe, saw the country as a place of retreat from the troubles of the world. The idealized farm was a safe haven where, one of Vergil’s shepherds says,“my cattle browse at large, while I myself can play the tunes I fancy on my rustic flute.” Man lives in harmony with nature and is rewarded with peace, leisure, and self-sufficiency.2 A somewhat different version of that ideal, more practical for real farmers, descended from the Greek poet Hesiod, who lived in the seventh or eighth century b.c. Hesiod’s epic poem The Works and Days provided practical advice and moral lessons for the man who would succeed at farming.3 His ideal farmer was independent, owning his own land, tools, and livestock, and would rise or fall by his own ability and luck. His farm was small, perhaps six to ten acres, quite diversified, and part of a thriving, self-sufficient community in which the moral right and the practical good were one and the same. Although he was not unrealistic in his expectations—he anticipated only a grudging cooperation among people, accepted from necessity, and saw toil as necessary and ever-present—Hesiod believed that the best life came from living in harmony with the will of God, with nature, and with one’s fellow human beings, while at the same time being as much as possible morally and economically self-sufficient.4

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Vergil and Hesiod helped to establish, for Westerners, the two main intellectual models of the country. Both saw the farm as ideally a place of harmony, but while Hesiod saw it as a place of productive toil, the best situation for imperfect men in an imperfect world, Vergil described a place of peace, a retreat from the troubles of the world.5 To say that Hesiod wrote from the country while Vergil wrote from the city would be an oversimplification, but it helps to explain the differences between them. Vergil wrote at the dawn of the Roman Empire, when the independent family-owned farms of the Republic had been replaced by largescale agricultural operations owned by aristocrats and worked by slaves. For him, as for the poets and philosophers of Renaissance Europe who enjoyed his work and copied his motives, the thriving, independent rural community was a symbol of a simpler, more innocent past, when man and nature were not in conflict and farming was not an impersonal mode of economic production but the sum of personal, cultural, moral, and social relationships. Hesiod, however, lived the rural life that Vergil meant to describe. Hesiod saw that life more realistically, though he still sought to improve it by practical wisdom. For Vergil, however, ideal and reality were in hopeless conflict.6 A similar contradiction faced rural England on the eve of American colonization. Rural England in the Middle Ages had been based on local community and self-sufficient, diversified farming, but by the sixteenth century the enclosure movement was eliminating common lands and breaking manors into individual fields and farmsteads more suitable for grazing sheep. This “modernization” made English agriculture more profitable, but at the expense of rural communities. Enclosure forced thousands of people off the land, and the new focus on producing wool for export turned farming from a way of life into a business. As a result, agriculture and its symbols became a battleground for moralists and modernizers. The plow had long served as an emblem of rural England, once as the symbol of traditional community and local self-sufficiency but now as a sign of national pride, economic progress, and competitive individualism. As older views of agrarian England became less relevant, traditionalists were left with a symbolic plow that was now merely decoration in a pastoral landscape. The traditional agrarian way of life still seemed right and good, but as it disappeared its advocates, like Vergil, were left to portray it in increasingly nostalgic terms.7 The English in America, however, faced no such contradiction. There they found a clean slate on which farming could symbolize economic and cultural progress without losing its moral overtones. Their vision of an agrarian America was more individualistic than that of medieval England but no less firm in its commitment to farming as a way of life. America was an agrarian nation; farmers made up the overwhelming majority of the population in 1790. Its philosophers and statesmen were farmers, or fancied themselves as such, and it was natural that they saw farming as central to their present and future societies—especially since

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they had only recently carved their farms out of what they viewed as a wilderness. American agrarianism, as originally conceived, was about the future, not the past. American writers juxtaposed rural America with both the wilderness and the European metropolis, holding it up as an ideal middle state between two dangerous extremes. Great cities such as London and Paris encouraged disparities of wealth, crime, immorality, and the laziness of both the spoiled rich and the indigent poor. The wilderness of the New World allowed barbarism and, in its own way, the laziness of people content to live off the bounty of nature. The rural society of small landholders, however, avoided the corruptions of both extremes by fostering hardworking, moral, sturdy inhabitants.8 Eighteenth-century American writers joined this notion of the moral superiority of the country to the English “country” ideology in politics. This ideology, created when the furor over enclosure had barely died down in the seventeenth century, set the country in opposition to the metropolis as the natural seat of all that was right and good in society. Country ideology assumed that people who were dependent economically upon others—whether by wages or actual servitude—would also be dependent politically. The city was a web of interdependence and, therefore, of corruption. But the country was the home of sturdy farmer-citizens whose self-sufficiency and independence allowed them the moral freedom to stand by the good of the community rather than the interests of a private cabal. For many country thinkers, the ideal form of society and government was a republic modeled on those of ancient Greece and Rome, in which the small, independent farmer, or “yeoman,” would be the model citizen. In England, this ideal remained always out of reach, never taken seriously by more than a radical few except during the years when Cromwell temporarily dispatched the monarchy. America, however, seemed the perfect proving ground for country ideology. There was no monarch (at least not in residence) and no hereditary aristocracy; the great majority of citizens were farmers, and most of those farmers, even in the slave South, were yeomen. When Americans began to separate themselves psychologically from Britain in anticipation of a political separation, they took up this republican country ideology to explain why America was superior to Europe. America became the country, Britain the metropolis; and the virtuous, hardworking yeoman, morally and economically self-sufficient and willing to fight for the common good, became the model citizen of the new American republic.9 Thomas Jefferson provided the most influential, if not the most consistent, articulation of this yeoman ideal.“Cultivators of the earth,” he wrote in 1785,“are the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to its country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands.” America, Jefferson argued, should strive to remain agrarian as long as possible.“I think our governments will remain virtuous . . . as long as they are chiefly agricultural,” he prophesied, but

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when Americans “get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.” Manufacturing should be left to Europe; Americans could trade agricultural products for finished ones.10 This strain of “agrarian republicanism” resisted all efforts to make the United States an industrial nation. In its purest form it took root in the South, where by the mid-nineteenth century it had mutated into an ideology that was actively proslavery and extremely conservative. But this pure form of agrarian republicanism had a major flaw. It assumed the existence of cities and factories elsewhere to supply farmers with the manufactured goods they craved; the moral costs of the farmers’ dependence upon manufactures were merely externalized, not eliminated. And to avoid that problem was to assume, even worse, a static society in which there could be no material progress at all. Most Americans, however committed they might be to an agrarian way of life, also wanted progress, material improvements that would make their lives easier, more productive, and more enjoyable. Particularly in the North and West, statesmen and philosophers tried to combine their belief in the superiority of a predominantly rural civilization with a philosophy of economic progress. Tench Coxe, assistant secretary of the treasury under Alexander Hamilton, tried to separate mechanical improvements from the cities and factories that created them in Europe, arguing that small-scale production would preserve the best elements of rural society while allowing for progress. A “purified” factory system might support farmers and undergird a strong rural society. It was an idea whose merit even Jefferson eventually conceded.11 Something like it also formed the basis of the pre–Civil War ideology of the Republican party, which captured the votes of midwestern farmers and businessmen with a vision of an America of small towns and cities that would exist in harmony with the surrounding countryside. Henry Carey, a Pennsylvania economist, developed a theory of small industrial nodes, centers of manufacturing to serve local farmers and provide a market for their produce. This locally oriented economy, Carey argued, would be beneficial not only economically, by providing a firm, stable basis for trade, but morally as well.“The more directly the consumer exchanges with the producer,” he wrote, “the less will be the disposition and the power to commit frauds. . . . The shoemaker makes good shoes for his customers, but he makes indifferent ones for the traders who deal with persons that are distant.” Long-distance trade broke up families and communities; better that a man remain at home, where he could tend to his family, his land, and his neighbors. Farming and close agrarian communities fostered intellectual growth, an appreciation for aesthetic beauty, and physical and spiritual health. Carey objected to wage slavery and division of labor but also to socialism and communism. His solution was essentially agrarian in that it preserved localism and the cultural and economic primacy of agriculture, but it differed from traditional agrarianism by

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making room for economic and material progress. Americans might not necessarily support the details of his economics (he argued that economic protectionism would foster this “American system”), but they could certainly agree with his vision in an America where a sizeable majority still farmed and large-scale factories and corporations remained the exception.12 If it is obvious now that nineteenth-century economic progress would fail to produce harmony between city and country, it was far from obvious at the time, and it is certainly unfair to criticize people in the past for failing to accurately predict the future. Some intellectuals worried that the contradictions between the philosophies of agrarianism and progress would prove such harmony untenable, but it was only reasonable for ordinary Americans, and particularly for ruralites, to believe that rurality and progress were not inherently in conflict. Though they desperately wanted progress for themselves, their communities, and their nation, most Americans before the Civil War had in mind a level of comfort they wished to achieve but did not imagine themselves as future tycoons or millionaires. Farmers might wish to salt away enough money to buy farms for their children or more productive land for themselves, but for the most part they saw themselves remaining farmers and their children remaining rural. For rural Americans, rurality was not in conflict with progress but rather at the very heart of it, supporting both morality and economy. The American view of the country was largely a rural view of the country, self-referential; it could not, like Vergil’s eclogues, refer to the past, but only to the present and future; and it must, like Hesiod’s ideal farmer, combine practicality with idealism. The truth or possibility of that vision was less important, at least culturally, than its tenacity.13

The Garden Spot Lancaster County was nearly a perfect fit to this American ideal of the country. By the turn of the nineteenth century, its agriculture had few rivals in either productivity or reputation. Hardworking and independent yet connected to their communities, Lancaster’s farmers seemed to combine the best traditional practices with an innovative, progressive spirit that built productive, diversified farms and kept them at the forefront of American agriculture. The productivity of their soils was improving, not declining, from the generous application of manure, the inclusion of red clover in the crop rotation, and, by the early nineteenth century, the application of burnt lime and potash. While small farms in New England were declining and new midwestern farms were taking over the national grain market, Lancaster farmers found new crops and markets, including cattle fattening (which included still more manure as part of its profit) and, eventually, tobacco. As early as 1779, residents of the mid-Atlantic referred to Lancaster County as the “Garden of Pennsylvania,” and by 1800, it was being called the “Garden

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Spot of America.” The name stuck. Lancaster County was no utopia, certainly, but it could serve as a practical model for practical people.14 The first white settlers in Lancaster County were also its first Pennsylvania German farmers: Swiss Germans who called themselves Mennonites, after Menno Simons, the founder of their Anabaptist religion. Led by Hans Herr, they purchased ten thousand acres on the Pequea Creek, near the present-day village of Willow Street. They were not the first Mennonites in Pennsylvania, thirteen families of their faith having founded Germantown in 1683. Nor were they the last. By 1727, hundreds of Mennonites had settled in a wide swath through the middle of Lancaster County, and dozens more a few miles to the north. Though welcomed by William Penn and his fellow Quakers, who believed in freedom of conscience, they had been persecuted in central Europe for their refusal to accept military service. By mid-century, their numbers included several settlements of Amish, a sect that had split from the Mennonites in the late seventeenth century. Other Germans arrived soon after. The Brethren, often called Dunkards because they “dunked” or fully immersed believers during baptism, fled persecution in their homeland in the 1720s. Like the Mennonites and Amish, the Brethren were Anabaptists and would become known as “Plain people” because their faith proscribed the wearing of fancy dress. Members of the Lutheran and German Reformed churches also fled the chaos of war-torn central Europe for Pennsylvania. These “Church” Germans—so called because they belonged to established churches, or because unlike the Mennonites they built churches rather than worshiping in their homes—first came to Lancaster County in significant numbers in the 1720s, settling mainly in what would be the northern part of the county. Most were farmers, but as the towns of Lancaster and Manheim grew later in the century, a number of Church Germans set up shop in the county’s fledgling industries. In the countryside, scattered settlement spawned “Union” churches that alternated Sundays between Lutheran and Reformed churches, a practice that continued well into the twentieth century and helped to unite Germans of the two faiths.15 Other ethnic groups soon joined the German majority in Lancaster County. English men and women settled in the growing towns and cities as well as on farms. Some English Quakers spilled over from settlements in Chester County to settle along the western bank of Octorara Creek. They were joined by a handful of Welsh Quakers, who came in larger numbers to northeastern Lancaster and Berks counties. Large numbers of Scotch-Irish, Scottish Presbyterians who had lived for a time in Ulster before seeking economic opportunity in the colonies, settled in the northwest and southwest portions of Lancaster County and gave their names to the townships of Drumore and Donegal. While the Penns recruited Mennonites to Pennsylvania because their nonviolent faith resembled the Quaker faith, they recruited the Scotch-Irish for a very different reason: to provide a sturdy bar-

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LEBANON COUNTY Adamstown Denver

DAUPHIN COUNTY

BERKS COUNTY Manheim

Akron

Lititz

Morgantown

PA 23

New Holland

LANCASTER

Marietta

Terre Hill

iv nest Co oga R

East Petersburg

Mount Joy

Ephrata er

Elizabethtown

Mountville

Bird in Hand

PA 340 U.S. 30

Paradise

Gap

Strasburg ek

ue h Susq

Millersville

Honey Brook

Intercourse

Smoketown Ronks

Columbia

Blue Ball

C

Christiana

a

a

n na

re

Pe q u

e

Ri

ver

Quarryville

Oc tora ra Cre ek

YORK COUNTY

CHESTER COUNTY

MARYLAND

figure 1.2. Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

rier against Catholic settlers from Maryland and Indians from the Appalachians. Good land, abundant natural resources, and the tolerant policies of the Quakers made Pennsylvania perhaps the most diverse of the English colonies in North America, and Lancaster County was no exception.16 By the eve of the Revolution, Lancaster city had become the largest inland town in the colonies, an important stop on the “Great Wagon Road” from Philadelphia west and south through the Appalachians. The Conestoga Wagon originated there, on the banks of the river from which it took its name, as did the misnamed Kentucky rifle. But it was agriculture for which Lancaster County fast became known. Southeastern Pennsylvania generally, and Lancaster County in particular, boasted some of the best soils in the colonies. Not only religious freedom but also economic opportunity awaited migrants, for labor was as scarce as land was plentiful. Slavery was far less common than in the South; the Quaker and Mennonite faiths forbade slavery, and the climate, though ideal for some

22

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West Cocalico East Cocalico

Elizabeth

Penn

ADAMSTOWN

DENVER

Clay

Brecknock ELIZABETHTOWN

Mount Joy West Donegal Conoy East Donegal

Warwick

Rapho

West Earl

MOUNT JOY EAST PETERSBURG

NEW HOLLAND

Manheim

East LANCASTER West Hempfield Hempfield Lancaster

MARIETTA COLUMBIA

TERRE HILL

LITITZ

MANHEIM

MOUNTVILLE

Upper Leacock

Manor

Co

nes tog a

Pequea

East Earl

Earl Leacock

East Lampeter

West Lampeter

MILLERSVILLE

Caernarvon

Salisbury

Paradise STRASBURG CHRISTIANA

Strasburg Sadsbury Providence

Eden

Bart

QUARRYVILLE

Municipalities: Martic

East Drumore

CITY BOROUGH

Colerain

Drumore Little Britain

Township Fulton

figure 1.3. Lancaster County municipalities, 1990.

kinds of agriculture, did not support large-scale, labor-intensive commercial farming. Europeans and Americans alike considered Pennsylvania “the best poor man’s country in the world,” and it was indeed as affluent an agrarian society as could be found in Europe or America. Although farmers were never quite selfsufficient, they created a varied agriculture, growing grain for market and feed, a fair variety of vegetables, an array of livestock, and apple orchards. The market at Lancaster was known for the quality of the produce sold there, and the region’s cider won praise as well.17 Although Pennsylvania’s temperate climate, gentle slopes, rich soils, ample water supply, and abundant flora and fauna all impressed observers, most praised the settlers themselves, particularly the Germans, for the region’s agriculture. The Pennsylvania Dutch, as they were increasingly called, seemed to be more industrious, more frugal, and simply better farmers than their English and Scotch-Irish neighbors. Comparison with the Scotch-Irish, who had a reputation for moving

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frequently and working poorly, particularly helped the Germans. An English visitor to the colonies in 1775 wondered how in “a country in which nature has done so much, man will do so little,” and his contemporaries largely agreed that Pennsylvania’s agriculture left much to be desired. Yet most observers made an exception for the Germans. George Washington noted that the German farmers took better care of their farmsteads and livestock than those in other parts of the commonwealth. Poor Richard, however much his alter ego Benjamin Franklin despised the dissonant tongue of the “Palatine horde,” praised the “habitual industry and frugality” of the Pennsylvania Germans. Benjamin Rush found the Germans’ agricultural abilities so impressive and so vital to Pennsylvania’s wellbeing that he wrote a short book on the subject in the 1780s. Pennsylvania German farmers, Rush claimed, were “industrious and frugal . . . skillful cultivators of the earth.”18 The solidity and permanence of the Germans’ stone “bank” barns (figure 1.4) stood out particularly among the somewhat ramshackle dwellings more common in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century rural Pennsylvania and testified to the value Pennsylvania German farmers placed on the care of their livestock. Similar barns had existed in the mountains of Switzerland, and although the first generation of immigrants made do with more temporary shelters, their sons and grandsons replaced the first crude shelters as soon as their means allowed. On many farms, permanent barns appeared before permanent houses and were much larger, lending the impression that German farmers cared more for their livestock than for their own comfort. The stone barns gave permanence to the landscape; indeed, many of them remain today even beside busy highways. But the barns’ purpose also gave permanence to the land itself. As winter housing for livestock, the big barns allowed farmers to collect great quantities of manure, which, when mixed with the straw from the animals’ beds, broke down into ideal fertilizer for the next season’s crops. While the fertility of most well-farmed American soils was declining by the end of the eighteenth century, that of many Pennsylvania farms seems to have been improving. German farmers had also learned by that time to add red clover to their crop rotation rather than let their land lie fallow; red clover, a legume crop, restored nitrogen to the soil and made an excellent hay for livestock. Advertisements for “Lancaster County Red Clover Seed” began appearing regularly in Pennsylvania German newspapers by the mid-1780s, several years before the gentlemen farmers of the Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of Agriculture lent their names to the cause of soil improvement.19 Not only was Lancaster’s agriculture increasingly productive at the turn of the nineteenth century, but it also fit almost perfectly the developing American conception, or at least the northern one, of an ideal farming community. Like most of the first European settlers in what became the United States, immigrants to Lancaster County settled not in villages but on separate farms. Given the slow

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figure 1.4. The Jacob and Elizabeth Miller barn, built in 1804, is typical of the Pennsylvania German bank barns that still make Lancaster County’s agricultural landscape distinctive. Photographed in 1941 by Charles H. Dornbusch for the American Institute of Architects Pennsylvania German Barn project. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Historic American Buildings Survey, HABS,PA,36–LANC. V,6A-1.

development of trade, farmers and communities there as elsewhere were forced to be relatively self-sufficient, with diversified cultivation and local craft and industry. As time went on, the self-sufficiency of individual farmers diminished, but Lancaster farmers never adopted the monoculture of nineteenth-century southern plantations or twentieth-century midwestern grainfields; they retained a mix of livestock, feed crops, and crops for market that allowed a measure of local if not personal self-sufficiency. Lancaster’s rural population was dense enough for social and economic intercourse; the frontier of settlement had passed the Susquehanna decades before the Revolution, leaving the original scattered farms far from isolated. New arrivals from Europe could not simply strike out on their own, even had they wanted to, and Germans in particular relied on networks of family and friends to make their way in the New World. The society they built had a balance, if not quite a harmony, of individual and community interests. By the early nineteenth century, Lancaster County had several well-established nodes of settlement, with networks of roads and trade that helped to bind communities together.20 The Pennsylvania Dutch commitment to farming as a way of life, it is often argued, lent permanence to this milieu of small farms. Although this claim, like so

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many aspects of Pennsylvania Dutch agriculture, has been exaggerated, the Dutch tended not to accrue land unnecessarily, in general limiting themselves to what they and their families could farm and spending profits on land for their children. Culture was partly responsible for the relatively small size of their holdings, especially the religious beliefs of Amish and Mennonite farmers, which enjoined them to be stewards of God’s creation. Pennsylvania German language and culture remained relatively intact through the nineteenth century, and farmers still partly separated from national markets by a language barrier might have been less eager to embrace them economically. Practical considerations were also important: Lancaster’s proximity to eastern population centers and the quality of its soil meant that land there was always in demand and therefore costlier than land farther west. The county had been settled early, too, so that by the nineteenth century many once-large farms had been subdivided among several generations of children. The land was so productive that a large family could live quite well on fewer than a hundred acres; there was no urgent need for more. Larger holdings would have required more labor, in the form of slaves, indentured servants—immigrants who sold their labor for a term of several years to pay for their passage across the Atlantic—or expensive paid labor. When immigration to Pennsylvania peaked before the Revolution, a number of German farmers bought indentured servants, most often from their own country, but few bought slaves. Even if slavery had not been antithetical to Pietist beliefs, neither the climate nor the topography of southeastern Pennsylvania encouraged largescale commercial agriculture. Lancaster County was, culturally and economically, best suited to small farming. Yet the proximity of urbanity, ironically, played a vital role in maintaining the county’s rurality in the nineteenth century. While homesteaders on the Great Plains were lucky to have neighbors less than a mile away, Lancaster farmers had the advantages of thriving communities and nearby towns. City markets had always provided a destination for local produce and would continue to do so, keeping Lancaster’s agriculture relatively diverse; before the advent of refrigeration and trucking, there was no way to sell fresh produce at any appreciable distance from its source. Urban markets also provided new possibilities for commercial agriculture, even as old ones dried up. Until shortly after the Revolution, Lancaster’s main market crop had been wheat, but after the Upper Midwest opened to settlement in the early nineteenth century and the growth of canals and railroads eased transportation and trade over the Appalachians, farmers in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois could grow cereal crops more cheaply than Pennsylvania farmers could. Cereal crops require little labor but also produce little profit per acre, and the (by comparison) huge farms of the wide-open Midwest were better suited to corn and wheat than the smaller, hillier farms of the East. To survive economically, Lancaster farmers had to find new crops. Luckily, as the market for

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grain was diminishing, new markets were emerging in the swelling urban centers of southeastern Pennsylvania. Cattle raised in the midwest were now brought to Lancaster for finishing (that is, fattening in pens) before being sold as beef to urban consumers. After the Civil War, the city of Lancaster became a railroad terminal for livestock, and by the 1920s it was known in some circles as the “Largest Stock Yards East of Chicago.”21 If the physical presence of cities helped preserve small-scale farming, what those cities represented—the ideal of progress—helped even more. The willingness to experiment and adapt produced, by the time of the Civil War, another new cash crop: tobacco. Farmers discovered that Lancaster’s highly fertile limestone soils produced excellent cigar leaf, a higher grade of tobacco than was possible in the poorer soils of Virginia and North Carolina. Tobacco tended to deplete the soil more quickly than most crops, but as part of a well-established rotation and with regular amendments of manure, it proved sustainable. Tobacco was (and remains today) highly profitable on a per-acre basis but quite labor intensive—also perfect for farmers facing a growing population and shrinking landholdings. Amish and Mennonite farmers, wanting to put their large families to work yearround, found tobacco well-suited to their culture. Other innovations followed, spurred by developments in transportation and technology. When refrigeration and trucking became possible in the early twentieth century, Lancaster farmers could market fresh produce to somewhat more distant cities, particularly Philadelphia. They also expanded their operations to include dairying, which eventually became the most important and most visible segment of local agriculture. This willingness to experiment with new crops and adapt to changing economic conditions, combined with the early adoption of crop rotation and soil amendments, kept Lancaster County’s farms fertile and profitable despite the looming shadow of Philadelphia and New York. Plain sect farmers, the Amish, Mennonites, and Brethren, were behind much of that success. Although it seems strange today to discuss the Amish as progressive farmers, they were far from being hidebound, ignorant rubes. Like successful farmers in any era, they knew their craft well, and whatever their disdain for “book farming,” they knew a good thing when they saw it. The presence of urban markets and ideas, the balance of tradition and progress, made Lancaster the Garden Spot, and kept it growing—in both senses of the word—into the twentieth century.22

Plain People Although the story of the Garden Spot is a complex one, it is in large part the story of the Plain sects, the Amish, Mennonites, and Brethren. Their centrality to Lancaster County’s twentieth-century image makes this so, but they have always made up the largest share of the county’s farmers and have been primarily re-

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sponsible for keeping the county’s best lands productive. By the twentieth century the Brethren had moved closer to the mainstream of American society, dropping their plain dress and even building a college. Lancaster’s Mennonites remained true to their roots until mid-century, and the handful of Old Order Mennonites still retain a way of life very similar to that of the Amish. But it is the Amish, and particularly the Old Order Amish, who play the greatest role in making Lancaster the Garden Spot today. In the twentieth century, the Amish came to exemplify many of the traits central to Americans’ idealizations of the country—the hopeful harmony between tradition and progress, economics and spirituality, and the individual and the community. The Amish have their origin in the spiritual chaos of Reformation Europe. They are descendants of the first Anabaptists, followers of Ulrich Zwingli who broke away from Zwingli’s state-supported church in Zurich in 1525. These dissenters baptized one another (hence the name “Anabaptist,” which means “rebaptizer”) to symbolize their break with the church and because they believed infant baptism to be meaningless. But since church and state were one, to reject infant baptism was to reject not only membership in the church but also citizenship and its duties. As Anabaptist ideas spread, the rulers of Swiss city-states saw them as an invitation to chaos and harshly punished as many Anabaptists as their bounty hunters could catch. The lucky were merely jailed or harassed; others were tortured, burned alive, drowned, dismembered, or sold as galley slaves. The violence lasted several decades, but persecution, far from stopping the Anabaptist movement, seems actually to have encouraged its growth. By mid-century, Anabaptist groups had sprung up not only throughout Switzerland but also in northern Germany and the Netherlands.23 The persecution, moreover, left a deep impression on the Anabaptists and their descendants. If they had begun by rejecting citizenship and refusing military service, they now developed a deep distrust of larger society and especially of government. Twentieth-century Amish still read and retell the stories of sixteenth-century persecution collected in their book The Martyrs Mirror. The culture of South German and Swiss Anabaptists already encouraged meekness, simplicity, humility, and nonresistance, but the arrogance and violence of the world strengthened these opposite tendencies and made the Anabaptists cling to them self-consciously.24 In particular they stressed “radical obedience” to the examples and teachings of Christ, a conception of the church as a voluntary body of believers bound to one another by mutual covenant, and “an ethic of love” that forbade all violence. The need to hide from their persecutors also forced many Anabaptists into the mountains, where they turned to farming, a life well-suited to their beliefs. “Be not conformed to this world,” the command of St. Paul, became their creed.25 But the small, mobile congregations that persecution created also encouraged a multiplicity of beliefs. Although all Anabaptists shared basic principles, they

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differed in how strictly they were willing to adhere to them. The largest group followed the leadership of a former Catholic priest, Menno Simons, and thus became known as Mennonites. In the late seventeenth century a group of Mennonites emigrated from Switzerland to Alsace, and it was there that the Amish emerged as a sect in 1693. A young leader, Jacob Ammann, taught that the church should take more seriously the need for mutual accountability. The Swiss and Alsatian Anabaptists practiced the Meidung, or shunning, of errant members but excluded them only from communion; Ammann wanted to exclude them from all social relations. The Alsatian Mennonites followed Ammann’s leadership; the Swiss did not, and Ammann excommunicated them. By 1711, the breach was final, and the “Amish” became a separate church.26 Both Mennonites and Amish arrived in Pennsylvania within its first decades as a colony. Although their numbers grew slowly before 1900, Amish communities in the United States have—surprisingly enough—mushroomed in the twentieth century. Today there are some 24,000 Amish in Lancaster County alone, as well as nearly 200 settlements elsewhere in Pennsylvania, the Midwest, and Ontario.27 Although Mennonite churches have grown up around the world, the original Amish communities in Europe have long since died out. As different as the Amish are from mainstream modern Americans, traditions of local government and religious freedom have allowed the Amish to flourish in this country even as the gulf between them and their non-Amish neighbors has widened. Amish society is organized on three levels: the settlement, the church district, and the affiliation. A settlement consists of all the Amish living in a particular area; Lancaster County is a single settlement. The church district, or congregation, is a group of twenty-five to thirty-five families living in close enough proximity to gather for worship every second Sunday. The number of families in a district is also limited by the number of people who can be accommodated in a large house, since the Amish worship in their homes and not in special church buildings. The district is self-governing, although members of different districts may share virtually identical beliefs. An affiliation is a group of congregations whose members interpret their beliefs similarly. The largest affiliation in Lancaster County (and the one that receives the most attention) is that of the Old Order Amish, which consists of some 140 congregations; there are also smaller groups of more liberal New Order and “Beachy” Amish.28 The small size of the church district and the fact that such small groups govern their own social and religious affairs help to preserve the Amish community, which is at the heart of all worldly concerns. The Amish conception of the church (and of the community, for they are the same body) is of a voluntary band of believers, responsible to one another and governed only by God’s will. All are equal before God; ministers, deacons, and bishops are chosen by lot. Members join voluntarily and only when they are old enough to understand fully the choice they

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make—in practice, in their late teens or early twenties. They are then baptized, taking a vow of obedience to God and to the church. The Amish take this vow quite seriously. Before they join the church, youth can flirt with the world with only minor penalties, the equivalent of an Amish parental grounding. Some “running around” is expected and even encouraged as a normal part of growing up and allows youth to choose the Amish way with fuller understanding of what they are giving up. (In practice, of course, a young man or woman who has lived his or her entire life in an Amish community would find it difficult to live completely in modern society. About 80 percent of Amish children remain within the Old Order; those who leave usually join a more progressive Amish or Mennonite church.) Once baptized, however, an Amish person who breaks the vow of obedience faces excommunication. In practice, the community is governed and maintained according to the Ordnung, an orally transmitted set of rules respecting all aspects of life. The Ordnung is created and when necessary altered by unanimous consent of the congregation. Most of the rules are taboos against overly showy or individualistic dress, appearance, or behavior, or against the adoption of certain worldly luxuries such as electricity or automobiles. Although the rules of congregations of one affiliation tend to be similar, particular taboos may vary. The most common rules, universal among the Old Order Amish, prohibit electricity, telephones in homes, central heating, and automobiles; they require beards but not mustaches for married men, long hair for men and women, hooks-and-eyes rather than buttons on coats, and the use of horses for farming and transportation.29 Since Amish belief forbids physical violence, the Ordnung must be enforced through informal, peaceful means. The means vary with the seriousness of the transgression. For small offenses, the errant member may confess privately to the minister or deacon and be forgiven. For greater offenses he or she may be required to make a public confession before the congregation. If the offense is serious enough or is part of a pattern of worldliness, the member may face a six-week period of Meidung, during which members of the congregation must avoid all social contact with the transgressor. The ultimate punishment for those refusing to submit to the church’s authority is permanent excommunication—not only from the church but from Amish society as well. In time the offender may be allowed to confess and rejoin the congregation; others join a more liberal church. Under the Meidung, however, the remaining members of the congregation may have no social or economic intercourse with the expelled individual. The ban extends to members of the same family, and even to husband and wife.30 To outsiders, the Meidung sounds unbearably harsh, a terrible contradiction to the Amish community’s professed values of love and charity. In the modern world, however, the threat of shunning is necessary to prevent an Amish community from slowly disintegrating. Without the Meidung, members could flout the

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Ordnung with impunity. It is not employed casually—only to punish intransigent sinners, and even then only to guide the sinner back to the church. Ideally, it should deter disobedience without the need of using it, and church leaders often go to great lengths to win back errant members. But a single intransigent individual represents a very real threat to the stability of an Amish community. The Amish take very seriously the biblical injunction to avoid intercourse with sinners, lest the righteous too be turned to sin. In the midst of what they consider a world of sin, the Amish must remain isolated or cease to exist.31 The heart of the Amish conception of community, however, is not about rules and punishments but rather the idea of Gelassenheit, or submission. Gelassenheit means meekness, humility, and service to God and to others. It also means nonresistance to evil—turning the other cheek—but it is more than passive avoidance of a sinful world. At its best, the doctrine of Gelassenheit is a positive, affirming basis of community. According to Sandra Cronk, the Amish see Christ as a “suffering servant” who saves through his own submission, through the “power of powerlessness.” Love, not might, gave Jesus the power to bring about radical change, and the Amish attempt to follow his example. In Amish society, the most important expression of love is in the ritual of work. Whereas a modern economy functions through an impersonal system of distribution of goods and services, the Amish household economy relies on personal gifts of work. Through hard work, a person shows his or her love and commitment to the family and community. “If a daughter does not make a rug from fabric scraps,” Cronk explains, “the family may have no rug on the floor. If a son does not cut the lumber from family land and make the kitchen cabinet, his mother may have no place to put her dishes.” To reduce work by means of technology and conveniences would be to break down the sharing relationships that are the basis of Amish family life.32 The oft-depicted barn raising, therefore, is more than a primitive substitute for fire insurance, more than a system by which labor is exchanged for the promise of future assistance; it is the most visible manifestation of a vast network of gifts of work that holds the Amish community together. The Amish, unlike Hutterites or Shakers, do not live communally; they own property as individuals and households. But any Amish person who needs help, because of age, infirmity, death in the family, or natural disaster, is given help—ideally, without keeping tabs on who owes whom a favor. Actions, not words, form the basis of Amish society. Their faith, in this sense, differs from the evangelical doctrine; although the Amish follow Luther’s teaching that man is saved by faith alone, they believe that faith will show in behavior. Conversion is not a single experience but an ongoing, lifelong process of yielding one’s will to God’s and to that of the community.33 Ironically, it is the emphasis on unanimity and on visible manifestations of faith that creates so many schisms. When a dispute between members of a church becomes great enough and there can be no compromise, one group often splin-

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ters off to form a new sect. The complex divisions among Amish and Mennonite affiliations defy easy explanation; even settlements and districts of the same affiliation often differ on minor points of the Ordnung. In general, however, there is a continuum of affiliations of Plain people from the “low” (conservative) Old Order Amish to the “higher” Beachy and New Order Amish, the Old Order and still higher Mennonites, and finally mainstream Protestantism. “High” churches are more evangelical and less removed from society at large than low churches, whose members wear plainer dress and are more likely to eschew modern conveniences. The “ladder” of sects serves a useful purpose: when a member of one sect leaves or is excommunicated, he or she will likely join the next church higher up on the ladder. The variety of choices thus presented allows each district to maintain its own integrity. In the Lancaster settlement, nearly all of the Amish belong to the Old Order, with small numbers of Beachy Amish, who use electricity, automobiles, meetinghouses, and tractors but otherwise live, dress, and worship much as the Old Order Amish do. (Those who leave the Old Order most often “go Beachy.”)34 Lancaster County also contains a great diversity of Mennonite churches. The Old Order Amish are the plainest of the Plain people and therefore are the most noticeable and receive the most attention from outsiders. Plainness, like so much of Amish culture, is a part of Gelassenheit; to be showy or to make a prideful display of one’s wealth or abilities would be to elevate oneself above one’s community. Over the centuries, plainness has also become a way of distinguishing members of the Amish church from the world of sin. To outsiders, the most obvious mark of their separation from the world is their clothing, which has not changed greatly since the seventeenth century (even then, it was plainer than the fashions of the day). Coats must close with hooks-and-eyes, not with buttons, and they have no lapels. Men’s hats must have at least a three-and-one-fourthinch brim; pants fasten with a flap and buttons, not a zipper, and are held up with suspenders. Men wear their hair long (the more conservative the church, the longer the hair) and grow untrimmed beards but not mustaches: the Bible warns men not to “round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard” but does not require mustaches, which are reminiscent of military fashion in early modern Europe. Women wear dresses cut for modesty but not impractically long for housework, with a cape, apron, and bonnet. They do not cut their hair but wear it in buns beneath their bonnets after the commandment of St. Paul. Patterned clothing is forbidden, a prideful and unnecessary luxury, although shirts and dresses are often dyed bright blue, green, red, or purple. No jewelry may be worn, nor frivolous accessories such as neckties. In general, an Amish person must project an appearance of meekness and modesty; the details vary among districts, and the Ordnung is often quite specific about what type and style of clothing may be worn.35

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But plainness goes far beyond dress. A plain life is a simple one, close to nature. The Amish see the work of God in the soil, in the weather, in plants and animals, in the cycle of life; the city, however, is the work of Man, a place of leisure, waste, and wickedness.36 Hence their use of horses for transportation and farming: to use automobiles and tractors would be unnecessary, wasteful, and a step further removed from God. Whenever possible, Amish people live and work on farms. Given their insistence on traditional methods, Amish farms are to many people surprisingly productive. Centuries of nurturing the soil and a willingness to work long hours at physical labor allow the Amish to remain more than solvent. Large families, often multigenerational, can live comfortably on farms that average (in the rich soil of Lancaster County) about sixty acres. The Amish have been quite successful in remaining farmers, buying for their sons land from non-Amish farmers looking for a more financially rewarding line of work. The practical problems of remaining solvent as farmers in the late twentieth century have nevertheless forced the Amish to make some compromises with modernity. Population pressure on farmland and plummeting crop prices have meant that Amish farmers have had to adopt some technology to compete for a market share and to pay rising property taxes. Although they still make use of the manure from their livestock, they augment it with chemical fertilizers and pesticides. They use gas-powered machinery in the field, but it must be pulled with horses; they may own tractors, but only for stationary diesel power in the barn. Diesel engines power milking machines and the refrigeration required by dairy health laws. As the Amish population in Lancaster grows and farmland slowly dwindles, many young Amish men are forced to leave farming or to supplement their farm income with other work. Although the Old Order still does not allow factory work, more than 1,500 Amish-owned enterprises have appeared in the last half-century. Amish women, too, often earn extra money by selling quilts, baked goods, pickles, and preserves, often out of their homes— and often to tourists. The key for the Amish is to adopt necessary or useful technology without adopting the values that come with it. They will, for example, accept rides from neighbors with cars, should the need arise, but they may not own cars themselves, lest they become too reliant on them. An individual who can, anytime he or she wishes, drive hundreds of miles in a day will no longer remain tied tightly to home and community. Similarly, Amish shops may contain telephones for business purposes and farmers may use community phones, but they are forbidden in homes. Telephones are necessary and useful at times, but to rely on them for communication would erode the face-to-face contact vital to maintaining a strong sense of community. To rely too heavily on telephones and automobiles would, moreover, yoke the user to the outside world. The same is true of electricity. To adopt electrical conveniences would make an Amish family dependent on

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modern society for its daily activity and would open the door to the influence of television and radio. If community is created through personal contact and gifts of work, technology threatens to isolate individuals from one another and at the same time tie them unacceptably to a sinful world. To remain a separate people in a modern world, the Amish must both survive economically and maintain their cultural integrity. ✸ The Amish conception of community seems, at first look, utterly at odds with some of the most cherished American values. Yet the extreme individualism of American society makes the Amish appear more communitarian than perhaps they really are. The Amish are far from utopian; their worldview is more like that of Hesiod’s farmer than that of Vergilian shepherds (or of twentieth-century hippies, for that matter). On the contrary, it is their belief in human corruptibility that has led them to create such tight restrictions on behavior. They live, as they always have, on individual, family-owned farmsteads and produce for their own profit; at the same time, those profits are most often returned to the land or used to buy farms for the next generation. Work is family-centered and only to a lesser extent community-centered; it is also to be valued for its own sake. The individual’s relationship with the community might be described in more familiar terms as neighborliness—the free gift of what one has clear title to, with the expectation of similar good will in return but with no sense of explicit trade or obligation. Amish beliefs about technology, too, are extreme only when contrasted with those of mainstream American society. The Amish do not eschew technology or the benefits it brings; they adopt it selectively, to maintain a balance between spirituality and economic necessity, between tradition and progress. If they are hardly Jefferson’s idealized yeomen, they are nevertheless an exaggerated embodiment of many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American ideals of rurality, and the differences between them and their more secular neighbors are far less obvious now than they were at the time. As recently as the early twentieth century, in fact, the Amish were far from unique. In their attitudes toward agriculture, community, technology, and progress, they had much in common with other American family farmers. Farm families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries responded to change by striving to maintain a balance between individual success and community needs and between modern conveniences and traditional ways of life. Because the good of any individual was linked to the good of the farm and therefore of the family, and because the family was the basic unit of production, personal ties formed the basis of local economies. Individual and community needs must similarly be balanced; though work and cooking often inspired competition, too much competition was showing off and led to censure by neighbors. A neighborly combination

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of hospitality and favors was the basis of community. Neighbors did not keep a tally of exchanges or expect favors in return for favors; if a neighbor could help, she was simply expected to do so, and it was equally important that those in need ask for help. Labor, given the relative lack of material goods in traditional farming communities, was the main resource shared among families. This system of mutual assistance met not only the economic needs of farm families but emotional needs as well, building, ideally at least, an attitude of friendly help rather than one of obligation. Rural Americans a century ago thus integrated work and community much as the Amish still do—and not, as might be expected, purely out of necessity. When government, agribusiness, and reformers introduced new agricultural techniques and consumer goods that emphasized individual work and rendered neighboring practices unnecessary, farmers were slow to give up traditional family and community ties. Farm people tried to blend the old and the new, recognizing the practical value of radios and automobiles but also the cultural and spiritual value of communal work and neighboring. They were eager to improve their lives, but not at the cost of rendering their way of life obsolete.37 Just as rural America before the twentieth century was defined by the desire to integrate progress and tradition, ruralites also tried to integrate individual needs with those of the community and productive work with spiritual and cultural needs. This was as true in Lancaster County as elsewhere. Barn raisings were as practical and enjoyable for other farm families as they were for the Amish, as were other occasions for communal work such as threshing, butchering, or making apple butter. Even so simple an occasion as moving day—by tradition the first day of April in Pennsylvania German communities—became an opportunity for people not only to work together but simply to enjoy one another’s company and, of course, to eat together. One non-Amish Lancaster Countian, writing in 1906, defined a good neighbor simply as “One we can depend on for help in times of sickness or for help with some extra work and with whom we can dispense with formalities.” (Or, as a Pennsylvania Dutch saying joked, “You never have any bother to get people to help you move. If you were a good neighbor, they were always happy to help. If you were a bad neighbor, they help to be rid of you.”)38 The Amish underpinned their way of life with a unique religious doctrine, but other Plain sects shared aspects of this as well; the Brethren remained committed to farming as a way of life until the late nineteenth century, and the majority of Lancaster’s Mennonites until the middle of the twentieth. The doctrine of nonconfrontation in particular set the Plain sects apart, as it always had. And, of course, Old Order groups enforced their way of life with more stringent rules, customs, and punishments than other Americans ever did. But although other ethnic and religious groups may have been more eager to embrace progress or less thoroughly committed to farming, the majority of Lancaster Countians at the turn of

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the twentieth century shared with the Old Order Amish an important core of agrarian ideals.

Into the Twentieth Century That core of agrarian values meant that decades after the Civil War, Americans— both North and South—could still believe in the possibility of a rural America that successfully integrated agrarian tradition and culture with the fruits of material progress. But by the end of the nineteenth century, the tie between rurality and progress was coming undone. The closing of the frontier, announced by the 1890 census, symbolized the end of an era of expansive growth in which the existence of empty land to the west had guaranteed that rurality meant freedom and opportunity. The United States was urbanizing and industrializing, fed by new waves of immigration and huge concentrations of wealth in northeastern cities. The Republican party that had risen to power on a platform of free labor, free soil, and free men now wielded it by abandoning homesteaders in favor of corporate industry and railroads. When in the 1890s southern and western farmers turned to populism in an attempt to find a new community spirit that would save them from the excesses of economic individualism and from their own isolation, they represented not the vanguard of a new agrarianism but the last gasp of the old. A slim majority of Americans still lived in the country, and would until World War I, but an era was rapidly passing. An increasingly urban culture brought with it a new perspective on rural America. Increasingly, in fact, ruralites became objects of pity instead of admiration. Urbanites aspiring to sophistication had always looked down on farmers, but now there were enough of them to do some cultural damage. Tourists to northern New England found real farmers to be dirty, dull, and isolated—utterly unsatisfactory compared with the idealized farmers of American myth. Wealthy northerners also invaded Appalachia after the Civil War, but with an eye on profit as well as recreation. Appalachians seemed, to proper Victorians, sadly backward and in desperate need of education and improvement. Women and men from middle- and upper-class backgrounds moved south to help, building schools and “settlements” not unlike those used to Americanize turn-of-the-century immigrants, in which Appalachian children were taught the essentials of mainstream middle-class culture. American fiction, most famously the novels of Sinclair Lewis, began to show the negative side of small-town and rural life, emphasizing its banality and narrow-mindedness. The city had become the home of opportunity; Horatio Alger, not James Fenimore Cooper, portrayed the American spirit of freedom and opportunity.39 Stable rural areas were slower to accept these new ideas, but even they were slowly changing, and there were fewer of them all the time. Parts of rural New

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England, long in decline, found their economies supported primarily by tourism.40 Where agriculture still flourished, mechanical innovations were changing it—not as rapidly as they would in the twentieth century, to be sure, and farmers could still fit steam-powered threshers into patterns of community work.41 But these “improvements” were enough to increase production and feed a downward spiral in prices that bankrupted many homesteaders in the 1880s and 1890s. Lancaster County, as usual, was more fortunate than most rural areas; farmers there were only then fully exploiting the possibilities of tobacco fields and stockyards, and intensive dairying still lay on the horizon. Yet Lancaster was not immune from broader changes in economy and culture. By the time of the Civil War, the county’s farms could be subdivided no further and remain profitable; the rural population had, for the time being, reached its peak. The “excess” population headed to the city—to Lancaster, or perhaps to Reading or Philadelphia—for industrial work. The changes especially threatened Pennsylvania Germans, whose slow absorption into the Anglo-American mainstream seemed to reach a crisis stage. Not only were they increasingly drawn to cities for work, but urban culture reached out to them, even through such devices as the mail-order catalogs delivered free to their doors. No one, certainly, was ready to abandon the Garden Spot, but doubts were beginning to creep in about just what the future might hold. In the midst of this change remained the Amish, clinging stubbornly to their faith and their way of life. As the world around them changed in the early twentieth century, they would become more and more noticeable to outsiders, and their comparatively communal way of life would remind “progressive” Americans of a time now lost, for better or for worse. The ideals they shared with other agrarian communities would be more than sufficient to facilitate their adoption as symbols of America’s past agrarian age—and, by the mid-twentieth century, of the Garden Spot itself. But what would it mean for a people increasingly associated with the past to represent a place that had always prided itself on progress as much as tradition? And though the idea of the Garden Spot remained as strong as ever, if progress meant urbanization, how could Lancaster County remain rural without becoming backward? These questions, both philosophically and practically, would haunt Lancaster County throughout the twentieth century.

✸ 2

PRIDE AND PROGRESS Education, Literacy, and the Little Red Schoolhouse

Rejoice, I say, rejoice, for the wilderness has blossomed the rose! —PERCY JEWETT BURRELL

On three muggy evenings in the early summer of 1929, thousands of Lancaster Countians packed Franklin and Marshall College’s football stadium to watch their history come alive. To mark the county’s bicentennial, several hundred of their neighbors had staged a “Pageant of Gratitude” for two centuries of God’s blessing. The figure of William Penn opened the pageant, establishing the colony of Pennsylvania as a haven for the oppressed of body and spirit and proclaiming it “destined to be blessed by God.” Hans Herr and his band of Mennonites followed close behind, fleeing the Old World’s persecution to find in Lancaster County “a land of plenty where peace and liberty shall be our portion.” From there the actors traced the county’s growth through the major events of the nation’s history: revolution, civil war, and world war. Modeled after the drama of ancient Greece, the pageant came complete with a narrative chorus of Lancaster’s townships and boroughs and climaxed with a procession of the Fruits of the Soil, of Civilization, and of the Spirit before an Altar of Gratitude.1 Agriculture, not surprisingly, played a starring role in the celebration. A “Hymn of Gratitude” composed for the occasion praised the land for its bounty: “Rich is thy soil and merciful thy clime / Thy streams unfailing in the Summer’s drought.” The figure of the Farmer led all the Fruits of Civilization, for he had earned his county “the fairest of all names— ‘The Garden Spot of America.’” The Minister followed the Farmer, emphasizing the link between the fruits of soil and spirit; then came the Teacher, Physician, Statesman, Scientist, Artist, Merchant, Artisan, Manufacturer, and, lastly, the Soldier.2 But if the order of procession

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recognized agriculture as the fount of all material and spiritual wealth, it also suggested the direction of history—away from the soil and the spirit, toward industry and war. Though the land might “teem with wealth,” so did the cities, where “trade and joy, in every busy street, / Mingling are heard.”3 Even the very nature of the pageant, with its iambic pentameter and allusions to classical mythology, played to the audience’s desire for the most refined fruits of civilization. Lancaster might have been built on the wealth of agriculture, but its industry and art were the blossom of the Red Rose City.4 This tension between Lancaster’s rural heritage and its urban future was finding expression in all areas of local culture, but education and literacy in particular had become battlegrounds. Such conflict was not new to the Pennsylvania Germans, who had long sought cultural legitimacy in an English-speaking nation. Residents of small towns often used expressions of “high” literary culture, with classical allusion and flowery language, to prove their cultural merit and separate themselves from less-educated farm folk. Lancaster’s Pageant of Gratitude was typical of those efforts. But the Pennsylvania Dutch felt a particularly strong need to prove their cultural merit. They had long been disparaged by English-speaking Pennsylvanians as “Dumb Dutch,” in part because of their refusal to give up their German dialect, in part because of their devotion to (and association with) rural life and farming. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, newly urban Pennsylvania Germans struggled to prove the value of their traditional language and culture. Some fought for their history and praised their “great men,” while others tried to turn their dialect, once almost exclusively oral, into a written language that could take its place among the “legitimate” languages of Europe. Meanwhile, in Lancaster County, as in much of rural America, public education was becoming a battleground. Rural progressives sought to improve rural education by consolidating schools and modernizing curricula, but many farmers, including Lancaster County’s Plain sects, saw these changes as a threat to their ideals of community, agriculture, and religion. In the nineteenth century, reformers had sought to assimilate the Dutch by requiring schools to be taught in English, compounding the problems of Pennsylvania Dutch parents who wanted to keep their children within the bounds of traditional culture. The Amish, the most conservative of Pennsylvania Germans, forced that battle into the public eye by winning their fight to preserve a rural form of education where many rural communities had failed. Both battles had unforeseen consequences. Pennsylvania Germans’ eagerness to prove their cultural worth on the ground of mass urban culture ultimately undermined their efforts at separate legitimacy and hastened their assimilation into mainstream society. The Amish won the right to separate schools, but only by means of a public legal battle that further separated them from their non-Amish neighbors and gained them national attention. It was the Amish, not the mod-

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ernizing and urbanizing efforts of other Pennsylvania Germans, that mainstream Americans found fascinating. By the 1940s, the furor over Amish education was changing Lancaster County’s public image from a progressive, prosperous agricultural region to the home of the quaint, old-fashioned Amish. Though no one realized it at the time, Lancaster would never be the same.

City and Country In the 1920s, rural Americans faced both an economic decline and a cultural assault from the city. World war had inflated agricultural prices, but peace brought a quick end to the boom and sent agriculture into a long recession. At the same time, the urban culture of the 1920s, from flappers to evolution, threatened traditional rural values, and farmers feared for their children’s morality. Many farmers, accustomed to being the cherished model citizens of their nation, felt slighted by the changes they saw in society. Their reaction took the form of campaigns for moral reform, as preachers and parishioners condemned flappers and jazz, denounced the teaching of evolution, and fought to enforce Prohibition. It also took the much uglier form of the Ku Klux Klan, which, far from being a purely southern phenomenon, grew in the 1920s wherever ruralites felt threatened by the cultural and economic changes taking place in the cities. Especially in the North, the Klan’s appeal could be as much about stability, localism, and traditional values as racism and nativism; it flourished in areas that were almost entirely white and Protestant. The rural press, whenever possible, ostentatiously ignored the impending changes. Editors pitied the poor urbanites who had never experienced the joys of “God’s country,” praising rural life and portraying the country as a place of sanity, purity, peace, security, and happiness—whatever temporary troubles farmers faced.5 Lancaster County, true to its boosters’ claims, fared better than most of rural America in the 1920s. Local agriculture was diversified enough to withstand the postwar recession; truck farming (growing vegetables for urban markets) and dairy farming had joined tobacco and livestock as major sources of farm income. Residents of Lancaster city and of the county’s larger boroughs still provided a vital market for local produce. The early twentieth century was the golden age of Lancaster’s farmers’ markets, with no fewer than six market houses serving the city’s residents. Demand for local produce was so great that the city continued to license curbside marketers, who sold their goods straight from their buggies and trucks, until sanitation laws shut them down in 1927. Ruralites had much to gain from the city, and no one could miss its role in keeping Lancaster the Garden Spot. But even so, many feared the encroachment of urban culture. Dance halls flourished as far from the city as the village of New Providence, and radio reached everywhere. At the same time, the country was losing population to the city. The

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most rural parts of the county had been in slow demographic decline since the turn of the century, when farms had reached their minimum productive size and could be subdivided no further. Capitalizing on ruralites’ growing unease, the Ku Klux Klan made inroads, holding meetings in the southern part of the county in 1923 and 1924.6 The battle against urban culture would likely not have been so fierce had farmers not also been battling themselves. Although they condemned the city as the root of all evil, they were quick to embrace its material wealth. They bought radios to partake of the city’s culture, cars to drive there. To solve their economic problems, farmers adopted techniques from urban business and industry: new technology, advertising, cost accounting, government assistance. But these new elements of rural life undermined the personal independence, sense of local community, and preference for the spiritual over the material that bolstered rural pride. Many farm families adopted new technologies and conveniences selectively, trying to blend improvements in agriculture and a higher standard of living into the existing structure of rural life, but over time their balancing act grew more difficult. Children came to take for granted the mass culture, commercial recreation, and technological conveniences their parents saw as unique experiences or expedient compromises. It was, in part, ruralites’ growing realization of the direction their choice was taking them that precipitated the cultural battles of the 1920s. Their assault on urban culture and constant praise of things rural helped to hide their own complicity in the changes they decried.7 While farmers blamed their troubles on the city, urbanites also struggled with the tension between rural virtues and urban comforts, a tension that infused urban idealizations of the country. At the turn of the century, urban Americans often praised the rural ways of their childhood, even though, of course, few actually returned to farming. What they valued was the “spiritual impact” of nature, its ability to provide an antidote for the ills of urban life. The idealization of the country as a kind of Arcadia was part of a broader antimodernism that sought to revitalize overcivilized modern life by infusing it with the sort of direct, intense physical or spiritual experience that had supposedly been common in premodern societies. The rural life of the not-too-distant past was one such model to be emulated, and affluent urbanites took vacations in the country or set up second homes there in hopes of absorbing either its native vigor or its sense of repose, or possibly both. Their ideal, according to one commuter, was “living in the country without being of it,” by “allowing the charms of nature to gratify and illumine, but not to disturb one’s cosmopolitan sense.”8 Only rarely were urbanites visiting the country willing to give up the comforts of urban life. They felt only a profound distaste for truly rural people. “If a man perspires largely in a cornfield on a dusty day,” the editor of Harper’s wrote in the 1860s, “and washes hastily in the horsetrough, and eats in shirt-sleeves that date their cleanliness three days back,

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and loves fat pork and cabbage ‘neat,’” he could never be a suitable dinner companion for an Arcadian gentleman. “A long day of close fieldwork,” after all, “leaves one in a very unfit mood for appreciative study of either poetry or the natural sciences.”9 Even the most committed idealists admitted that one needed an urbane, cosmopolitan outlook to fully appreciate nature. While cities built parks to provide a “natural” place for children to play, the National Recreation Association published a handbook to teach rural children how to play properly.10 Conflicted goals and urban elitism lay also at the core of the Country Life Movement, which alleged to bring the advantages of the city to ruralites. The movement, which arose from the findings of Theodore Roosevelt’s 1908 Country Life Commission, tried to make farmers into businessmen while preserving the traditional agrarian values that rapid urbanization threatened. But reformers’ real motives stemmed as much from rural nostalgia as from humanitarianism. On one hand, reformers held fast to the yeoman myth, the idea that farmers were the most reliable, energetic, intelligent members of society. On the other, Country Life reformers no more wanted to return to an agricultural economy than suburban commuters wanted to dig potatoes. Unless the United States should revert to a premodern agricultural economy—which was unthinkable—farmers, to survive, must be made into businessmen. But to become businessmen, farmers must organize, accept government assistance, and adopt urban business methods, all of which would destroy the self-reliance and neighborliness that made farmers so attractive to idealists. This was precisely what government agricultural agencies and land grant colleges promoted as they tried to increase efficiency through technology and farm consolidation. To agricultural reformers, farm life was a problem to be solved, and farmers who failed to accept reformers’ solutions were simply backward. Instead of neighborly relations that sustained farm families and communities, reformers saw only isolation. They responded by encouraging ruralites to join formal, town-based institutions, to adopt new farming practices, and to buy mass-produced consumer goods and farm inputs. Yet at the same time, they insisted that they were only trying to help save rural communities. Reformers, like so many of the farmers themselves, wanted to have rural America and eat it, too.11 These tensions between rural tradition and urbanizing progress bubbled to the surface when rural communities tried to sum up their history in books or in pageants like Lancaster’s Pageant of Gratitude. In employing the literary “fruits of civilization” to harmonize past and present, Lancastrians drew on a proud if recent tradition. From the turn of the century to the beginning of the Depression, small towns and cities established historical societies, put on pageants, and published books of local history. In part, the Pageant of Gratitude’s high-flown prose and form reflected not the pretensions of local boosters but the standards of a nationwide pageant movement. The pageant’s author, Percy Jewett Burrell,

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figure 2.1. The Enos Royer farm in Lancaster County, 1938. The Royer farm was a successful mixed-use farm, combining livestock and crop operations. The chickens roaming free outside the henhouse would today be called “free range” and would cost an extra dollar per pound at the market. Photograph from the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration–Office of War Information Collection, LC-USF34-040256-D.

represented Community Service, Incorporated, an organization whose mission was to build community spirit in towns and cities across the United States. A local pageant, according to Burrell and his colleagues, should transform a “city of strangers” into a “community of neighbors”—a genteel alternative to the “100% Americanism” of the early 1920s that sparked divisiveness and xenophobia in the wake of the First World War. Instead of warding off dangerous outsiders, historical pageants stressed unity and identification with community by building pride in common achievement. Burrell had written a number of religious and historical pageants for mid-Atlantic communities, and his work was typical of the genre, employing classical allusion and poetry to edify as well as entertain audiences.12 If no one smirked at the irony of hiring an outsider to build community pride, it was because the county’s boosters shared Burrell’s vision. The pageant’s organizers included Lancaster’s most prominent citizens—a former lieutenant governor, the publisher of the Lancaster Daily Intelligencer, two well-known artists, a landscape architect, and the wife of William Shand, owner of the major downtown department store. A few, like the pageant’s chairman, John M. Groff, were

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descended from the county’s first settlers.13 With ties to both local heritage and present prosperity, the organizers idealized Lancaster’s rural past, boasted of its progress, and recognized no potential conflict between city and country. Hardheaded commentators, meanwhile, noted that while factories provided an outlet for surplus farm labor and supplied farmers with manufactured goods, the county’s agricultural resources guaranteed that workers would eat even in the worst of times. Thomas W. Kemp, agricultural editor of the Intelligencer, claimed that Lancaster County came “as near being self-contained as any geographical section of the county.” The development of Lancaster city, according to Kemp, was “part and parcel of the agricultural history of the county as a whole.” Indeed, agriculture was “the determining factor in every progressive step of [the county’s] history.” Lancastrians, he boasted, remained “faithful always to tradition,” while “ever forging ahead,” because they maintained “a conservatism that begets permanency in every innovation embraced.”14 The traditions of agriculture and the progress of the city went hand in hand, the twin guiding lights of Lancaster’s history. But although boosters claimed to uphold the traditions of their community’s agrarian past, their methods belied their deeper motives. When urbanites looked down their noses at farmers, upwardly mobile residents of small towns and farming communities grew defensive. The reverse of the reformers’ coin, what made farmers as much to be pitied as lauded, was the old stereotype of rural ignorance, and anyone born and raised on a farm felt its sting long after they had taken up residence in the city. Residents of Lancaster city were naturally eager to prove that they were just as erudite and cosmopolitan as Philadelphians and New Yorkers. A pageant allowed them to do that, by demonstrating their familiarity with classical literature and learning—while still leaving themselves a base of rural pride to fall back on should they fail to win the respect of metropolitan intellectuals. The Pageant of Gratitude expressed feelings of inferiority as much as pride in achievement.

Dumb Dutch Even the praise Lancaster County and its Pennsylvania German farmers received for their skilled agronomy and husbandry did little to quell the gnawing fear of rural inferiority. Pennsylvania Germans had always borne more than their share of the stereotype of rural ignorance, in large part because of their refusal to give up their language, Pennsylfaanische Deitsch, which descended from the German dialect spoken by the first Palatine and Swiss settlers in Pennsylvania. For as long as Germans had lived in Pennsylvania, their English neighbors had derided them as “Dumb Dutch.” Until late in the nineteenth century, most Pennsylvania Germans spoke either Deitsch or High German at home, in school, in church, and among friends; they spoke English more rarely and, therefore, more awkwardly. It

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is no coincidence that the word dumb can mean both “stupid” and “unable to speak,” for no one appears one’s brightest in an unfamiliar tongue. The resulting stereotype of the ignorant Dutchman and similar notions about farmers fed on each other, for although there had always been a sizeable urban population of Pennsylvania Germans, the Dutch were widely associated with farming. For Pennsylvania German farmers, rural traditions and ethnic culture went hand in hand, and passing the dialect on to children went hand in hand with keeping farms in the family. At the same time, speaking his native tongue in a city might identify a Dutchman as a rube, and children who grew up and left the farm might symbolically refuse to speak in dialect to prove their urbanity and, by implication, their superiority to their rural kin. A turn-of-the-century folk story, likely apocryphal but nonetheless telling, recalls the problem: Sally Reitenour went off to college. During her first summer back on the farm she could suddenly no longer speak her native Dutch. While helping her mother in the garden one afternoon she responded to her mother’s dialect each time in English until she carelessly tramped on a rake whose handle flew up and hit her in the forehead. Then she exploded, “Verdammter Reche!”15 But despite the best efforts of Pennsylvania Germans to resist assimilation, by the end of the nineteenth century their dialect was threatened by the march of mass American culture. Pennsylvania German ties to the land had weakened in previous decades, as economic opportunity grew in nearby cities and midwestern farmers began underselling Pennsylvanians in wheat and other staple crops. Efforts to modernize education were also taking their toll. As requirements for public school teachers grew more stringent, German-speaking districts had trouble finding qualified bilingual teachers. Nineteenth-century reformers had campaigned to oust Schriftdeutsch, written German, from Pennsylvania’s schools and popular culture, and by the 1890s the lack of bilingual teachers had brought that campaign near to success. Part of the trouble was that Pennsylfaanische Deitsch was primarily an oral language. Pennsylvania German children, if they learned to read and write, learned English or “High” German, and Pennsylvania German newspapers printed formal German, not their own dialect. Deitsch was a folk language; even native speakers thought it unworthy of literature. The Pennsylvania Dutch dialect seemed a poor country cousin to German, just as the Dutch seemed to be poor cousins to the English in America.16 Interestingly, as the gradual assimilation of Pennsylvania Germans began to threaten the dialect’s survival, scholarly and popular interest in it arose. Pennsylvania Germans in cities, like the Lancastrians who staged the Pageant of Gratitude, wanted to preserve ties to their past while proving their mettle in the increasingly urban culture of the present. If Pennsylfaanische Deitsch was in danger

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of dying out, thought educated Dutchmen, the printed word might keep it alive—and elevate it to the status of a full-fledged language. A number of dialect publications appeared in the last decades of the nineteenth century, both original works and translations of English literature. Edward H. Rauch, a native Lancaster Countian and newspaper publisher, made the first major effort to put Deitsch into writing, founding the Pennsylvania Dutchman in 1873. This English- and Dutch-language magazine provided original Pennsylvania Dutch literature, transliterated according to English rules of spelling and accompanied by an English translation to enable non-Dutch readers to familiarize themselves with the Pennsylvania Dutch language and culture. Rauch wanted more than just to preserve and expand the dialect; he aimed to elevate it, and its speakers, by association with great literature and culture. The first issue of the Dutchman contained, among other such efforts, a partial translation of Hamlet into dialect. The Pennsylvania German, Rauch insisted, was every bit as worthy a language as the “High” German, and should be spoken—and written—with pride. Though the Dutchman ran for only three months, Rauch refused to abandon his efforts; he later published Rauch’s Pennsylvania Dutch Hand-Book, which though primarily a Dutch-English dictionary contained dialect selections from Shakespeare and the Bible. Nor was Rauch alone in his efforts to prove that Pennsylvania Dutch—and by extension the people who spoke it—were fit for more than farms. In the 1880s and 1890s, Pennsylvania Germans published dialect newspaper columns, books of poetry, and histories of their people. Even Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore was translated partly into Deitsch and performed locally for eager audiences.17 History, too, could play a role in elevating the status of the Pennsylvania German people. In 1891, several dozen prominent men met at Lancaster to found the Pennsylvania German Society. “For almost a century,” a speaker reminded the gathered notables, “there seems to have been a yearning among these people towards that fuller recognition which, as the preponderating element of this great state, it was felt they deserved.” Now, this “Sleeping Giant” was about to awake and “arouse to the magnitude and importance of the destiny that lies before him.” Other speakers recalled their forefathers, “who made the wilderness blossom as the rose.” After all, the Pennsylvania Germans had always been a farming people, and the society’s members did not hide that fact. But they placed greater emphasis on other accomplishments, boasting that “in the art of printing, in the realm of science and letters, in religious fervor, in pure statesmanship, in war and in peace, the Pennsylvania-German-Swiss element has equalled [sic] any other race.” If they did not deny their rural origins, neither did they want to be limited by them, and they measured their people’s accomplishments by the standards of the late nineteenth century. The society numbered among its members captains of industry, ministers, prominent newspapermen, the president of Franklin and Marshall College, and a former governor of Pennsylvania; its first president later became

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legal advisor to Wall Street baron J. P. Morgan. All traced their ancestry to prerevolutionary German immigrants, but the ancestors whose memories they promoted were not ragtag peasants desperately fleeing their homeland but successful men like themselves, confident and forward-looking.18 Successful Pennsylvania Germans, stung by the lack of respect their language and culture seemed to receive from mainstream America, wanted to show their best side in their literature and histories. Nineteenth-century efforts to limit the reach of public education, though motivated mainly by fiscal conservatism and a desire to preserve their dialect, had only worsened the Germans’ reputation, making them appear not merely simple but ignorant and backward. Translations of great literature into dialect gave them a way to fight that reputation, proving the Dutch capable of appreciating more than just off-color jokes and Bible stories. Men like Edward Rauch wanted to preserve the dialect, but preservation was about more than nostalgia; it was about elevation. Even the very process of turning an oral dialect into a written language gave it, somehow, a stamp of approval. Pennsylfaanische Deitsch was no longer just a hick dialect of a European tongue, but a complete language, capable of literature and “high” culture of its own. Historical journals like those of the Pennsylvania German Society and of the Lancaster County Historical Society, formed a few years later, fought the same battle. Unfortunately, World War I interfered with these efforts. Even in majorityGerman districts in Pennsylvania, the war raised distrust and persecution of German Americans. One of Lancaster’s own newspapers, the New Era, regularly impugned the loyalty of people whose ancestors had likely fought in the Revolution. As in most of the nation, the German language was removed from the curriculum of local high schools, making Pennsylvania Germans’ uphill struggle to preserve their language even more difficult. Dialect columns in newspapers and Deitschlanguage books all but disappeared, and the city of Lancaster even changed a few of its German street names. The Pennsylvania German Society suspended its annual meetings for the duration of the war, lest members draw too much attention to themselves.19 The pacifism of Lancaster’s Plain sects did not help matters. Woodrow Wilson’s administration, taking the position that to oppose the war was to be a traitor, made no accommodation for conscientious objectors. Although some received farm furloughs, dozens of Lancaster Amish and Mennonites were jailed for noncompliance with the draft. The War Department’s Military Intelligence Division kept the Plain community under surveillance throughout the war, and a bishop who encouraged conscientious objectors was arrested, convicted, and fined.20 Although persecution of German Americans was never as severe in Lancaster as it was in much of the nation—there were simply too many of them, and they had been there too long—it was sufficient to make the Pennsylvania Dutch wary of trumpeting their heritage.

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The war also legitimized the sport, long popular in southeastern Pennsylvania, of deriding the Dutch and making fun of their speech. Jay House, a writer for the Philadelphia Public Ledger, helped popularize the garbled jargon later passed on to tourists as an accurate portrayal of Dutch speech. In 1922, House printed numerous letters from readers relating amusing stories—usually misrepresentations—of Pennsylvania Dutch English. Among the phrases most commonly passed around were, “Bell don’t make—bump,” “Till Saturday his off is all,” and “Jake, come down and eat yourself, Mom’s on the table and Pop’s half et.” The first was supposedly a sign on the door of a house: the doorbell doesn’t work, please knock. The second meant that a man’s vacation (his “off ”) would be over (“all” gone) on Saturday. The last is fairly obvious. None of these constructions was really accurate or, at least, common, although most of the components, such as the use of “all” to mean “all gone,” were frequently heard. In most cases, English that seemed garbled to native speakers was simply German grammar and mistranslated cognates applied to English vocabulary. House meant his jibes in good fun, of course, and noted on one occasion that compared to a novel he had read recently, “Pennsylvania Dutch is a limpid stream of pure and undefiled English.”21 But the impression he left was that the Dutch were uneducated rubes. If Pennsylvania Dutch children were no longer learning German in school, and if they already felt that speaking Deitsch labeled them as hicks, House and his imitators certainly weren’t providing them any additional incentive to pass on their dialect. The presence of the Amish posed another problem for Pennsylvania Germans wishing to present their people as progressive and cosmopolitan, for even in the 1930s Plain farmers refused to adopt tractors, electricity, or even telephones, and they clung more stubbornly than most to their traditional dialect. For the Old Order Amish and Mennonites, preserving a separate dialect was a means of maintaining the separation from the world to which the Bible enjoined them. Some Pennsylvania Germans, both urban and rural, tried to distance themselves from their Plain neighbors by passing the stereotypes of ignorant Dutchman and farmer onto the Amish and Mennonites. The most influential was Helen Reimensnyder Martin, whose novels written in the first decade of the twentieth century gave the Amish and Mennonites their first real notoriety. Martin’s usual theme, a common one for the time, was that of a young girl, intelligent, individualistic, and independent, struggling to free herself from the stifling confines of rural life. The first and most popular of these novels, published in 1904, was Tillie, a Mennonite Maid: A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch. Tillie, encouraged by a kindly schoolteacher, fights a “battle for freedom” from her domineering father (who beats her for reading) and escapes the world of the farm to find “ineffable peace and contentment.” A later Martin novel, Sabina: A Story of the Amish, depicted a girl whose “blind soul reached out gropingly for something beyond the deadly monotonous experiences of her farm life.” The novels’ primary purpose

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was titillation, not edification, and Martin’s frequent references to heaving bosoms peppered a formulaic plot, but the subtext was clear. The author, who found even “respectable” Lancaster Countians to be distastefully narrow-minded and hypocritical, thought the Amish and Mennonites were the most backward of rubes. Sabina, like all of Martin’s heroines, “had a strange face—one that, unlike all the rest of her family, suggested an uncommon individuality.” But even she, as an Amish lass, showed a “lack of bright intelligence.”And her aunt, asked whether Sabina was happy, only “repeated [the question] vaguely. It was a question too searching for the average Amish intellect.”22 No one could have guessed, reading Martin’s novels, that the Amish would in a generation become symbols of all that was right and good in rural America— least of all their fellow Pennsylvania Germans. A few feeble protests arose in Lancaster County against this rather one-sided portrayal of the Plain people. William Uhler Hensel, a bank president, railroad director, newspaper publisher, lawyer, and former state attorney general, defended them against the slanders of Martin’s publisher, which was “brutally frank in advertising . . . the ‘common, sordid, unlovely atmosphere of a Pennsylvania Dutch community.’”23 But Hensel’s remarks elicited as much criticism as sympathy; most Pennsylvania Germans were not entirely certain how they felt about the Amish. Certainly they resented outsiders (such as a New York publishing house) slandering their cultural kin. But the distance between the Old Orders and even rural “church” Germans was growing, as the latter adopted telephones, radios, automobiles, and tractors. Recent generations of Pennsylvania Germans had moved in ever greater numbers to the city, and the stereotype of the uneducated Dutch farmer galled these new urbanites. The Amish represented an agrarian heritage that even the most urbane Dutchman hesitated to renounce, but it was a heritage less than comfortable to Dutchmen on the make who knew too well the kernel of truth lurking behind Martin’s exaggerations. Hensel, perhaps Lancaster County’s most respected citizen, could afford to be magnanimous.24 As Pennsylvania Germans struggled to legitimate their culture, history, and ethnicity, they found themselves simultaneously preaching heritage and progress. And, like the German and English organizers of Lancaster’s bicentennial pageant, they saw “high” culture as the means to do it.

A Rural Education The subject of rural schools finally brought the tension between tradition and progress in rural Lancaster County into open conflict. Education reformers and farmers had battled there, as in most of rural America, since the middle of the nineteenth century: first over free public schools, later over compulsory education and curriculum. Many farmers saw formal education beyond reading, writ-

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ing, and arithmetic as a threat to their ability to preserve their way of life; reformers believed that the expansion and improvement of public education was necessary to prepare children for an increasingly urban and industrial future. After World War I, the biggest issues for rural parents and educators became school consolidation—the elimination of one-room local schoolhouses in favor of “modern,” town-based elementary schools—and compulsory high school. But, as Lancaster’s experience would show, the battle lines were not so clearly drawn between urban reformers and traditionalist farmers. Though the impetus for change came from the cities, most rural Lancaster Countians opposed school consolidation primarily because of the high cost of new buildings. The idea of modern schools was, in itself, quite attractive—except to more conservative farmers such as the Amish, but even the Amish insisted that they were not opposed to education per se. At the same time, many urbanites sympathized with the traditional values embodied by the “little red schoolhouse.” The battle over school consolidation was really about the merits of tradition and progress, and where one stood on the issue was only partly a result of how much one had already “progressed.” When the battle over school consolidation in Lancaster County became public, as it eventually would, it laid bare the feelings of both residents and outsiders about the value of tradition, the merits of progress, and the uses of rurality. ✸ In the 1930s, Amish children, like most rural children, attended local, one-room, eight-grade schoolhouses. On the eve of the Second World War, some four thousand such schools still remained in rural Pennsylvania. State law required farm children to attend school only until age fourteen, when they could obtain permits to work on their parents’ farms. Old Order parents were content with this situation. They intended their children to become farmers, and to become successful farmers they needed work experience, not “book learning.” Children who sat too long in school would be spoiled for the physical labor of farming. Equally important to parents was that schools be local. In a small district, all parents could exert some influence; a number of Amish and Old Order Mennonite fathers sat on school boards and could prevent the curriculum from growing too worldly. Many of their “fancy” neighbors agreed with the Amish view of education. They, too, were farmers, and believed the three Rs to be education enough for farm children. Too much schooling, they feared, would only make it harder to protect their children from the enticements of the city. “Schools,” said a Downingtown man in 1937,“are teaching boys and girls that the best thing in life is to make money. They have forgotten how to care for the land.”25 Pennsylvania Germans had always, to a great extent, opposed the extension of public education. In the mid-nineteenth century, they opposed the establishment

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of free public schools, largely on grounds of excess cost. They opposed compulsory education, as well, when that was proposed after the Civil War. Farmers everywhere in the United States tended to be conservative on issues of public education, not because they were (as their opponents often portrayed them) ignorant rubes, but because of a fiscal conservatism and political independence that stemmed from the necessities of farm life. Nearly all wanted their children to receive an elementary education; some even hoped their offspring might go on to a professional education and career. Most, however, also wanted their children to remain on the farm and feared that an excess of education—at least of the wrong kind of education—would only make them lazy and discontented. Most farmers also agreed that it was unfair to make people pay for an education they did not want, and opposed school bonds on principle. And too much exposure to life in towns, where new consolidated elementary schools would be located, threatened to corrupt their children. Pennsylvania German farmers had a special reason to fear state-run public education, for they remained suspicious of an English establishment that had never entirely accepted them. As reformers “modernized” schools and demanded “professional” teachers in Pennsylvania, they also attacked the Pennsylvania German dialect and the bilingual education that Pennsylvania German children had always received, insisting that schools be conducted in English only. For the Dutch, rural education was about preserving not only agrarian culture but also ethnicity.26 On the other side of the cultural divide stood education reformers who preached the importance of modern curricula and facilities. While ruralites wanted to retain control over their children’s education, urban reformers believed that education was too important not to be handled by professionals. One midwestern educator went so far as to say that the only way to improve country schools was “to take just as much of their control out of the hands of the people as is possible.” Reformers imagined local school boards filled with uneducated, even illiterate and incompetent, men motivated primarily by a selfish desire to keep costs down. One-room schools were chaotic, lumping children of varying ages and abilities into the care of one ill-prepared teacher; the model of efficiency was the urban educator in a graded school teaching one subject to one age group at a time. Certainly many rural schools were poorly run, and many farmers were motivated mainly by financial concerns. The typical curriculum of the one-room school was heavy on memorization and rote learning, pedagogical approaches that poorly fit an increasingly individualistic society and failed to prepare children for the new opportunities of urban America. Most education reformers were sincere and quite well meaning, and many had come from the rural neighborhoods they now sought to reform. Indeed, more than a few argued that better education would actually keep farm boys and girls down on the farm. But too many education reformers, like Country Lifers and other urbanites who tried to

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modernize rural communities, began and ended their analysis with condescension, accepting at face value the appearance of vigor, wealth, and innovation in city schools and assuming that farming and education were a poor match. They assumed that rural children could only benefit from contact with town children and denigrated the educational value of farming: administrators in New York State went so far as to require physical education instruction for farm children, believing farmwork highly inferior to athletics in its effect on the body and mind. Education, according to reformers, should prepare children not to make a better life in their own rural communities but to make a new life in the modern, urban world beyond.27 By the 1920s, education reform in much of the rural United States focused on the necessity of replacing outdated one-room schoolhouses with modern, consolidated schools. Reformers rarely asked whether the existing system of rural education might serve the needs of farm children and farming communities; nor did they consider what improvements could be made to existing one-room schools. Consolidated schools, they argued, would provide a broader social experience for rural children, while busing children to school would eliminate truancy and provide a more wholesome environment than walking to school without adult supervision. Julius Arp, a county superintendent in Minnesota, insisted that consolidation would help, not hurt, rural communities. His mission was to save rural America, but that would require “a radical readjustment of the entire rural educational and social system, to fit modern conditions.” Modernization of rural schools, he argued, would slow the exodus to the cities. An improved curriculum would teach aesthetic values and supplant the “cold, calculating, dollar-getting, and prosaic attitude” that prevailed among farmers with “an intelligent, sympathetic, alert, and eager desire for a better kind of country life.” The “wholesome recreation and organized play” provided by new schools would be “the best antidote for monotonous rounds of duty and uncongenial neighbors.” Whatever the problems of rural education in the early twentieth century, arguments like these were not about to sway farmers. Arp was, in fact, precisely the sort of influence farmers wanted to keep their children away from. To attend school in town would subject farm children not only to the immoral influences of urban culture, but also to the condescension of teachers, students, and parents who dressed better, presumed to be more refined, and generally looked down on farmers. Particularly when farmers faced change in so many other areas, they were reluctant to accept it in education. In many communities throughout the United States they fought reform to a standstill, at least until World War II, but reformers ultimately won the war, in part because farmers too often lacked the clout, the organizational skills, or the conviction to sustain their political fight.28 In Lancaster County, however, the Old Order Amish and Mennonites, the most traditional farmers of all, succeeded in winning the war against school

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reform—and, more incredibly, won the approval of an urban audience for doing so. The setting for this battle was East Lampeter Township, just southeast of Lancaster city. The township had eleven one-room schoolhouses and a large Plain population. But it was also next door to Lancaster, and by the 1930s it was rapidly falling into the city’s close orbit. Progressive parents felt one-room schools to be simply not good enough for their children. In 1933, the East Lampeter school board proposed building a new, consolidated grade school for the entire township to replace the one-room schools, but the prospect of construction bills in excess of $100,000 dampened the board’s idealism. This was, after all, the Great Depression; the Garden Spot remained prosperous only by comparison to other regions and larger cities. East Lampeter farmers, leery of a tax increase, rejected a bond issue for the new building, and some 80 percent of the township’s taxpayers signed a petition against consolidation.29 For the time being, at least, residents were satisfied with their children’s education. But the Depression, while decimating local tax bases, also opened new opportunities for local governments eager to modernize. In 1936, the federal Public Works Administration (PWA) granted the East Lampeter school board $66,250 toward the cost of the consolidated school building. Taxpayers could provide the rest. The new school would open at Smoketown in the fall of 1937. Ten of the district’s eleven one-room schools—all except the school at Fairview, where the students were nearly all Amish and Mennonite—would close.30 The East Lampeter Amish were horrified. Their children would have to ride buses or wagons to the new school; its central location made walking impractical. Not only might the ease of bus rides make children lazy, but the conversation of worldly drivers might corrupt young morals. Parents would have little control over the curriculum of so large a school, and the modern environment might encourage the teaching of evolution and other worldly notions of which the Amish did not approve. Even worse, the Amish considered the PWA grant tantamount to charity; their principles would compel them to repay the money, which they could never afford to do. The responsibility for educating their children was their own, and they would not give it up.31 A group of Amish parents retained an attorney—an act that was in itself a violation of a religion requiring believers to turn the other cheek, but one they felt was a lesser evil than relinquishing responsibility for their children. The attorney, John N. Landberg of Philadelphia, requested a restraining order against the new school, arguing that it violated Amish religious freedom and that to build it over taxpayers’ previous objections would violate state law. A federal court granted the restraining order in March 1937, but the ruling was overturned a month later. Construction resumed, and the Amish appeared to have little legal recourse.32 In July, the Amish parents’ predicament worsened. The state legislature lengthened the school year to nine months and raised from fourteen to fifteen the age at

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which farm children could obtain work permits. Representatives of each of Lancaster County’s sixteen Amish church districts circulated a petition asking the state for an exemption. The Amish could not, they said, “conscientiously . . . send our Children unto the World’s nurture, and teachings until they are grown up.” If the state would grant them an eight-month school year, an exemption from schooling after the eighth grade, and local, one-room schools, they could “with a free conscience send our Children to the Public Schools.” Nearly 3,000 members of Old Order churches signed the petition.33 But the consolidated school at Smoketown would open in only a few weeks, and the East Lampeter Amish could not wait for the legislature to respond. At a mass meeting on September 29, five days before the school was to open, they decided to boycott the new school and, if necessary, take their case to the U.S. Supreme Court. A resolution calling the PWA grant “wasteful” and asking that the money be given instead to the poor and hungry met with little opposition, but as many abstained as voted. Despite Landberg’s dire (if unfounded) warnings that the Amish might, indeed, be asked to repay the grant, not all present were ready to resort to such drastic legal action.34 But however much the Amish wanted to avoid a confrontation, when the Smoketown school opened on October 4, only a dozen Old Order children attended. To remove their children from school was not, in the Amish’s eyes, to provoke a confrontation, but merely to exempt themselves from the world as people of their faith had done for centuries. According to John E. Forry, the Mennonite chairman of the committee leading the protest, nearly 200 children remained home. The school board, wary of a confrontation, decided to wait out the strike, claiming that fewer than twenty children were absent. “They’ll come around after awhile,” the board’s secretary, Harvey Heller, told reporters.35 But the Amish held out for more than a year, while their legal battles dragged on. Governor George Earle, in a grand show of generosity, ordered the one-room schools reopened at state expense, boasting that the annual cost of $6,000 was “a pittance” and that “for that amount of money I wouldn’t interfere with religion.”36 With renewed hope, Forry held a second public meeting in November, but now the confrontation grew ugly. Attorney Landberg claimed that the school board had lied to the PWA by claiming that the township was in “distress” and charged its members with skimming $12,000 in “gravy” from the grant. A minister on the board demanded an apology; Landberg refused. The audience took sides. A fistfight nearly broke out. The committee proposed a resolution praising Earle and calling on the entire school board to resign; a voice vote elicited “a loud swelling chorus of ‘no,’” but a standing vote produced a favorable majority of 213 to 2. Forry finally declared the meeting adjourned when a “free-for-all argument” threatened to turn violent.37 In the end, despite the governor’s grand promises—and despite a Christmas turkey sent him by the East Lampeter Amish community—the money to keep the schools open never came through.38

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The Amish then found a sympathetic ear in federal district court, where Judge George A. Welsh, a Quaker, agreed to take jurisdiction. Welsh denounced the school board for violating the “religious and moral precepts” of the Plain people and accepted Landberg’s contention that by building the school without taxpayers’ assent the board had unlawfully deprived citizens of their property. In March 1938, Welsh blocked the district’s plans to sell the ten remaining schoolhouses at public auction. The school board had thought that selling the schoolhouses would compel Amish attendance at the consolidated school, a notion that Welsh said showed the “lack of toleration which is rampant today.” “We hope,” Welsh told his Amish petitioners from the bench, “this big State of Pennsylvania will make room for you people because you are interfering with no one.” But in the end, not even a federal judge could help the Amish. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals judge Joseph Buffington ended Welsh’s involvement in the case, insisting that the federal courts had no jurisdiction over “the policies of local school boards,” regardless of where their funding came from. Buffington sympathized with Amish and Mennonite parents but said that “the law is the law.” Even Welsh admitted that he had no jurisdiction in the case of a Chester County Amishman jailed for keeping his fourteen-year-old daughter out of school. In November 1938, their legal path finally cleared, the East Lampeter school board auctioned off the ten vacant schoolhouses for a total of $9,515.39 Two dozen Amish children still remained home from school. In September 1938, facing a second year without schools, the East Lampeter Plain community turned again to the state legislature. This time, they proposed to secede from the East Lampeter school district—to set up their own schools, with their own teachers.“Our children,” said a spokesman,“are our only source of building our faith. We want to educate them for farm and domestic work. We do not want them to work on public works or in cities.” The legislature, in a hurried special session called before a new Republican majority took over in January, approved the plan. The Amish leased the former Horseshoe Pike School, one of the ten schoolhouses sold at auction, from its new owner, equipped it, and hired their own teacher. On November 28, the school reopened, and the township’s Amish children attended school for the first time in a year and a half. The following year, the state relented and allowed fourteen-year-olds again to obtain work permits.40 The motivation behind the Amish protests seemed to be mainly religious, and indeed the constitutional separation of church and state aided their cause. But their faith and their agrarian way of life were inseparable. Amish leaders justified their civil disobedience on religious grounds, citing freedom of religion, and used biblical arguments to explain their desire to educate their own children. In their petition to the state legislature, they protested that the requirements of compulsory high school and a 180-day term are “abridging our freedom of religion, and of bringing our children up as we understand the Bible, and will lead our children

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away from the faith and undermine our churches. We believe it . . . detrimental to true religion.” Higher education had “a tendency to detract the youth from our God fearing way of life.” Had the Amish been able to separate their fear of God from their way of life, they might have consented to send their children to consolidated schools and high schools and argue only (as many rural parents did) that evolution be banned from the curriculum. But “true religion,” to the Amish, meant educating their children for “farm home work.” Amish representatives explained to the governor that “throughout time past, we have been and have chosen to be a farming people. We believe in that simple life—farming. . . . Our life is our religion. Education is one of the tenets of our religion. . . . We believe that a grade school education fully covers the educational requirements for our calling.” Anything more would lead children away from both farming and the church. The way of life the Amish wanted to preserve was not so different from that of other ruralites, but it was the basis in Amish religion that ultimately allowed them to preserve it—in large part because it gave them the conviction to continue fighting.41 Non-Amish Lancaster Countians who spoke out on the issue also saw it as a matter of rural and urban needs. The Amish battle with modernity had divided the county over the value and nature of progress. Not all Amish and Mennonites had backed the protest, although their social and religious rules forbade open dissent. But, conversely, not all of East Lampeter’s “English” favored the consolidated school. If most residents could not make as strongly principled an opposition as the Amish did, they had already made clear their displeasure with the added tax burden the school represented, and they were not entirely at ease with the idea of sending their children to town for schooling. Even after the Smoketown school was completed, several non-Amish families preferred to send their children to the township’s remaining one-room schoolhouse.42 The debate embodied the conflict between the desire for progress—a shiny, electrified new school—and the preference for traditional values, which included not only parental control over children but also the fear of debt. Landberg, the protesters’ lawyer, had fanned the flames of that conflict. He played on his farmer clients’ instinctive attitude of moral superiority, reminding them that they grew “the same corn and potatoes that fat lawyers and bankers have to eat if they want to live,” and fed their fear of being asked to repay the government’s money. Landberg, a Philadelphian, appeared to more than a few local observers as a slick city lawyer out to make a name for himself by cynically exploiting rural-urban tensions.43 Lancaster’s two newspapers, meanwhile, played out the conflict in ink. The New Era disparaged the protest, emphasizing the worst aspects of Landberg and his clients. “From the non-Amish point of view,” its editor argued, “there is no reason for delaying educational progress—and educators view consolidation as progress—because a minority takes objection. . . . The board took the attitude

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which a preponderant majority of their constituents wanted.” New Era reporters also played up the brush with violence at the protesters’ November 1937 meeting.44 The rival Intelligencer Journal took a more sympathetic view of the Amish, complimenting them for “standing by their guns . . . and educating their children on the basis of ‘keeping them down on the farm.’” A traditional rural education was better than any government handout, because “the man who owns and has paid for a Lancaster county farm, as most Amish have, is the free citizen of the country. He has a social security that leaves in the ruck any law made social system.”45 The small-town Ephrata Review held the Amish up as models of the peaceful, sturdy farmer. “We commend the Plain Folks,” the editor wrote. “They’re the ‘salt of the earth,’ and this country would be far better off, if more people would adopt the same sturdy idea of the plain people who want to work for what they get.” Despite his superlatives, the Review’s editor may have come closest to understanding the Amish position that rural communities needed rural schools, not urban ones. The state should not give the Amish a special exception to the new laws, he argued, but rather “retain the old regulations concerning school attendance in rural districts.”46 The Amish themselves never appealed to nostalgia, insisting that they wanted the best possible education for their children—so long as it remained consistent with their faith and their way of life. In fact, their unique situation inspired them to imagine what reformers and other ruralites seemingly could not: an improved, rural system of public education. By the 1950s, Amish churches throughout Pennsylvania and the Midwest had used successful court challenges to public education laws to establish their own private schools. These schools had state oversight but were managed locally by representatives of Amish congregations. A group of Amish leaders in Ohio drafted standards for Amish education in the mid-1950s that were also typical of Old Order schools in Lancaster County. Quoting Herbert Spencer’s definition of education as “preparation for complete living,” they set out their goals for a practical, agrarian education: We desire to provide a type of Christian education which will enable our children to learn to be self-supporting and respectful. Help them mature into healthy home-makers who not only know about working, but can actually do the things that they are supposed to learn in school. . . . We intend to model our schools after the distributive education pattern which will enable our children not only to gain all the teachers have to offer in the class room, but will also have the advantages of learning from their own parents, and from the parents of the other children in actual projects which can best be carried out in the home. . . . We will test all learning by how well the child can use any learning in a practical situation. To know about it is not enough. We want them to actually use their education. We want them to learn to do in-

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dependent study so they will be equipped to continue learning all their lives. We want a better education for our children than the minimum standards the public school provides. [Emphasis added.]47 The goals they presented were a model for lifelong learning, an education that was integrated into the rest of one’s life rather than formalized and set apart. Schools should help children be self-sufficient (“not even one Amishman a beggar”), “respectful and thoughtful of others,” mature, healthy, and religious, and should prepare them to be good citizens,“to take an active part in preserving our government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Schools must prepare children for lifelong education, teaching them “the fundamental processes of learning” and helping them to develop the ability “to gather evidence on both sides of a question and . . . to use judgement.” Perhaps most important, education was a function of, and integrated into, family and community; families managed and participated in their children’s schooling, and Amish education would foster farming as a way of life “because it offers the most advantages in raising a healthy, self-employed family.”48 Whether this was an ideal system of education is certainly debatable, and the rigid expectations that boys would become farmers and girls homemakers would not sit comfortably with many Americans even then. Similarly, Amish schools were not designed to foster free critical thinking and personal independence. But this was not a prescription for ignorance, as reformers might have expected; it provided a model of education that was both progressive—in the sense of fostering constant improvement—yet at the same time traditionally rural. In the long run, the greatest division created by the controversy in Lancaster County was the further isolation of the Amish from their fellow Lancaster Countians. After the establishment of parochial schools, Amishmen no longer served on school boards with their non-Amish neighbors; Amish children no longer played with non-Amish children at recess. Amish children received the same rural education as before, walking to schools without electricity or central heat, learning the three Rs and traditional values, and leaving school at age fourteen to work on the farm. Students at the new Smoketown school, meanwhile, rode buses to a shiny modern school building equipped with electricity and radio—and then, in ever-growing numbers, on to high school, where they would be prepared for life in a modern, urban society. Their religious beliefs had always made the Amish separate from the world, but now it was not just nonresistance and brotherhood that made the Amish different. It was their insistence on remaining rural.

The Little Red Schoolhouse The battle over consolidated schools had another consequence for Lancaster County, one that would reinforce the growing separation between the Amish and

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the non-Amish—not by isolating the Plain people but by drawing attention to them. When the Amish took their case into federal court, the national media took notice. The school strike provided enough controversy to spark serious attention, and by the end of 1937 major eastern newspapers were actively covering the case. The New York Times, in fact, assigned a reporter to the story even before Lancaster’s own newspapers did. Feature articles on the Amish explained their “quaint” way of life to urban readers, complete with photographs of one-room schoolhouses sure to provoke nostalgia. The travel section of the Sunday Times ran a lengthy piece on “Lancaster’s ‘Plain Folk,’” focusing on their “picturesqueness,” their dress, customs, and accouterments. But the writer also noted the times and locations of farmers’ markets—“the best times for observing the ‘plain people’ in large numbers”—and pointed out historic sites that visitors to Lancaster might also want to see.49 Almost overnight, Amish tourism was born. The school controversy had sparked a regional interest in the Amish by highlighting not their religious principles or their odd appearance (for these had always existed) but rather their ruralness. Newspaper coverage cited the Amish and Mennonites’ religious values and their appeals to religious freedom but only rarely mentioned nonresistance. The religious principle that received the most attention was the desire to remain “close to the soil and to God.” Feature stories praised the great ability and productivity of Amish farmers, describing in great detail the produce available at Lancaster farmers’ markets.50 When the first Amish school opened in East Lampeter Township in the fall of 1938, an Associated Press reporter was on hand to describe the rustic splendor: Thirty children with Amish bowl-shaped haircuts rode in horse-drawn sleds and typical Amish wagons through a deep snow to the opening of the one-room country school. . . . The youngsters, arriving shortly after the cold dawn, piled from beneath blankets and straw in the sleds and wagons and went to work with a will carrying in coal from the shed beside the school, bringing drinking water and performing other chores.51 In case words alone failed to summon in readers’ minds the appropriate Currier and Ives print, the story was accompanied by a photograph of Amish children climbing out of a horse-drawn buggy parked by the door of a one-room schoolhouse. Snow, horse, and schoolhouse were all prominently displayed.52 The editorial staff of the New York Times envied the Amish children and expected city schoolchildren to feel the same. “It feels comfortable in the perfectly heated, ventilated, and illuminated modern classrooms. But the thirty Amish youngsters came to school in horse-drawn sleighs through the deep snow. And what child would travel in a school bus when he could do it in a sled on straw and under blankets?”53 One suspects that East Lampeter’s children would, having never before done so; their first day at the consolidated school must have been terribly ex-

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citing. But this was not, of course, the editor’s point. Whether or not “a sled is much more fun than a bus,” he argued, grownups would certainly agree that it is better for the soul of a child to attend classes in the Horseshoe Pike School than in a big consolidated structure. . . . When the Amish youngsters climbed out of their sleighs in the early morning hours they had to bring in coal from the shed to light the stove, fetch water and do other chores. What of it? Forty years later they will be the big industrialists and labor leaders and give orders to the graduates from our chromium-plated central schools.54 The editor, to take so romantic a view of the country, must have grown utterly accustomed to urban life, even if he did feel a bit isolated in his “chromium-plated” and “thermo-stated” city. Yet however different his way of life from that of the Amish, however distant his Manhattan office from rural Lancaster County, the Times editor attached some of the same values to the rustic one-room schoolhouse that the Amish did: frugality, industry, closeness to nature. What was more, he embraced them without hesitation, suggesting that urban children would be better off in such a schoolhouse. And he recognized these values in the scene without the slightest scrap of knowledge about Amish religion. (Amish children growing up to be industrialists? Their parents would have fainted dead away at the thought!) The “little red schoolhouse” was already an icon in American popular culture, symbolizing individualism, democracy, faith in education, traditional values, and community enterprise—in short, everything good about America. As the real one-room schoolhouse disappeared from the American landscape, the iconic one came to represent the simpler way of life that previous generations had supposedly led.55 The Amish and their own schoolhouse, whatever the real purpose of Amish education, had become symbols of the idyllic rural past now lost to urbanites. No one could have realized it at the time, but the battle over Amish education was the spark that would set off a hundred-million dollar tourist industry in Lancaster County.

“Amish Appeal” Prior to the 1930s, Lancastrians rarely considered that people would come to the Garden Spot of America just to see farmland—let alone to see the Amish. The first serious attempt to attract tourists followed the extension of trolley service across the county in the first decade of the century. Trolley lines, boosters quickly realized, were potentially “one of the most convenient and most economical modes of travel for the sightseer,” providing visual access to nearly all of the county’s scenery in a quiet, comfortable, convenient setting.56 Railroads had crisscrossed the county for a few decades, but some rural corners remained without regular service, and trains moved too quickly for passengers to take in all the

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sights. The Conestoga Traction Company, which operated Lancaster’s trolleys, published guidebooks in 1908 and 1910 for trolley tours of Lancaster County. These booklets focused primarily on historic buildings and sites of historic events or amusing anecdotes, noting the county’s industry and bustling, prosperous towns. The Traction Company considered few sites of natural beauty to be worthy of the tourist’s interest; landscape, and particularly agricultural landscape, only provided something to look at on the way to more important urban or historical sights. Describing a trip to Marietta in Seeing Lancaster County from a Trolley Window, author H. W. Kreibel asked merely that visitors “not fail to note the scenery, the attractive farm buildings and the tobacco lands” that exacted “a toll of toil from all in the household from grayhaired sire and matron to innocent youth.”57 The language, while admitting that farms made pretty scenery, hardly invited visitors to linger over them. At least one local writer did see some scenic potential in Lancaster’s farmlands: the accomplished William Uhler Hensel, whose Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the Garden Spot of the United States guided visitors through the Arcadian landscape of the county’s “Picturesque and Historical East End.” The booklet opened with a catalog of local agriculture, boasting that “if ever a land could be spoken of as ‘flowing with milk and honey,’ it is here.” This was “the peculiar Amish section,” he noted, home to “the most primitive of all the local sects and the best of good farmers.” Hensel described the Amish and their land in idyllic terms: crops “springing with life and verdure,” buildings “neat as the face of a rosy-cheeked milkmaid.” Lest readers fail to appreciate the simile, a photograph on the booklet’s cover, titled “The Evening’s Milking,” showed two pretty young girls in white aprons and bonnets cheerfully toting pails of milk from the barn. But if the girls were Amish (and they probably were, to judge from their dress), the caption did not mention it. Indeed, although he described a region heavily populated by Plain people, Hensel mentioned the Amish explicitly only once in twenty-eight pages. (In Seeing Lancaster County from a Trolley Window, the Amish didn’t even merit their own paragraph.) Even the lovely farmland itself was overshadowed by old houses and tales of bygone days. Hensel, like other local travel writers of his time, expected tourists to be more interested in the remarkable or the historic than in the merely picturesque.58 As Americans’ mode of sightseeing shifted from the train and trolley to the automobile, the county’s bid for tourism strengthened, but its basic nature remained the same. Although businessmen welcomed tourism and the money it brought, they hardly expected the Amish to attract it. In the 1920s, Lancaster’s major downtown hotel, the Brunswick, published road maps to guide tourists from cities on the eastern seaboard as well as from Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and Ohio, but neither farmland nor the Amish appeared among the listed attractions.59 A Chamber of Commerce brochure from the same period included a few photos of

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the Amish but stressed more frequently the restorative qualities of Lancaster’s natural setting than the scenic potential of the Plain people. The chamber’s members hoped that a stay in Lancaster County would help visitors “find the joy, peace, and contentment which comes from the contemplation of a bountiful Nature”—while playing golf, not motoring through the countryside.60 Although visitors amused by the Amish could buy picture postcards (figure 2.2) and “True to Life Amish Dolls” from Isaac Steinfeldt’s downtown tobacco shop, the Amish remained only one attraction among many. The great majority of the postcards available in Lancaster, even those commissioned by Steinfeldt, showed townscapes and historical landmarks rather than rural lands and people.61 The failure to publicize the presence of the Amish stemmed in part from local biases. If the “Fruits of Civilization” were the rose, the Amish remained in the wilderness, more of an embarrassment than an asset to a modernizing county. And to farmers struggling with the difficult choice between traditional values and economic progress, the Amish were more than an embarrassment; they were a slap in the face, a reminder of what other ruralites had forsaken. Like its pageants and newspaper columns, Lancaster’s tourbooks embraced modernity wholeheartedly so as to ignore its more unpleasant consequences and the road not taken. If Lancastrians would eventually market their rural past, they were not yet ready to do so—not until they had grown more comfortable with having moved beyond it. The lack of interest in the Amish also reflected something much simpler: until the 1930s, the Amish were not particularly noteworthy. Yes, they dressed oddly; no one writing about Lancaster County could fail to mention their “picturesque garb” or “unique uniforms.” And, as locals knew, they had some unusual religious beliefs, although visitors seeking unusual religious beliefs were better directed to the Ephrata Cloister, home of an eighteenth-century communitarian sect. But the Amish way of life that would fascinate later generations of tourists was not yet far from the ordinary in the early twentieth century. Barn raisings? Few farmers yet had insurance; community assistance remained a necessity, not a curiosity. Handicrafts? Most rural families still walked on rugs and slept under quilts sewn from recycled scraps of clothing. Horse-drawn buggies? Only the wealthy and adventurous owned cars before the First World War. In small towns east of Lancaster, the Amish served on local school boards and in (horse-drawn, of course) volunteer fire companies; an Amish man was even the first postmaster of Smoketown. The Amish were, for the most part, a rural people like any other in America.62 As the twentieth century advanced, that began to change. Modernizing ruralites bought cars, listened to radios, talked on telephones, went to movies; the Amish did none of these things. Nor did they accept the agricultural advice and assistance that bureaucrats and professors peddled. Facing the choice between debatable material progress and reliable, time-tested values and traditions, the Amish chose the latter.63 As a result, with each new technology that the Amish

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figure 2.2. Isaac Steinfeldt's postcards of the Amish were the first to be sold in Lancaster County. The images, produced by the Curt Teich Company, were highly stylized and quite formal in contrast to later photographs of the Amish; compare to figure 3.1. Courtesy Lake County (Illinois) Discovery Museum, Curt Teich Postcard Archives.

refused to adopt, they grew ever more distant from their “English” neighbors and ever more peculiar to outside observers. By the mid-1930s, they had begun to look like relics of a bygone age and could be seen not simply as backward cousins to modern America, but as modern America’s own living past. People who remembered the days before the horseless carriage, the tractor, and canned food could look with nostalgia upon the Amish way of life—and, as the memory of that way of life grew more distant, they could more easily romanticize it. If most Lancaster Countians were not yet far enough removed from that way of life to gawk at the Amish, plenty of New Yorkers and Philadelphians were. And, thanks to the automobile, they could. The first suggestion that the Amish might fascinate people in a positive way came from Travel magazine, which in 1935 ran a profile of Lancaster County. Although the author of the article, Raymond Tufft Fuller, noted a number of potential tourist attractions in the county, he was most interested in “the most picturesque and unusual of [the residents]: the Mennonite-Amish ascetics.” Like nearly everyone else who would ever write about the Amish, Fuller meticulously detailed the “quaint” Old Order dress but made little effort to sort out their religious beliefs. Nor did he care particularly about the differences between Amish and Mennonite or even Plain and Fancy; they were all Pennsylvania Dutch to him. Fuller’s reaction to them was, overall, a rather cheery disbelief. Lancaster County, he

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wrote, was “truly a bit of foreign land sequestered in the heart of my own nation,” its Plain people a “strange group islanded in the swirl of feverish American life.” Their difference in itself made them noteworthy, curiosities to be gawked at rather than people to be met and understood. Next to photographs of Amish people (whose captions commented mainly on their clothing), he noted with a wink that “it is particularly distasteful to [the Plain people] that they should be regarded as conspicuous; photographing them upon the streets is possible only by stealth.”64 But underneath this sideshow curiosity lay a wistful longing for a simpler, idealized rural past. Though convinced that the Plain people were hopelessly backward, he shrugged off any concern. “Suppose they are discouragingly ‘sot in their ways,’” he argued. “At all events, they have as a class achieved a distinct success in their calling; well-to-do, simple, law-abiding, humble, thrifty.” Their prosperity—especially when compared to the lot of most Depression-era Americans— fascinated him. The Depression, indeed, had hardly affected the region, “not so you, visitor, could notice it.” As evidence for this remarkable assertion he described the region’s barns, the only things “more conspicuous” than the Pennsylvania Dutch themselves. Far from the rundown shanties of Steinbeck’s destitute Okies, Lancaster’s barns were “sturdily built, spick and span and thoroughly efficient.” A Pennsylvania Dutch barn, in fact, was “not just a barn” but “an agricultural temple of a sort,” evincing a spirit of permanence rarely found in the United States. Thanks to agriculture, Lancaster County was wealthier than “many whole states”—truly, as the story’s title proclaimed, a “Domain of Abundance.”65 Fascination with the Amish, then, had little to do with Amish religion or the realities of Amish life. Nor was it merely a function of the growing gulf between their way of life and that of the rest of modern America. It was nostalgia, in particular, that attracted tourists. First-generation urbanites drew on memories of their own rural childhoods; others could borrow from their culture’s nostalgia for a lost age of rural innocence. Residents of northeastern cities could channel their nostalgia and idealism into what historian David Luthy calls “Amish appeal.”66 The Amish suddenly seemed to embody everything good about rural America: sturdy, hardworking farmers with simple tastes and simple pleasures, one eye on the land, one eye toward heaven. Rural ignorance, at least for those who didn’t face it on a daily basis, could be forgotten; even Amish superstition would soon become “quaint.” The benefits of rural life in the 1930s appeared easily to outweigh its limits, and the Depression only added to these feelings—as it also compounded nostalgic memories of childhood. In a time of economic dislocation and despair, people wanted desperately to believe in an Arcadian “domain of abundance.” Thousands of urbanites went “back to the land” in search of that dream, or at least a steady source of food. Some succeeded, but most lacked the necessary knowledge and skills for subsistence farming. Yet even Franklin Roosevelt hoped a broader movement back to the country would boost the nation out of its slump,

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and the Civilian Conservation Corps, unlike other New Deal programs, received nearly universal support, because it took boys out to work on the land and evoked the spirit of the frontier. In times of hardship, Americans could slip into the comfort and security of their rural past.67 Lancastrians quickly picked up on the interest generated by the school controversy. Within months after the story became national news, two local writers produced pamphlets explaining the Amish to tourists. Bernice Steinfeldt, whose father, Isaac, had sold the first Amish postcards a decade earlier, was first to tap the market. Her book provided a model for dozens of later tourist booklets, painting the Amish as a people out of time, bound by their religion to the land and to centuries-old traditions. Much of her booklet detailed the aspects of Amish life in which tourists would be most interested: dress, weddings, holidays, and other “quaint” customs. But to Steinfeldt, a Lancaster native, the Amish were not a sideshow curiosity; they were real people with whom she interacted daily. She made a sincere if fairly brief effort to explain the religious principles that lay behind their ostensibly strange behavior, including their refusal to accept a consolidated grade school. “His religion,” she explained, “enters into every phase of the Amishman’s life. It has become so integrated with his existence that it can be truthfully stated [that] the Amish lead truly religious lives. Nowhere else in America can be found a Christian religion that has been so carefully and faithfully followed for so long a period of time as that of the Amish.”68 At the same time, however, her account portrayed the Amish as ideally rural. She described at some length the prosperity of the Amish, which she attributed to their thrift and industry. “As farmers,” she boasted, “the Amish have no superiors,” and the Amish woman was “an immaculate housewife.” Both sexes were not only hardworking but also frugal; as a result, they had no need of Federal Farm Aid and could “get along very well without” loans. Plain women do not squander cash on luxuries as “most women” would but “save their money either for a rainy day or invest it in some needed household appliance.” The Amish were “a peaceful, industrious, thrifty, neighborly, law-abiding people. They tend to their own business, respect the rights of others, and desire nothing more than to be left alone to work out their own problems.” As reward for their efforts, they reaped a harvest of unparalleled bounty, which readers could experience vicariously through Steinfeldt’s descriptions of Amish market stalls or directly by sampling the recipes she included. Even the Amish farms themselves “breath [sic] forth an air of calm, security and magnificent complacency.” What more could one want?69 For Depression-era readers, the book carried a clear moral: “clean living,” hard work, and a “Good Neighbor” insurance policy were the keys to happiness and prosperity.70 The Steinfeldts intended visitors not only to observe but also to learn from what they saw. Yet in their descriptions of Amish life there lurks a suspicion that the Amish were not, after all, so useful an example for modern Amer-

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icans. Like the Travel article, Steinfeldt’s account focused on the vast gulf between the Plain people and their “gay” neighbors. Bernice Steinfeldt, however, saw the Amish not as a people from another land—they were, after all, her neighbors— but as a people from another time. She imagined a visitor seeing Lancaster County for the first time, asking, “Are we dreaming? . . . Or have illustrated pages of history books come to life?” If Steinfeldt did not answer yes, neither did she take great pains to say no. “Time nor advances of science,” she wrote, “have done much to change them from their settler forefathers.” Later, she noted that “the horse and buggy era has not passed for the Amish.” And, in conclusion, Unmindful of the ways of modern man, the Amish . . . calmly continue to follow all the old religious teachings, all the old religious beliefs, all the old standards, and all the old customs as established hundreds of years ago. The world goes on, but the Amish dutifully follow their particular needs and ideals, and firmly cling to the faith of their fathers.71 Probably Steinfeldt did not consciously intend to portray the Amish as a people out of time, but that is very much the feeling her words convey. It was, moreover, precisely what her metropolitan readers, fresh from reading newspaper coverage of the Amish school controversy, wanted to hear. Here and there, hints of the old concern about rural backwardness remained. Steinfeldt’s booklet was followed within a year by Ammon Monroe Aumand, Jr.’s Little Known Facts about the Amish and the Mennonites. Aumand, also a Lancaster County native, gave considerably more press to the negative aspects of Old Order life than Steinfeldt had. He discussed excommunication, something Steinfeldt omitted, recalling that “one poor [Amish] fellow in the middle West went amuck [sic] and killed his whole family because the operation of the ban . . . finally got the better of his mind, and his rash act resulted.”72 The Amish’s situation, he noted sadly, “really requires sympathy, especially among the young who sometimes hide themselves from the sight of ‘English’ persons,” a behavior not surprising “where the parents have too much stunted their natural mental developments.”73 Indeed, their entire lives “are ordered by ‘ritual’ to methods which others think . . . foolish.” And that’s the way they like it, “avoiding everything outside their own circle as they would a plague.”74 At the same time, however, Aumand did not claim the Amish as impoverished rustics to be pitied, for they had chosen the life they led, and liked it. Mentioning Tillie, the Mennonite Maid by name as a great source of misinformation, he insisted that the Plain people were far from “Dumb Dutch,” even if their grammar “leaves much to be desired.” He could even see their life as a kind of Utopia, for they “certainly set a great example to those who would have peace among men.” Left alone, they will thrive “for-ever-and-a-day, for they will hold their own in a world where around them is much strife and discord; while amongst them there is peace, pleasure, and plenty.”75

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The differences in tone between Aumand’s account and Steinfeldt’s masked a fundamental similarity in the authors’ points of view. On the one hand, the Amish were refugees from Eden; on the other, they were relics of a recent American past. Either way, however, they represented a lost golden age. Neither Steinfeldt nor Aumand explained in any detail the Amish religion, other than to point out its abhorrence of violence and strict preference for farming as an occupation. Nor did they explain to their urban audience the habits of mind required by traditional farming practice, the ties created between work and family and nature. Once the spiritual and economic purposes were removed from the Amish way of life, what remained to be described was merely a lifestyle, behaviors without context. The authors and their readers were then free to invent their own context for those behaviors. Any number of idealizations and stereotypes of rural life fit perfectly: the Garden of Eden, the yeoman farmer, the little red schoolhouse. ✸ To fit the Amish to existing stereotypes of ruralness required no great leap of imagination, even for rural people who resented the stereotypes. But for Lancaster Countians to advertise the presence of the Amish—and hence of those stereotypes—required a dramatic shift in perspective. Lancaster County was, and always had been, defined by residents as a rural place, perhaps as the rural place in America. It was all very well to make passing references to paradise, to evoke Eden by calling the county the “Garden Spot”; this was mere boosterism. But the county’s ruralness and the traditions that maintained it had always been tied to the idea of progress. If the Amish, ostensibly the great enemies of progress, now became the symbol of rurality, what did that say about Lancaster County? Could people who wanted so badly to unite tradition with progress so easily consign the rural to the past? In the 1930s, most Lancaster Countians held to the old vision of rural progress. Their community celebrations, the newspapers they published and read, their desire to improve their children’s schools, and the way they advertised their county to tourists all proved their commitment to an accepted kind of economic and cultural progress. If the struggle to balance that commitment with an equally strong commitment to traditional rural values seemed increasingly difficult in the decades before the Second World War, most Lancastrians remained willing to try. But the growing distance between traditional and modern ways of life, combined with urbanites’ new fascination with the Amish, would make it ever easier to give in to stereotypes and idealizations of rural life—even for people who still considered themselves largely rural.

✸ 3

DUTCH COUNTRY The Amish and Tourism

Myths help the tourist trade; they are so much cheaper than other forms of advertising. —ALFRED L. SHOEMAKER, 1951

Two images frame Lancaster’s tourist industry in the 1950s. The first was painted in words by Flora Rheta Schreiber in American Mercury magazine in 1952: In their isolation, in their circumscribed world, in their peaceful island of living the Amish present a picture in microcosm of the kind of economic security, spiritual serenity, clarity of motives, decency of human relationships for which our world is still struggling. The Amishman wants only what is within his grasp and so he has eliminated impossibility. For the group the way of life is self-sufficing, complete. And in being the most unworldly group in America, they have retained a sweetness of spirit lost to the rest of us.1 The second was drawn in stark contrast by the Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center’s annual tourist guide. Inside, grinning cartoon Amishmen hawked bologna and “modern” diner food, while the Little Red School Gift and Gourmet Shop promised the authentic experience of a one-room schoolhouse recently converted into a gift shop. Articles by the Folklore Center’s staff taught tourists how to “cuss” in the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect and gave them advice on photographing the Amish: The only way you can get pictures of the men and women is on the sly. However, children, . . . when unaccompanied by their elders, can occasionally be

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encouraged to pose, provided they are sufficiently bribed—by candy bars or small coins.2 Tourists came looking for the unworldly and found something quite worldly indeed—or was it the other way around? No one seemed sure, and no one much cared, so long as they came. Neither portrait of the Garden Spot was particularly credible, but no one seemed to care much about that, either. It would be easy to dismiss this tourist experience as so much hypocrisy, as the crass exploitation of a peaceful people in the name of spiritual values or the boorishness of self-absorbed sightseers. It would also be not entirely unfair. But underneath the contradictions lay deeper truths about the cultural baggage of both the tourists who came and the locals who beckoned them. Americans who read about the Amish and their Garden Spot in popular magazines or drove to Lancaster to see them wanted very much to believe that such a mythical place could exist, and Amish values always took center stage. The way the Amish were portrayed, however—innocent, even childlike, relics of an American past rather than active participants in an American future—tended to counteract tourists’ desire to take their values seriously. Just as individual Amish people were most often shown as children, Amish culture was shown as a holdover from America’s youth, its values not necessarily applicable to a mature civilization. The Amish seemed a people out of time, more appealing and yet less relevant than ever to modern society. Had this transformation affected only a small religious sect, it might have made little practical difference, for long tradition warned the Amish to expect ridicule and persecution. But tourist promoters and their national audience increasingly identified anything Pennsylvania Dutch, and indeed all of Lancaster County, with the Old Order Amish. That identification put Pennsylvania Germans and Lancaster Countians in a quandary. By identifying Lancaster County and the Pennsylvania Dutch people with the Amish, by portraying the Amish as a people out of time, and by wrapping the whole package in a carnival atmosphere, tourist writers and promoters made the locals’ struggle to reconcile tradition and progress more difficult. For the Pennsylvania Germans who initially promoted their region as a destination for tourists, the boom came as a vindication, but by the late 1950s it seemed that they had succeeded too well. America wanted traditional Pennsylvania Dutch culture, not the twentieth-century version that was rapidly approaching the mainstream, and it was the Amish who could best give it to them. Lancaster County, meanwhile, became in the minds of outlanders no longer the progressive and prosperous seat of modern agriculture but rather “the Heart of the Pennsylvania Dutch Country,” an Amish wonderland where time stood still. For tourists, promoters, and residents of the Garden Spot alike, tourism proved to be a double-edged sword.

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Deitsch fer die Volk Although the Amish school controversy provided the spark that drew Americans’ attention to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania German boosters had laid the groundwork for the tourist boom in the 1930s. Instead of urbanizing and modernizing their culture as earlier generations had done, they increasingly focused on the past. Although forward-looking groups like the Pennsylvania German Society continued to meet, they were less optimistic about associating their culture with urban civilization and progress than they had been before the war. The rather genteel air of such groups also seemed a bit out of place in the bustling 1920s—and even more so when the Great Depression brought into question the value of the very kind of progress they longed for. Instead of focusing on great men, great accomplishments, and future promise, a new generation of Pennsylvania Germans worked to keep rural traditions alive by reminiscing about their common origins, their farm culture, and their shared past. Dialect columns reappeared in the late 1920s, stripped of Edward Rauch’s boosterism. Eager Pennsylvania Germans performed plays around the region in Pennsylvania Dutch, published dialect poetry, and produced regular Dutch radio broadcasts. Although church and school groups still performed the occasional translation of Shakespeare, the new dialect literature accepted the Pennsylvania Germans as a farming people and Pennsylvania German culture as essentially rural; it celebrated common people and asked common people to join in the celebration. Yet the movement to preserve this culture was led not by rural people but by urbanites, primarily those who had grown up in farming communities and later moved to the city. Missing the company of their fellow Dutch and nostalgic for the farm days of their youth, they held Versammlinge (gatherings), dinner meetings that featured Pennsylvania Dutch food, conversation, and song. As the Versammling movement grew more popular, some of the meetings became quite large. A few grew into Groundhog Lodges that met on the second day of February to celebrate the German and Pennsylvania German folk belief that animals can predict the weather.3 No one took the folklore entirely seriously; it was presented tongue-incheek, with an emphasis on fun. This second wave of the Pennsylvania German revival was primarily about nostalgia and enjoyment of the lighter elements of traditional culture.4 Typical of this new pride in the Pennsylvania Dutch as a rural people was H. Winslow Fegley, a Berks County businessman. Born in 1870 in the crossroads village of Hereford, where his father owned a country store, Fegley moved to the growing city of Reading as an adult. He became a newspaper reporter and later opened a stationery and novelty business, distributing merchandise to country stores like the one his father had owned. As part of this business he sold postcards, specializing in historical and spiritual subjects drawn largely from the countryside

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around Reading. He also began taking his own photographs of rural Berks County, photographs that show both an empathy with traditional rural people and a refusal to recognize that their way of life was rapidly passing. Unlike so many urban journalists and photographers who documented farm communities, Fegley found not dislocation and social need but quiet dignity, prosperity, and pride. He captured farmers, artisans, and laborers engaged in their work, interacting with one another and enjoying both the work and the company. One photograph shows a group of men taking a break from moving furniture; they have been working hard, but a woman in the background, wearing a man’s hat and taking a swig from a flask, reminds us that labor and pleasure need not be opposites. In Fegley’s portrayals of country life, notes a recent editor of his work, “The cultural alarm has not been sounded. If these country folk are aware of a passing order and impending dislocation they do not tip their hand, nor does Fegley.” Fegley made no attempt to make their way of life appear quaint or old-fashioned, for it was a way of life he missed and hoped would never die. Although the photographs were not published until forty years after his death and would not have appealed to popular audiences of the 1920s, Fegley’s feelings for his subjects were shared by other Pennsylvania Germans who had left the farm in an effort to improve their lot. By preserving at least the representation of traditional culture, through images, poetry, or celebrations, they could feel that they had not lost that culture entirely.5 Despite its inward focus, this second wave of Pennsylvania German celebration finally attracted attention from non-Germans. People from diverse backgrounds who cared little for dry history and dialect poetry could share in nostalgia, folk art and craft, and seriocomic folklore. When Pennsylvania German writers used English to describe their people’s past and present, they began to reach a wide audience. Cornelius Weygandt, a Dutchman and a professor of English literature at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote two popular books on traditional Pennsylvania Dutch culture in this period. The Red Hills: A Record of Good Days Outdoors and In, with Things Pennsylvania Dutch, published in 1929, focused primarily on folk art, crafts, and antiques. But his introduction described, with a heavy dose of nostalgia, the farm culture that had created these objects. He chided Philadelphians for sneering at the “Country Dutch” and “dismiss[ing] us cavalierly” when so many residents of even that great metropolis traced their origins to Germany by way of Pennsylvania farms. Now a Philadelphian himself, Weygandt wanted all Dutch to take pride in their rural origins, and he reminded them of the agricultural talents of Dutch farmers, their love of the soil, and their commitment to traditional values and personal freedom. But most potent of all were his descriptions of the serenity and security of farm life: What a place was the barn, say, of a November night and the cold falling. The stock, fed and bedded, voice their content with gratulatory noises, as

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they stir placidly at the pleasant task of eating in warm quarters. It is snug here in the stables. . . . You have a sense of all that mass of hay above you in the great lofts. It is between you and the menace of winter; it will spend but slowly, and keep all the creatures in fine fettle until there is pasture again. It is, directly or indirectly, food and shelter and money in the bank.6 Pennsylvania German writers were beginning to adopt the same nostalgic tone used by other urbanites a generation or more removed from the farm. If Weygandt tried to protect his still-rural kin from the slings and arrows of urban mockery, he wrote about them in a way that implicitly consigned them to the past. His second book, The Dutch Country, appealed even more strongly to popular conceptions of Dutch farmers. Writing in the wake of the Amish school controversy of 1937–1938, he inserted descriptions of Lancaster’s curb markets and the Plain farmers who populated them, and even of a “little red schoolhouse, where you may see long breeched and broadbrimmed small boys playing with girls of like diminutiveness, bonneted and dressed in solid gay colors.”7 Ann Hark, another Philadelphian writing at the same time, evoked similar images in praising the Pennsylvania Dutch. Her 1938 book Hex Marks the Spot contained a chapter entitled “Amish Interlude,” in which she described a drive through Lancaster County: Life, I thought complacently, was really very nice. Especially in Lancaster County on a summer Sunday evening. No noise or rush or bustle to distract the mind. No busy hum of thresher to disturb the air. No farmers working in the big red barns. Nobody doing anything—nobody going anywhere. Just peaceful calm and quiet and tranquility.8 Hark, like Weygandt, had come to praise the Dutch, not to bury them, but she did so in ways that appealed even more strongly to an urban audience. There is no work here, only rest; not only the bustle of the city but also the bustle of farm life is absent. Much of Hark’s time in the country was spent in a small cabin on a large tract of unimproved land with few close neighbors. The Dutch country she painted was a still life, picturesque and unchanging, requiring little or no interaction from the viewer. Where Weygandt described the work of traditional craftsmen, Hark described only the end products, the quilts and the food, and the “simple-hearted naturalness” with which they were presented to visitors.9 Both writers genuinely liked all things Pennsylvania Dutch, and both must have been delighted that the public had begun to share their fascination. But their desire to appeal to public interest was changing the way Pennsylvania Germans wrote about their culture. The fact that nearly all of those writers were émigrés from the farm culture they wrote about only made it easier for them to think of it in the past tense.

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Weygandt and Hark were not alone in their praise for the country; they and other Pennsylvania German writers contributed to a broader genre of “country books” that promoted the benefits, both practical and spiritual, of rural life and farming. Although pastoral tranquillity and exhortations to go “back to the land” had appeared frequently in American literature throughout the nineteenth century, the genre became especially popular in the decades prior to World War II. Authors reacted in part to the rapid social change and urbanization of the 1920s and in part to the economic and social dislocation of the Depression. The war and its industrial job opportunities sparked another massive migration to the cities and, in turn, another wave of country books in the 1940s. The audience for country books, like their authors, were mostly first-generation urbanites, people raised on farms and nostalgic for their rural childhoods. Migrants to the city often described feelings of alienation from nature and from “the firsthand experience of life,” and they complained that urban society made people antisocial and insensitive. Some authors of country books, such as New England homesteaders Helen and Scott Nearing, provided step-by-step instructions on how to live a simple life in the country and enjoy its spiritual benefits. Others, such as the economist Ralph Borsodi, touted the independence and autonomy that farm life allowed and argued for small-scale, part-time subsistence farming as an alternative to the inefficient and dehumanizing industrial economy. Most popular country books were longer on flowery prose and pastoral images of peace and tranquillity than on practical advice, and most readers chose not to follow the authors back to the land. But the feeling that they were trapped in the city only heightened their desire for a temporary escape, and if they preferred poetry to prescription, they can perhaps be excused.10 Noting the swelling popular interest in Pennsylvania Dutch folk culture and wanting to give it focus, a group of educated Pennsylvania Germans established the Pennsylvania German Folklore Society in 1935. They set themselves apart from the older Pennsylvania German Society by allowing anyone to join, regardless of ancestry; the only qualification was an interest in the history and culture of the Pennsylvania German people. Broad membership was in keeping with the Folklore Society’s democratic goal of preserving the culture of common people, but it belied the society’s high intellectual aspirations. The society’s founders pledged not only to preserve Pennsylvania German culture but also to preserve it “in scholarly fashion,” in hopes of “pointing the way towards fuller understanding and appreciation of the culture of our people.” Also new was the explicit interest in preservation. The society was established to preserve “for future benefit the folklore of the Pennsylvania German past,” not necessarily to extend Pennsylvania German culture or dialect into the future. Admitting that folk culture was a thing of the past, the society set it aside for study, as if in a museum.11

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Like country writing, folklore experienced a revival in the turbulent 1930s. Interest in folklore had begun to grow in the previous decade as Americans realized that pre-industrial ways were slipping into the past and, at the same time, tried to establish themselves as a civilization distinct from Europe with its own unique culture and heritage. America between the wars seemed caught between two ages, and the desires to preserve the past and to define the future went hand-in-hand. The Depression, too, raised fears that American civilization was failing. Just as some Americans found solace in back-to-the-land movements, others tried to revive the vital spirit of the American past to put the nation back on track for the future. Many folklorists concentrated on collecting folksongs that helped to define who Americans had been—or at least who they wished to believe they had been. The folksong movement began with socialist overtones, in the hopes of finding a still-vibrant folk culture that could inspire the masses to overthrow the industrial order, but folklore easily found a home in mainstream American culture. The popular musical play Oklahoma!, which opened on Broadway in 1947, expressed the spirit behind the folklore movement, the desire to recapture the vitality of America’s innocence. The reconstruction of Colonial Williamsburg similarly helped to put the nation’s past in focus, with a particular emphasis on unity—the legacy of the American Revolution, in which all Americans could share—rather than on the divisive trends of the more recent past. Ironically, folklore could serve the needs of both unity and nativism: it attempted to define a single American heritage while at the same time separating that heritage from ties to the Old World and establishing the superiority of American culture. Even such mundane matters as Boy Scout imitations of Indian rituals served this dual purpose. Either way, folklore and its popular offshoots provided comfort and security in an uncertain age.12 At about this same time, a few enterprising individuals found another way to tap the growing public interest in folk culture: the folk festival. George Korson, a Wilkes-Barre native, staged the first event of its kind in Pennsylvania. His “Pennsylvania Folk Festivals,” held annually from 1935 to 1938, gave special recognition to the “musical instruments, language, amusements and hobbies of the Pennsylvania Germans,” showing them as a “fun-loving, social people.”13 The Ephrata Cloister, long one of Lancaster County’s more popular tourist attractions, held its own “Pennsylfaanish Deitsch Volksfeschts” in 1939 and 1940. The Ephrata festivals were open to the public after the model of a giant Versammling, with programs printed entirely in Deitsch.14 The first “Pennsylvania Dutch Day” at Hershey Park, held in August 1949, was a similar get-together for people of Pennsylvania Dutch descent. The program included exhibitions of quilting, folk art, antique farm equipment, butter churning, and apple butter making, but mostly the event resembled an old-fashioned country fair. Attractions included sack races, crackereating competitions, and even a greased pig contest, along with square dancing,

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band concerts, and a religious service in dialect. The 24,000 who attended were primarily local and primarily Dutch; neither the program nor its advertisers catered to tourists, and much of the program was printed, without translation, in dialect.15 Nevertheless, the folk festival proved precisely the means to attract large crowds and wide interest in folk culture. The academic approach of the Folklore Society and the popular appeal of folk festivals, although they might seem at first blush contradictory, had two things in common: each had great potential to disseminate knowledge about Pennsylvania Dutch folklife, and each appealed to people who were not themselves immersed in that folklife. It would not be long before someone thought to combine the two methods.

The Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center In 1949, three professors at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster founded the Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center (with no formal relation to the Pennsylvania German Folklore Society) and began publishing a weekly newsletter, the Pennsylvania Dutchman. Alfred L. Shoemaker, professor of folklore, served as the primary editor and wrote about folklore, arts, and crafts; Don Yoder of the Department of Religion wrote about Dutch religion as well as history and genealogy; and J. William Frey of the Department of German and Russian wrote about Pennsylvania Dutch dialect, literature, and music. They modeled their newsletter after Edward Rauch’s magazine of the same name, but added a democratic, popularizing focus. Like Rauch, the editors of the new Dutchman aimed to make Pennsylvania Dutch readers feel good about their heritage. The front page was devoted to “Pennsylvania Dutch personalities in the news,” while the remainder provided anecdotes and articles on Dutch folk culture and dialect. Like the Folklore Society, however, the editors sought not to elevate or improve Dutch language and culture but to collect, preserve, and disseminate “material, information and data on the intellectual and traditional culture of the Pennsylvania Dutch.” Traditional Dutch culture was to be presented in a positive but honest light.16 Shoemaker, Yoder, and Frey took a different approach to their mission than their predecessors had: they asked readers to become active participants in their intellectual endeavor. The three professors, recognizing that the scope of their mission was too great for them to manage alone, sought to “build up . . . a corps of several hundred part-time collaborators.” Modeled after European folk-cultural institutes, the center was created as a nonprofit membership corporation, and each week’s newsletter carried a questionnaire seeking information from readers about a particular aspect of Pennsylvania Dutch folklore. The editors welcomed unsolicited bits of folklore, literature, and commentary and suggested ways for teachers to assign pupils to collect recipes and stories. Participation in the collection of folklore would, they hoped, build respect.“I KNOW people have

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been taught to feel ashamed of folk beliefs,” wrote Shoemaker in the Dutchman’s first number. “We, the Pennsylvania Dutch, were taught for generations to despise and disrespect our traditional culture. The task that we of The Pennsylvania Dutchman have set ourselves is to teach NOT hate, NOT disrespect, but UNDERSTANDING, APPRECIATION, and, most important of all, a LOVE FOR OUR HERITAGE.” By encouraging broad, democratic participation in the collection of folklore, Shoemaker hoped also not merely to preserve traditional Dutch culture but to keep it alive. Folklore, he wrote, is not just about the past; it is “living, throbbing with life. It is knowledge handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth,” and the Folklore Center would continue that process. “The pupils of today” would be opened to “the pages of the romantic and thrilling story of our country’s men and women—not just a handful—but the story of all the men and women, no matter what their political importance.” Shoemaker, Yoder, and Frey were men on a mission.17 Making the Pennsylvania Dutchman successful required maintaining a precarious balance between academic integrity and popular appeal. On the one hand, the Folklore Center and its newsletter were housed in a prestigious liberal arts college; all three editors were professors, and Frey was chair of his department. The center’s mission, at bottom, was the collection, publication, and preservation of cultural and literary data, activities that required a certain amount of elevation and detachment. But the success of that mission depended on the ability of these college professors to hold the interest of several hundred Pennsylvania Dutch readers—readers with some education, certainly, but not fellow academics. For a time the academic and popular aspects of the Dutchman appeared to be in balance. The questionnaires in each issue generated plenty of responses, and the pages of the newsletter overflowed with short articles written by readers. Soon, however, the balance began tilting to the popular side. Readers might have predicted that this would happen. In the Dutchman’s first issue, Shoemaker, seeking to reassure readers that the newsletter was no erudite university journal, exclaimed, “We don’t want The Pennsylvania Dutchman to be a bit academic. Heaven forbid!”18 The folklorist’s little joke recognized the difficulty of maintaining high research standards while keeping large numbers of readers actively interested. The work of maintaining that balance, and of writing and editing an eightpage folio each week, gradually overwhelmed the three editors. With the May 1952 issue, the Pennsylvania Dutchman became a monthly magazine. Through the early 1950s, photographs became increasingly common; the paper on which the magazine was printed changed from newsprint to glossy, and readers’ contributions dwindled. The questionnaires continued, but the results were less well publicized. At the same time, the intended audience of the Pennsylvania Dutchman was changing. At first, the readership had been almost exclusively Pennsylvania Dutch. This was by design, since the primary purpose of the original newsletter

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was fact-finding. Gradually, however, the articles came to contain fewer inside jokes, fewer anecdotes that only the Dutch would appreciate; the news of local goings-on and Pennsylvania Dutch personalities ceased, replaced by articles on antiques and nostalgic pieces on farm life that could as easily have appeared in Life. The change was particularly evident in Edna Eby Heller’s recipe columns, which first appeared soon after the Dutchman began publication. Like the rest of the newsletter, Heller’s column was based largely on submissions from readers. At holidays, she compiled tales and recipes of seasonal foods from readers’ youth; at other times of the year, she discussed traditional daily fare. Her columns usually presented several variations on a single narrow theme, with recipes gathered from readers insisting theirs was the only proper method. In a column on potpie dumplings,19 for example, she explained that some people add a little baking powder, some add a lot, while some add none at all; and that these differences in texture were regional as well as personal. Through her column, Heller was able to present a fairly thorough and accurate picture of a cuisine with a surprising variety of local variations.20 While this sort of trivia may be fascinating to people who grew up eating Dutch food, it is of virtually no interest to anyone else. As the need to attract readers grew and the magazine’s focus shifted from fact-finding to fact-presenting, Heller’s column shifted with it. By the mid-1950s, although she continued to write regular articles on traditional Pennsylvania Dutch foods, she no longer printed recipes from readers. And instead of discussing the endless variations on a single dumpling, she was more apt to write about the differences between different types of dumplings. The new format suggested that she was now presenting information to readers with little or no prior knowledge, rather than sharing information among people with a common background. At the same time, her writing focused less and less on the preservation of traditional foodways and more and more on revival. In a 1956 article on beer- and wine-making, for example, she expressed the hope that readers would consider reviving the custom; earlier, her tone would have assumed the practice to be very much alive—as it likely would have been among her original audience. As had happened before in writing about the Pennsylvania Dutch, increased popular appeal meant treating traditional culture as a thing of the past.21 Alfred Shoemaker’s own personality may also have played a role in this growing conflict between the Folklore Center’s scholarly mission and the need for popular appeal. Shoemaker’s appeals to the Pennsylvania Dutch community and his ambitions for the Folklore Center suggested a broad streak of demagoguery, and both his writing and his activities tended to draw public attention to himself. He was, Don Yoder recalls, a very outgoing and charismatic person, “a marvelous speaker, with much of the preacher about him.” Pennsylvania Dutch had been his first language, and though he had struggled to lose his accent, his ability to speak

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perfect Dutch had a great effect on the Pennsylvania Dutch people with whom he worked.22 While Frey and Yoder continued working in the background, gathering facts and writing thoughtful and serious (though by no means dull) articles for the Dutchman, Shoemaker became the magazine’s managing editor and began branching out into ever more popular venues. In 1952 he resigned his teaching position at Franklin and Marshall College to work full time with the Folklore Center. The following year, Shoemaker wrote a pair of booklets for the tourist trade, My Off Is All! and Hex, No!, in which he attempted to debunk popular myths about the Pennsylvania Dutch, correcting the comic jargon and dispelling the notion that hex signs were painted to ward off witches. On the subject of jargon, he pointed out that “no one in the Dutch country quite talks like this. These [examples of jargon] are distortions thought up to make the tourist stuff palatable.” In Hex, No!, he joined a long line of Pennsylvania German authors who, disgusted with the popular notion that their people were childishly superstitious, insisted that the signs on barns were “just for pretty.” Shoemaker argued, fairly convincingly, that the symbols now seen primarily on barns were once common motifs in Pennsylvania Dutch folk art and that there was no evidence to suggest any superstitious motive behind their use. A year later, in The Pennsylvania Dutch Country, he refuted the idea that every Dutch meal had to include exactly seven sweets and seven sours.23 But if Shoemaker’s purpose in writing was to teach people the truth behind the myths, what sold his books was the popularity of the very myths he tried to debunk. Shoemaker, to his credit, openly acknowledged that fact, referring frequently to the myths as if they were true and noting that “myths help the tourist trade; they are so much cheaper than other forms of advertising.” People were bound to ask about them; they might as well at least get their information from a reputable source. Besides, he pointed, out, the myths were here to stay. The words Pennsylvania Dutch ordinarily conjure up four pictures in the mind of the average person: the cookingest folk in all of America, who serve seven sweets and seven sours three times a day; quaint, sombre-clad Amish who paint their gates blue to show there is a marriageable daughter in the household; a bell-don’t-make-bump type of ferhoodelt English; and, above all, high calibre farmers who paint gayly colored Hex Signs on their barns to keep away the witches. Whether we like it or not, this picture—though far from being factual—has become an integral part of American folklore. And nothing is likely ever to change any part of it.24 That being the case, Shoemaker was happy to join in the fun. The cover of My Off Is All! featured the cartoon head of a farmer with a corncob pipe jutting from one side of his jaw and a straw dangling from the other, mouth gaping in laughter and holding only three teeth. With a straw hat decorated with hex symbols, glasses

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perched on the end of his nose, and a matching gray-blond mustache and tuft at his chin, he looked utterly ridiculous and suggested that the Dutch were just silly hicks. And although “Real Pennsylvania Dutch-English is not as interesting” as the made-up jargon, Shoemaker commented, it was “still amusing.”25 The fun and games reached a peak at the first Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Festival, the Folklore Center’s answer to the earlier products of the Versammling movement and to the center’s need for financial support. Held in Kutztown on July 1–4, 1950, the festival featured Pennsylvania Dutch cooking, demonstrations of traditional sports and work methods, and a religious service in dialect. Yoder saw the festival as an “experiment in adult education,” a chance to put traditional culture on display. While most folk festivals to that time centered around performances of singing and dancing, the Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Festival included demonstrations of traditional crafts by skilled craftsmen. “You could talk to them,” said Yoder afterward.“They were living human beings,” not mere museum exhibits. Pennsylvania Germans and others from Pennsylvania and across the nation could learn, by watching, listening, asking questions, and eating, about the daily lives of Pennsylvania German farm folk.26 Local reaction to the festival was mixed. None of the three Lancaster newspapers previewed the first Folk Festival, despite the proximity of the Folklore Center. Not to be deterred, Shoemaker, Frey, and Yoder generated their own publicity, arranging radio interviews and advertising in metropolitan newspapers. One radio announcer opened his interview by asking if he could get some schnitz un knepp, a traditional dish of ham, dumplings, and dried apples; listeners knew right away that the festival was about entertainment, not fact-finding. “After all,” added Yoder, “isn’t our Pennsylvania Dutch cooking one of the finest phases of our folk-culture?” Frey, for his part, sang Pennsylvania Dutch folksongs on the air, while Shoemaker talked about the festival as “our Pennsylvania Dutch folkculture on parade.”27 The festival would have disappointed no one who came expecting what the trio had promised—unless perhaps they arrived late.“Our main trouble,” Shoemaker remarked after the event, “was that we didn’t have enough food.” But the publicity blitz had been a rousing success; the four-day event attracted visitors from twenty-eight states.28 Locals numbered heavily among the thousands who attended, though perhaps for different reasons. The readers of the Pennsylvania Dutchman who exchanged traditional recipes with Edna Eby Heller probably were not drawn by the food they already made for themselves at home. In printing the festival schedule, one Lancaster newspaper chose to highlight only the dialect religious service, which by this time had become a rarity and would have interested Pennsylvania Germans—but only Pennsylvania Germans, and only those who still spoke the dialect.29 The Folklore Center’s local publicity, meanwhile, reached out nostalgically to the same first-generation urbanites who had been drawn to Cornelius Weygandt’s books a generation earlier.

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The overall response to the first Folk Festival justified a second, and the encore was held over the Fourth of July weekend a year later. For Pennsylvania Dutch who attended and wanted to brush up on their folk culture, the second festival featured classes in dialect, art, literature, cooking, and folksongs. But for out-oftowners, there were lectures on the Amish and Mennonites, a program on bundling, and demonstrations of powwowing, the Pennsylvania Dutch form of folk healing. Food, sex, and magic proved the bigger draw, and as the festival grew larger over the years it also grew more and more into a carnival. Attendees to the 1953 event hailed from forty-one states and nine foreign countries. The 1955 festival brochure promised (without, à la Alfred Shoemaker, a trace of irony) “fullcourse, seven-sweets-and-seven-sours Dutch meals . . . with over 250 specialties of the famous Dutch cuisine.” After the food, the next attraction mentioned was “gift-shopping.” Also of note were the selection of “Miss Distelfink,” a “Colonial Cherry Fair of 1776,” and carnival rides. Attendance in 1954 had topped 50,000, and double that was expected in 1955. By 1959, the festival had expanded to eight days to accommodate the crush of tourists.30 All of the proceeds went to fund the Folklore Center’s library, publications, and research, but the research was becoming harder and harder to find amid the fun of the fair. Seminars on folk culture were offered on the fairgrounds throughout the 1950s, but attendees had to register for these separately and pay an additional $12.50. The 1959 festival featured three programs running simultaneously at all times, and although one of the three was on serious research, the phrase “threering circus” might have entered more than a few minds.31 The administration of Franklin and Marshall College, too, wondered where the research was. Plans had been in the works to build a library on the college campus for the Pennsylvania German Society; the association with the old society would have helped the Folklore Center, but the plans fell through by the early 1950s. In 1956, the Folklore Center disassociated itself from Franklin and Marshall College for good. Three years later, it changed its name to the Pennsylvania Folklife Society and the name of its magazine to Pennsylvania Folklife. Questionnaires on Pennsylvania Dutch folk culture continued for a few years to appear in the back pages of the magazine, but with decreasing regularity, and the magazine looked essentially like any other popular periodical. The Folklife Society retained an active membership, and the Kutztown Folk Festival continued to be held annually, but the original dream of a participatory “democracy of the mind” that would unite the folk with the folklorists was fading. In its place was, for the most part, a presentation of Pennsylvania Dutch folk culture as the masses wanted it presented. By the early 1960s, financial troubles forced the Folklife Society to broaden its appeal even further, adding events such as a staged “Amish Wedding” to the festival’s schedule to capitalize on the popularity of Amish culture. The second Pennsylvania Dutchman, like the first, ultimately failed to bring its serious mission to a broad audience.32

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This change in the Folklore Center created a quandary for local Pennsylvania Dutch who wanted to preserve their language and culture. On the one hand, the festival and the center’s publications presented accurate information about Dutch folklore and folk culture to thousands of people each year. On the other hand, that information was often presented with questionable taste. There was no shortage of women from farm and church associations around Kutztown willing to prepare the food each year for the festival’s tents, nor of men and women pleased to demonstrate traditional ways of work and play. Local Pennsylvania Germans also played a vital role in advising on and preparing exhibits. But the atmosphere of the festival and the publicity blitz that surrounded the affair had the potential to make them feel like sideshow freaks on display, and many Pennsylvania Germans less comfortable with the implications of their heritage stayed away. Advertisements for the festival in metropolitan newspapers relied on the same jargon Alfred Shoemaker had once derided: “EAT VONCE Schnitz un Gnepp,” read one ad in 1960. A magazine article claimed, years later, that “even the Amish showed up during the first years of the fair”—until “they got tired of being stared at.” As a member of the more staid Pennsylvania German Society remarked, in the Folk Festival’s second decade, the publicity for the event “was enough to give almost anyone in Washington, or in New York, or in other large cities, a horrible impression of the Pennsylvania Germans.” Yet even so, the festival had gained respectability and purpose from the participation of “numerous Pennsylvania Germans having an excellent sense of balance.” Perhaps, he added hopefully, the festival would, in the future, present “a more cultured and accurate image of the Pennsylvania Germans.”33 By the end of the Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Festival’s first decade, it was the most popular folk festival in the United States, educating and entertaining tens of thousands of people a year. The Folklore Center had, for the most part inadvertently, helped move the Pennsylvania Dutch revival from regional interest and scholarly study to mass appeal and a tourist industry. Yet even the swarms that descended on Kutztown each summer paled in comparison to the hordes of tourists now visiting dozens of year-round sites in Lancaster County. And if some Pennsylvania Germans feared that the Folk Festival portrayed their traditional culture with less than ideal sensitivity, they would save their fury for the series of attractions being built on U.S. Route 30 east of Lancaster, attractions that not only popularized but also commercialized Pennsylvania Dutch culture. And, ironically, it was not self-promoting Dutchmen like Alfred Shoemaker or serious boosters like the Pennsylvania German Society but the meekest, most self-effacing of the Pennsylvania Dutch who won the public’s attention. A new era had begun in Dutch Country. By the late 1950s, the Amish had become the unquestioned stars of the show.

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A Dutch Wonderland Within a year after World War II ended, Lancaster’s downtown Hotel Brunswick found a way to turn the burgeoning interest in the Amish and Pennsylvania Dutch into a very profitable business. In 1946, Paul L. H. Heine, the hotel’s manager, invented the idea of “Pennsylvania Dutch Weekends.” For only $39.95, guests could stay the weekend, eat authentic Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine from Friday supper to Sunday dinner, and tour the Amish farm country. The guide for these tours was Ira S. Franck, a real live Mennonite “descended from a long line of expert Pennsylvania Mennonite farmers.” Visitors rode buses through the countryside, toured a working Amish farm, and stopped at a “little red schoolhouse” to hear the story of the Amish battle to keep their traditional schools. The weekend’s highlight was a “feast on an Amish farm” during which tourists could “relish hearty, genuine Pennsylvania Dutch foods.” Brochures featured a cartoon Amishman named “Yonnie,” the hotel’s “symbol of native hospitality.”34 Less than twenty years earlier, the hotel’s brochures had not even mentioned the proximity of the Amish; now, the Amish were becoming a cornerstone of their business.35 The Brunswick received some free publicity from the renewal of Amish conflict with the state over compulsory education, and by 1950, Parker Tours of New York City had begun offering regular trips to Lancaster, as had at least one Philadelphia travel agent.36 Franck’s tours, like other early efforts to cater to popular interest in the Amish and Pennsylvania Dutch, were meant to be educational as well as entertaining. Franck had taught for several years at Eastern Mennonite College in Virginia and at Goshen College in Indiana, and he tried to be objective. He pointed out the National Bank in Intercourse, where modern Amishmen took out loans and kept their money, and commented approvingly on the failure of certain “communistic” ideas of household production. But in the end, Franck was hostage to popular conceptions of the Amish and of traditional rural life. He noted pretty Plain girls, who seemed “the embodiment of the simple faith and way of life which mark the Amish.” The countryside, “where peace and plenty abide,” he compared to the promised land of old hymns. He reminded visitors of the agricultural talents of Pennsylvania German farmers, noting “the neatness and efficient orderliness of everything about the farms and buildings, the well-cultivated fields and abundant crops.” Above all, however, he tried to make urbanites feel at home in Lancaster County: As a guest you may have come from a New York City apartment house or from the mountain slopes of sunny California. You may have thought you were leaving your world and coming to a different one. But you soon feel

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such a spirit of mutual, human understanding that you are convinced that under the surface we are all very much alike, and perhaps we do live in “One World” after all.37 Two other events in the mid-1950s, one within Lancaster County and one without, demonstrated the extent of popular interest in the Amish and helped to turn Amish tourism from a profitable business into an industry. The first was the bicentennial celebration of the town of Intercourse, held in August 1954. Intercourse, a village of 480 souls in the heart of the Amish section of Lancaster County, had been a “mecca” for tourists since the first school controversy piqued interest in the 1930s.38 The village’s Civic Association planned for a large turnout, providing maps to Intercourse from Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore. But they could hardly have anticipated the crowd of more than 20,000 that poured into town for the second day of the festivities. Although former residents made up part of the crowd, thousands more were merely curious, including four young people from Louisiana who read about the celebration and drove to Pennsylvania to see it. Visitors must have been hungry from the drive; they consumed 2,400 quarts of chicken corn soup, a Lancaster County favorite, and as many barbecued chickens on Saturday alone. They received their dose of “Amish appeal” from the village parade, in which Eli S. Beiler, a local farmer, rode in a buggy pulled by a cow, hopping out every fifty feet to milk her. Another resident offered guests rides in his own buggy, and dozens more lent their heirlooms for an antiques show. As one Amish farmer remarked years later, “Mix together the word Intercourse and some Amish buggies, and you’re bound to attract some tourists.”39 While the Intercourse bicentennial pulled tourists to Lancaster County, hesitant travelers received a good push from the Broadway run of Plain and Fancy, a musical comedy about the Amish that opened in January 1955. In this take on the timeworn city mouse-country mouse story, a New Yorker named Dan arrives in Bird-in-Hand, Lancaster County, with his girlfriend Ruth to sell a farm he has inherited. The prospective buyer is an Amish man, Jacob Yoder, who intends the farm as a wedding present for his daughter, Katie, who will be married in a few days. It turns out, however, that Katie is really in love with the groom’s brother, Peter. But Peter has a reputation as a troublemaker, and Jacob will not allow him near his daughter. As a wedding present and a symbol of his undying love for Katie, Peter paints a bluebird (the authors were perhaps thinking of a distelfink) on the side of the barn on Dan’s farm. When lightning strikes the barn and burns it to the ground, the Amish believe that the bluebird was a hex, and Peter is shunned. In the end, of course, events conspire (along with Dan and Ruth) to convince Jacob to let Katie marry Peter, and everyone—with the possible exception of Katie’s jilted fiancé, Ezra, who is too boorish to be likable anyway— is happy.40

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If the plot of Plain and Fancy was nothing special—take away the Amish and the remainder resembles countless other musical comedies of the 1950s—the play’s real purpose was to bring the Plain people to the stage. The authors’ emphasis was on quaintness, not accuracy, although they researched Amish speech and dress quite thoroughly, even hiding microphones among the produce in market stalls to capture the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect and inflection. Lyricist Arnold Horwitt deliberately avoided learning anything at all about the Amish, lest facts interfere with a good song; his lyrics came in part from a cookbook and from the inscription on a souvenir ashtray (“It Wonders Me”).41 The result was a play that, while not entirely inaccurate, perpetuated the most common conceptions and misconceptions of the Amish. The Amish of Plain and Fancy are an isolated rural people who, as Dan says, “have had practically no contact with the outside world since they settled in Lancaster County, and their customs haven’t changed in all these two hundred years.” They are ignorant of the city; one Amish girl marvels at a brassiere, and Jacob Yoder remarks that city people “are foolish people. In all Lancaster they do not even grow a turnip.” The Amish have no interest in the opinions of city people: We know how we want it here We know who we are, mister, Don’t interfere. We don’t need a city man, with soft words, To tell us what to do.42 Yet these traits, in the context of the musical, are presented as positive—after a fashion. Dan finds it “inspiring” that the Amish cling so tightly to tradition, and of course even Pa Yoder relents in the end. The city folks get their comeuppance when Ruth tries to help the Amish women prepare for the wedding and fails utterly to keep up with the rapid pace of experienced workers. Hilda, Katie’s unmarried sister, thinks at first that she is in love with Dan and wants to move to New York where “everything is polished like silver . . . and people walk light,” but a brief experience at the carnival in Lancaster convinces her that the country is where she belongs. In the country, there are “no complicated gadgets in the kitchen, No complicated notions in the head.” Why should there be? The Amish live, after all, in a land of milk and honey. As they sing early in the first act, Plenty of Pennsylvania You’ve never seen the likes of Plenty of Pennsylvania Where anything grows . . . All you need is some seed And a plow or two,

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And a bull who’s keeping company With a cow or two. Soon you’ve got Plenty of Pennsylvania, Sweet land of meadows golden And fat red barns holdin’ What goes to town on market day.43 New Yorkers responded eagerly to this idealization of the Amish, identifying with Dan and Ruth’s wistful longing for a simpler life. The musical received somewhat tepid reviews overall but widespread praise for its portrayal of the Amish. William Hawkins of the World-Telegram and Sun, getting into the spirit of the show, called it “fresh as new-mown hay, bubbly as hard cider and pretty as a bride’s smile.” The New York Times found the Amish girls, despite their plain dress, “enchanting” and appreciated that “behind their severity is a solid culture that produces happiness as well as abundance.” The musical played on Broadway for a year and a half.44 Lancaster Countians, hearing that the Amish had made it to Broadway, were less impressed. Although readers were certainly aware of the show’s existence, local newspapers only briefly noted its opening. Pennsylvanians had been the first people asked to back the show, and had refused; a fundraising effort in Allentown produced not a penny. The writer for the New York Times who reported this fact seemed to find it a bit odd that Pennsylvanians would not “get behind their own people,” but Lancastrians knew better than to trust a New Yorker’s portrayal of their home and neighbors. Those who drove to New York to see Plain and Fancy could tell quite clearly that, despite the authors’ good intentions, they were being made fun of.45 Although the musical seemed to show the Amish in a positive light, the haze of nostalgia that surrounded them made it difficult to take seriously their way of life. Dan and Ruth might pretend to want that simple life, but in the end they packed up their car and returned to New York, where they belonged—and where the audience belonged, as well. ✸ After the run of Plain and Fancy there was no stopping the tourist trade, for even if residents of cities and suburbs had no desire to move in with the Amish, they were more eager than ever to come in for a closer look. In 1955, the Amish Farm and House, the first freestanding, paid-admission Amish tourist attraction, opened, featuring a “century old Stone Farmhouse, decorated and furnished as ‘Old Order Amish’ have their homes today.” For 30 cents apiece—25 cents for children—visitors could tour the house and farm and “hear the authentic story of the ‘Plain People.’” The kitchen included an old-fashioned coal stove and a water

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refrigerator, in which food was kept cold by water piped via water wheel from a nearby stream. The sink was a wooden trough. A brass oil lamp with a glass shade hung from the ceiling over the table, on which were displayed a “homemade” loaf of bread, a farmers’ almanac, and a mail-order catalog, as well as a bundle of the straw used to make Amish summer hats. Most of the house was painted a bright robin’s egg blue with white trim, colors common to Amish homes, and the kitchen was a typical brown. Outside, visitors could stop on the porch to pump themselves a drink of water from a thirty-foot hand-dug well before touring the remainder of the twenty-five-acre property. The barn and barnyard housed a variety of animals, including cows and geese, which were used to the attention and would let children approach for a closer look.46 Some 200 persons a day, hailing from all over the eastern and midwestern United States, toured the Amish Farm and House the summer it opened. No guided tours were offered, but six “hostesses” were available to answer questions as tourists freely wandered the house and grounds. Owner Adolph Neuber said that his intent was to portray “a sincere and honest picture of Amish life, devoid of commercialism.” The claim of authenticity was not merely publicity, for an Amish family lived in a portion of the house closed to tourists and worked the farm. Upstairs, an Amish woman made rugs on a hand loom; guests could watch and ask questions. The Amish Farm and House seemed to go a step further toward authenticity than even the Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Festival or Colonial Williamsburg; it not only put Amish culture on display but also allowed tourists into the lives of real Amish people. But Neuber’s claims about commercialism were a bit disingenuous; tourists could not only watch rugs being woven by hand but also purchase those rugs downstairs in the gift shop, and it was the opportunity to buy handmade products, not the chance to watch them being made, that was featured prominently in advertisements. Even authenticity was in the eye of the beholder, for the fact that tourists were allowed to tramp through it made this Amish home far from typical. More important, though tourists might see the material surroundings of Amish life, they were left to form their own interpretations or to accept what hostesses told them; contact with the farm’s Amish caretakers was limited. The additional information provided to tourists tended to be very factual, focusing on the design of clothes, organization of religious services, and how they did their work without modern conveniences. The why behind these elements of Amish life tended to be left out, and even the Amish caretakers were poorly equipped to bridge the gap between their perspective and that of tourists. When a tourist asked if weaving by hand wasn’t hard work, for example, the Amish woman responded simply, “I suppose so, but I just love to do it.” As a result, despite its educational intent, the version of Amish life exhibited at the Amish Farm and House was likely only to bolster tourists’ preconceptions.47

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The Amish Farm and House did not remain unique for long. Other attractions soon popped up across the countryside, combining entertainment and gift-shopping with an allegedly authentic portrait of the Amish. A one-room schoolhouse, built in 1882 and in use until World War II, now became the Little Red School Gift and Gourmet Shop. Restaurants catering to tourists began featuring Pennsylvania Dutch food; the Dutch Haven restaurant marketed its popular Pennsylvania Dutch shoofly pies to tourists and sold thousands of them a year by mail order. The Pennsylvania Folklife Society opened “Amish Dutchland” in Lancaster, with demonstrations of traditional workways and an annual “Pennsylvania Dutch Harvest Frolic.” By the early 1960s, Lancaster even had its own children’s theme park, Dutch Wonderland; although most of the attractions were based on fairy tales, the park included a “Little Dutch Farm” and a “Little Red Schoolhouse.” For more adventurous visitors, PhotoArts Press published a series of materials for self-guided tours, complete with instructions on how to interact with real, live Amish people: When conversing with the Amish, remember that the men like to talk about farming, hunting, fishing, and the weather; the women, about sewing, cooking, home-making and children; and the children, about school, chores, and pets. Everyone likes to talk about horses and cows.48 By the end of the 1950s, the number of tourist attractions in Lancaster County was multiplying so quickly that operators formed a Visitors and Convention Bureau to keep track of it all. The bureau’s brochures heavily promoted the Amish, promising visitors “a country vacation with city conveniences.” The Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center published an annual Tourist Guide through the Dutch Country, which outlined several auto tours of the region, including a “Tour of the Amish Country,” a “Garden Spot of America Tour,” and a “Hex Sign Tour.” In the first of these booklets, Alfred Shoemaker gave instructions on how to sneak photographs of Amish people, and William Frey taught tourists how to cuss in dialect.49 Most guidebooks and tourist attractions, like the Amish Farm and House and the Hotel Brunswick’s tours, provided entertainment peppered with vivid details of Amish life. It was easy enough, after all, for promoters to focus on the Plain people’s entertainment value. The Amish were “picturesque”; they dressed and spoke oddly, maintained strange and ancient customs, and relied upon the horse and buggy for transportation. Nearly every tourist booklet published contained lengthy accounts of Amish weddings, although comparatively few explained in any detail the religious beliefs behind marriage rites and customs. Quaint barns and shy children completed the picture—literally. Photographs in tourist booklets, postcards, and even View-Master slides showed Amish clothes, barns, and horses. The Amish hardly needed selling, but when they did, promoters could fall

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back on Shoemaker’s myths. Writers and promoters quickly learned that they could attract attention most effectively with food, sex, and magic. Food quickly became the most obvious “hook” for tourists. Everyone liked to eat, certainly, and the number of “Pennsylvania Dutch” restaurants that opened in the 1950s proved that tourists were no different. The Dutch were renowned for the quality, quantity, and variety of food they served. Some promoters combined food with a regular tourist attraction. The Saturday night feast had been the centerpiece of the Hotel Brunswick’s early package tours, and the Plain & Fancy Farm and Dining Room, which opened in the 1950s, offered a tour of an Amish home followed by “delicious meals prepared by Plain Folk.”50 Several area hotels and motels opened in-house Dutch restaurants so that guests could have a bite to eat before retiring to their air-conditioned rooms. Miller’s Dutch Restaurant, which had served Pennsylvania Dutch food since 1931, began using photographs of the Amish to advertise its daily specials.51 The dishes served were generally representative of Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine, if also generally innocuous; stuffed pig’s stomach, although a local delicacy, rarely appeared on menus. Pork and sauerkraut, chicken soup with saffron, schmierkase (similar to cottage cheese) with apple butter, and the vast array of pickles and pies that made up the famous “Seven Sweets and Seven Sours” seem to have been exotic enough for the average American’s taste.52 Sex was considerably harder to find among the Amish than food, but promoters did their best. Several of the more popular booklets on Amish life contained a description of bundling, the ancient practice of allowing a courting couple to share a bed, but with a board between them to prevent funny business. This was not so strange a custom in a rural community; the Puritans of early New England had also accepted it, although even among the Amish bundling was probably rare by the mid-twentieth century. An Amish youth might drive to his girlfriend’s home late on a Saturday evening before a Sunday on which there would be no early meeting. He would travel after dark to avoid notice, for news travels fast in so tightly knit a community and he would want a little privacy. With only a horse and buggy for transportation, it would be too late to go home after visiting, and he would spend the night. Whether he shared a bed with the girl, and whether anything happened that would justify the titters of readers of tourist booklets, is impossible to guess—although it should be noted that, in fact, babies conceived prior to wedlock are hardly unknown among the Amish. This was not much to go on, but writers and tour guides made the most of it, and tourists, presumably, enjoyed it.53 After courtship came marriage, logically enough, and authors of tourist booklets described in great detail what the bride wore, what the guests ate, and whom the happy couple visited on their honeymoon. For people who were marrying and having babies by the millions, as Americans were in the 1950s, such fascination with marriage could be expected, and bundling made

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even premarital sex seem safe, combining the titillation of sex with the safety of community control.54 Magic was easy to provide, although this, too, required some creativity. Hex signs were pretty, certainly, and a natural spark for tourist curiosity. The Amish and Mennonites, however, do not paint them on their barns. Whether the Plain people eschew the decorations as manifestations of worldly pride or as evidence of witchcraft has long been a point of contention among Pennsylvania German writers. Alfred Shoemaker argued that hex signs had no connection at all to witchcraft, but writers and promoters with less concern for accuracy decided that the Amish must indeed paint hex signs on their barns and that however much they denied it, they did so to ward off witches. Even Nancy Drew got into this act; in The Witch Tree Symbol, she spent a few days among the Amish, solving a mystery in which the villains briefly convinced Nancy’s Amish hosts that she was a witch.55 A few enterprising Lancastrians began painting hex signs to sell to tourists, occasionally featuring such nontraditional Pennsylvania Dutch symbols as shamrocks. Powwowing, a traditional folk medicine that involved the laying on of hands and invocation of spells, also proved a popular topic in tourist booklets. Even authors who tried to be fair and accurate in their explanations of Amish life and culture felt compelled to bring up the subject of magic. As one deeply religious author wrote, simultaneously praising the Pennsylvania Dutch and excusing their faults, There is more to the Pennsylvania Dutch than backdoor English and shoofly pie. Just as the soil of the Dutch Country is rich and deep, so also there is a mysterious depth to the Dutch Saints that only years of intimate fellowship can begin to reveal. . . . But scratch a Dutchman a little too deep and you will also discover a stratum of the primitive in him. The same is true of all men.56 Magic and superstition brushed close to the subject of religion, as this quotation shows, and no writer or tourist promoter could entirely ignore the Amish faith. Unlike loincloth-clad “savages” on some Pacific island, the Amish could never be convincingly portrayed as mere historical leftovers, a people stranded in time by isolation from the modern world. Amish farms spread within a few miles of a city of fifty thousand; they daily drove their buggies into ditches to allow cars and trucks to pass. The Amish even participated occasionally in the tourist industry that had grown up around them, selling quilts and vegetables to motorists at roadside stands and gift shops. If the Amish were isolated, theirs was a deliberate rather than an accidental isolation, a spiritual rather than a material one, and their religion was the key to understanding that isolation. Even had tourists been uninterested in Amish religion, they could hardly have ignored it—but they were very much interested; it had been the clashes of Amish faith with modern society

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over schools and war that first brought the Amish to the attention of urban America. Religion was, by the demands of the market as well as those of sheer logic, an ever-present subtext to the entertainment provided at tourist attractions. Yet only rarely did authors of tourist booklets explain Amish theology in any great detail, whether their main purpose was to entertain or to educate. Most writers related the tale of the Amish flight from persecution in Europe, explained that the Amish worship in homes and choose their church officials by lot, and noted the Amish belief in nonconfrontation, but few went beyond those basic facts. An exception was John Hostetler, who had been born into an Amish family and eventually became a sociologist. Hostetler’s 1952 book Amish Life tried to set tourists straight on Amish religion and culture, patiently dispelling myths and explaining the essentials of Amish theology. He noted first that the early Amish and Mennonites had believed that a man becomes a Christian “by having an inner regeneration of soul proved by outward behavior,” and he used that principle to explain Amish life as an effort to emulate the life of Christ. As Hostetler explained for a scholarly audience in his seminal study Amish Society, the Amish saw Christ as the Wegweiser, “one who shows the way, and not just one who is to be worshipped for his own sake.” Hostetler crafted these explanations by answering a series of questions posed by a hypothetical tourist; they were, in fact, the sorts of questions tourists often asked of their guides (are the Amish loaded with cash? why do they dress so plain? do they practice soil conservation?). Instead of assuming that such simple questions revealed the full depth of tourist interest, Hostetler used them to provoke a discussion of the faith and values at the heart of Amish life. Visitors to Lancaster County seem to have appreciated Hostetler’s efforts; the book and its later editions sold steadily for decades.57 In general, tourists experienced Amish religion not through theological discussions but through its most obvious outward manifestations. Few tourists had the intellectual stamina or desire for detailed study of theology, and theology may not be the most appropriate way to approach the Amish; the Amish themselves rarely discuss theology, focusing on deeds rather than words. Symbolic acts also allowed observers some room for interpretation and did not bind them to a single specific theology. The most common and popular symbol of Amish religious values was, of course, the barn raising. Nearly every tourist booklet contained at least one photograph of Amish men in shirtsleeves (but with broadbrimmed hats still firmly on their heads) swarming over the post-and-beam shell of a barn. Magazine and newspaper articles on the Amish just as regularly included such photographs. The authors of Plain and Fancy had known enough about Amish appeal to open their second act with a barn raising scene, and the museums of Amish life that opened in Lancaster in the 1950s presented barn raisings as the centerpiece of their tours.58 The barn raising provided the perfect symbol of Amish community and faith in God. They refused to buy insurance or to erect

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lightning rods—themselves a kind of insurance—because they believed that to do so would be to flout God’s will. When disaster struck, it was incumbent upon the Amish to be good neighbors and to help rebuild what was lost. At a time when mainstream Americans felt increasingly isolated in their suburban homes and offices, they found the vision of so strong and loving a community appealing.59 Amish workways provided other symbolic manifestations of family and community. As Hostetler explained, it was not their dress and language that made the Amish separate, but rather their reliance on family and community that allowed them to remain separate.60 Stories and photographs showed Amish families working together—men in the fields, women in the kitchen. Children learned at home, from their parents, the skills and values they would need as adults. As one writer observed, Again and again in the Dutch country I’ve seen that hand upon the shoulder. I’ve seen it as the men tarried after Church; as they awaited the day’s threshing; as they frolicked before the hoedown; as they laughed and joked at the picnic; as they waited in the hospital lobby; as they bowed at the open grave. The Pennsylvania Dutch are a friendly people. While it is true that they are inhibited by a certain reserve that in the eyes of the stranger sometimes makes them appear aloof, in reality they have a consuming desire for the friendly way of life.61 If the writer referred to the Pennsylvania Dutch generally, his observations applied to the Amish specifically, and they mirrored the reactions of tourists hearing the story of Amish life. Word paintings of Amish life combined the safety and comfort of traditional communities under a sheen of innocence, often emphasizing friendliness or neighborliness to make the subject of religion more comfortable and less confrontational than it might otherwise have been. Like religion, the rurality of the Amish was a constant subtext to these popular portrayals, and no more clearly explained. The communal workways of the Amish, of course, would have been impossible without the setting of the farm. Just as no one could ignore Amish religion, no one could fail to mention the Amish attachment to the soil—or the link between the two. Like country life books, tourist booklets about the Amish linked rural life and farming to traditional American values. Even if few readers of country life books followed the authors back to the land, they took rural idealism more seriously than mere nostalgia would suggest. And even if some of Lancaster’s tourist attractions had begun by the 1960s to make the highways east of the city a bit reminiscent of Disneyland, there was more at work than simply entertainment. The Amish had, by the 1950s, become symbols of the old-fashioned values—devotion to family, community, and God—that Americans claimed to hold dear. Rural idealism was more than entertainment or nostalgia: it was a supplement to—or substitute for—religion.

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The Amish and America For American observers, the persistence of Amish society and culture in the midtwentieth century presented a problem. Americans in the 1950s—at least the white, middle-class, increasingly suburban Americans who visited Lancaster’s new tourist sites—wanted to see the United States as a homogeneous society, a great melting pot in which the many cultures of the past had been forged into a strong world leader riding the wave of progress into the postwar era. The Amish, however, rejected this view of America; they saw the brave new world as morally degenerate and preferred to maintain their centuries-old separate traditions. Increasingly, the Amish adopted new technologies, but not nearly as quickly or as often as their neighbors, and in any case it was not change but persistence that fascinated tourists and magazine subscribers. Like Appalachia at the end of the nineteenth century, Dutch Country represented a challenge to cherished ideas about the inevitability and desirability of progress. The Amish were white, northern European, independent farmers who worked the same land their families had worked for more than two hundred years; at the same time, they avoided industry, technology, and consumer culture. No one could have been more American—or less. The problem of Appalachia had been more easily solved. Mountain people seemed to be isolated from modern America by geography and to have had no opportunity to see the benefits of modern life. They appeared, moreover, to be indolent, impoverished, and in serious need of help from more fortunate Americans. Missionaries from the dominant culture established settlement houses, previously used to help immigrants adjust to life in the United States, to bring Appalachians up to date. These cultural missionaries, like other rural reformers of the early twentieth century, simultaneously venerated and undermined Appalachian culture. They saw Appalachian folkways as the purest present-day manifestation of traditional Anglo-Saxon culture, yet they fought to replace those folkways with the trappings of consumer society. They could justify their actions by the obvious poverty of the people they sought to reform, and Appalachia, in turn, seemed to justify modernizing, urbanizing America.62 The Amish, however, were doing just fine, thank you. Where Appalachians had been seen by many as a poor, backward people, shiftless and often violent, the Amish invited only praise. They were hardworking, religious, content with simplicity yet wealthy in the produce of the land. Their churches, communities, and families were strong, and they refused violent confrontations. The Amish represented so much of what Americans wanted to see in their own communities: it was not the Amish who needed help. Worse, potentially, for the postwar ego was that the Amish were clearly separate by choice. If in Appalachia difference could be explained by isolation—surely they would be like us if only they could—no such

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easy explanation presented itself in Lancaster. Some observers made half-hearted claims that the Amish had been isolated from the modern world since their initial settlement; Dan opens Plain and Fancy by marveling at the isolation of the Amish.63 But no one who actually visited Lancaster could continue to believe this. The Amish were isolated by choice rather than by circumstance; religion, not geography, defined their relation to modern society and culture. They actively rejected the values of urban and suburban consumer culture—and flourished for it. If the Amish were becoming pseudoreligious icons, that presented a problem for the “pilgrims” who flocked to Lancaster each summer and read popular magazine articles about Amish life. If Amish life was the supreme manifestation of values tourists held dear, and if tourists’ own lives seemed to show a disappointing lack of devotion to those values, it might seem logical that tourists should try to emulate the Amish in some way. If Amish separation was a choice, urban and suburban observers could presumably make the same choice. But millions of modern Americans were not ready to move in with the Amish—not yet, anyway. For Amish life conflicted squarely with another deeply held American value, technological progress. Few Americans were prepared to concede, in the 1950s, their brand-new cars and televisions; these were good things, evidence of an improving standard of living. Certainly the Amish raised the old fears about the side effects of progress. Tourist writers eagerly pointed out, for example, that broken homes and juvenile delinquency were virtually unknown among the Amish. But while suburban, middle-class Americans might have worried privately about such problems,64 they hardly wanted to spend their summer vacations bearing guilt for the ills of modern society. They wanted, if we can judge by the way they spent their money, to experience vicariously the values of traditional rural life and then to drive their cars to an air-conditioned motel room for the night. The ability of the human mind to ignore this sort of irony is indeed remarkable, but Lancaster’s tourist industry was carefully designed to smooth over the dilemma. Tourism there, as elsewhere, asserted an “authentic” presentation of culture. As public interest in and knowledge about the Amish grew, portrayals of them appeared to become increasingly authentic. Up to the 1930s, tourists observed the Amish mainly by driving or riding through farmland, but drive-by sightseeing offered only the most superficial view of Amish life. Folk festivals took the next step by presenting “authentic” demonstrations of farm life, but tourists apparently were not satisfied by these openly staged representations of rural culture; they preferred to gawk at the few genuine Amish people present. The Amish Farm and House took another step, letting tourists explore an actual Amish residence; yet even here tourists were denied access to the inner workings of Amish life, not to mention the reasons behind them. Each step offered, apparently, an increasingly authentic view of the Amish and of rural life, yet each (with the exception of drive-by sightseeing) was staged for the benefit of tourists no less con-

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sciously than Plain and Fancy had been. Tourists were shown what promoters thought they wanted to see: a happy, peaceful vision of traditional rural life, with thoughtful explanations of Amish religion—and the challenges it presented— largely absent. Even personal interactions between tourists and the Amish were carefully staged by promoters, who directed visitors to public markets and instructed them on proper topics of conversation with farmers. When the Amish woman at the Amish Farm and House told guests that she wove by hand because “I just love to do it,” she surely had no intention to deceive them, but she didn’t really answer their inquiries, either.65 Cries of authenticity are, of course, common currency in tourist experience. Missionaries to Appalachia at the turn of the twentieth century packaged and sold Appalachian folk culture and particularly music to mainstream America, infusing it as they did with their own values. Their romantic notions about Appalachia, which experience failed to dispel, led them to preserve traditional ballads and handicrafts—but not the cultural and social structures that produced them, which fitted less easily the missionaries’ preconceptions. Their belief in the authenticity of the folk music and crafts they selected merely gave them a second line of defense against challenges to their beliefs. In the turn-of-the-century Southwest, the Fred Harvey Company enticed tourists with museum-like displays of live Indians that appeared more “authentic”—in other words, that appealed more to tourists’ preconceived notions of traditional Indian life—than the dayto-day life of present-day Native Americans. In Appalachia, as in Lancaster, packaging preconceptions with claims of authenticity made tourists feel that they were being educated without challenging their beliefs and thereby spoiling their entertainment.66 The idyllic and unquestioning vision of rural life that tourism presented in Lancaster County took another important step in linking present-day Amish culture to the past. Since tourists could see that the Amish still lived the way they did, the link was a subtle one, formed by a pervasive atmosphere of nostalgia. In tourist literature of the 1950s and 1960s, the illustrations almost never portray the Amish as adults. Photographs are nearly all of children, and the children, though dressed (as Amish children always are) as miniature adults, look and act like children. They smile cheerfully and innocently, they play happily, they hide shyly from the camera (figure 3.1). This is true even in booklets alleging to chronicle accurately the Amish way of life; though the accompanying text concerns primarily adult life, it is the children who are the photographic stars. There is, of course, a good, practical reason why adults rarely appear in these photographs: the Second Commandment prohibits the making of graven images, and the Amish take the Ten Commandments seriously. Although they will not resist being photographed, neither will they cooperate in the process. Children, however, are another story—as promoters slyly reminded tourists.67

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figure 3.1. “A little Amish girl chooses apples for a delicious pie.” This postcard is typical of postcard photographs of Amish children since the 1950s, combining a cute little tyke with food, a one-room schoolhouse, or baby animals. Courtesy of Steven Witmer.

But it was not entirely accidental that children dominated this imaginary Amish landscape. Artists who, unlike photographers, had free rein to paint or draw the Amish as they chose, nevertheless tended to portray them as children. Even adults most often appeared childlike in some way. The strongest examples were in advertising, where there was no need for pretense at accuracy. The Hotel Brunswick’s “symbol of native hospitality” was “Yonnie,” a giddily cheerful cartoon Amishman who appeared on menus, brochures, and advertisements (figure 3.2). Although Yonnie’s beard identifies him as an adult, two other features make him appear more childlike: his big, round eyes and his oversized head. If the connection between these features and the impression of innocence is not immediately obvious, consider that the heads of not only human babies but also puppies, kittens, and other mammals are larger in proportion to their size and rounder than those of adults of the same species. Head size is the most obvious marker of children; cartoonists, knowing this, exaggerate the head size of figures to make them appear childlike. Charlie Brown, for example, if drawn with adult proportions, would appear as a balding, middle-aged man instead of a little boy. In addition, Yonnie is both wide-eyed and doe-eyed and therefore innocent on two counts. His plump cheeks (baby fat?) and cheerful lip-smacking complete the picture. Nor was Yonnie alone in his oversized innocence: Baum’s Bologna and Zinn’s Diner (figure 3.3) used similar cartoon Amish man-children to hawk their wares, and one of the

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figure 3.2. “Yonnie,” an advertisement for the Hotel Brunswick’s “Pennsylvania Dutch Week-Ends” in the mid-1950s. “So Fiel, So Gute, Far So Wennich,” wonders Yonnie—so much, so good, for so little.

more popular gifts sold at tourist attractions was the Amish doll that, although crafted with adult proportions, was soft enough to be cradled by a child.68 Picture books describing the Amish way of life also fell into this pattern of innocent children and childlike adults. Kiehl and Christian Newswanger’s Amishland, published in 1954, contained a hundred pages of etchings representing Amish life; although most of the drawings showed adults in their daily work, they were simplistic and somewhat cartoonish and, like the Brunswick’s advertisements, made the Amish appear a bit like children. The Newswangers’ style was artistry, not mockery; they wished “to interpret the Amish in a form that is visually related to their actual philosophy of life.” But the resulting simplicity and lack of individuality in their subjects made the Newswangers’ Amish resemble the faceless dolls that populated gift shops. The accompanying stories of the authors’ experiences with Amish friends and neighbors at times strengthened this impression. After a hard day and evening of work in the fields, the Newswangers recall, the Amish farmer “had us in for a treat—ice cream and cookies under the grape arbor.” Both the treat and its setting might seem more appropriate to a child’s birthday party than a break from physical labor; many of the Newswangers’ readers would have reached for a beer. To complete the scene, the Newswangers noted that “the first evening star had come out when I walked up the road to my house.” To mention wishing on it would be unnecessary; readers could fill that in for themselves—and besides, the residents of this idyllic world already had everything they could wish for.69 The emphasis on the Amish as innocents is reminiscent of portrayals of the noble savage, charmingly primitive, isolated from the modern world and innocent

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figure 3.3. “Amos,” a giant Amishman who speaks at the push of a button, welcomes travelers to Zinn's Diner off the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Denver. Photograph by the author.

of its ways. The noble savage of Romantic literature is unbound by civilization, drawing virtue directly from nature. Because the virtues of the noble savage had been thought to be the product and proof of civilization, his existence calls into question the value of civilization itself. Europeans from the sixteenth century onward liked to see the native peoples of the Americas in this way: idyllic, peaceful, naked, and innocent, with “natural intelligence” and virtue. Similar notions still thrived in the mid-twentieth century in the pages of National Geographic magazine, for example, where photographs of non-Western people presented the foreign as safe and familiar. Despite claims of authenticity, National Geographic’s photographs have always shown non-Westerners through distinctly Western eyes. Twentieth-century America is the standard by which all others are judged; “primitive” societies exist outside of time or are “developing” toward the modern, Western way of life. At the same time, the photographs and accompanying text tend to flatten out differences between those societies and our own, reassuring readers that the subjects are, deep down, just like us. As in popular portrayals of the Amish, differences in (for example) religious beliefs are simply glossed over; fundamental questions are neither raised nor answered. The reader is reassured, not challenged. Indeed, National Geographic profiled the Amish in 1965, with photographs and text nearly indistinguishable from those of any other magazine or tourist-booklet portrayal. The article was typically nostalgic, written by a for-

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mer Lancaster Countian, full of bland pronouncements that “the Amish never waste anything” and “life moves at horse pace in Amish country.” A typical caption noted “the warm brown eyes [that] reflect the gentle heritage of an Amish boy, who caresses a pet guinea pig.”70 The Amish were hardly noble savages (noble perhaps, savage no), but they fit the conventions well enough. Americans in the mid-twentieth century, like Americans and Europeans in centuries past, wanted to see themselves as the pinnacle of human history and civilization. Much of the rhetoric of the Cold War assumed this. Other societies must therefore be primitive and childlike by comparison to the maturity of Western civilization—or else, if they knew the value of American civilization and rejected it, they must be, like the Soviets, dangerous. If the postwar United States was the greatest society the world had ever produced, then the Amish, to live amidst it while rejecting its values, must be either subversives or innocents. Since Amish values seemed to be positive ones, they could not be seen as subversives—and subversion, particularly in the era of Joseph McCarthy, would not have made a suitable or popular tourist attraction. (Recall Ira Franck’s careful insistence that the Amish were not Communists.) Innocent, therefore, they must be.71 To portray the Amish as innocents not only made the Amish safe but also allowed tourists to avoid the responsibility of following their example. The Amish were made to represent values from the past that modern Americans had forsaken; their commitment to tradition, family, community, and God, as well as their apparent enjoyment of hard work, were held up as ideals for others to follow. But writers seeking to inspire their readers with the example of Amish life might, if they were not careful, start to sound like preachers delivering a jeremiad against the ills of modern life. The values the Amish represented were the core of their appeal, but tourists wanted to feel good about the Amish, not bad about themselves. Self-flagellation was out of vogue in postwar America, even in most religious settings, and certainly people didn’t want to spend their vacations bearing the guilt of their society. How, then, to preach without preaching, to communicate values without seeming holier-than-thou? One solution was to make children the conduit of wisdom. Consider, for example, the comic strip Peanuts. Charles Schulz, through the character of Linus, frequently quoted Scripture in his comic strips, and Linus himself often stood for common sense and lost innocence. An adult quoting Scripture might have seemed overbearing, but the wisdom of Peanuts came from the mouths of babes; Schulz could make his point without seeming to threaten the status quo. If the Amish, like Linus, were childishly innocent, then their wisdom, too, would be nonthreatening. And just as a child might innocently point out wrongdoing without a full understanding of the context in which it occurred, simple Amish people unfamiliar with modern society would not understand why tourists could not possibly emulate them. To see

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the Amish as children allowed tourists to admire the Amish way of life without feeling that they should necessarily adopt it. Even when the Amish were portrayed as adults, their society could still be made to seem childlike. Just as adults cannot return to their own childhoods, a society that has reached its maturity cannot return to an earlier stage of development and would thus be free of the burden of emulating it—however admirable it may have been. Postwar America did not need to look to another continent to find noble savages; it could find them in its own past. Davy Crockett, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, and the slew of similar television programs and movies produced in the 1950s promoted values from the middle-class American canon. The Amish, too, were often portrayed as modern frontiersmen, even though they had lived in the same place for three centuries and were as stable and constant a community as any in the United States. An Amish woman in a novel observed that her daughter would “be brought up like a pioneer.” The Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Festival was, at times, nearly indistinguishable from any other kind of American folk festival. The quilts, handicrafts, and traditional methods of farming shown to visitors could have been from any former frontier community in America, and many of the festival’s exhibits, such as the “Colonial Cherry Fair of 1776,” simply reflected a general American past. Colonial Williamsburg, too, resembled the “Dutch Country,” a living museum of America’s past that used history to teach present-day values. Visitors to Williamsburg in the 1950s saw a sanitized portrayal of unity and patriotism in the American Revolution that was meant to inspire similar virtues in the postwar era.72 But if Colonial Williamsburg was meant to inspire visitors to renew their commitments to traditional American values, the moral message of the Dutch Country was less clear. The Amish were apparently worthy of admiration, but as relics from America’s past they could not, reasonably, be emulated. They, and the rural way of life they represented, were essentially irrelevant to America’s present and future. Was this kind of tourism satisfying to the tourists? Sheer numbers suggested that it was. By 1960, tourists to Lancaster County numbered in the millions, and the deluge gave no sign of slowing. The number of repeat customers was also telling: hundreds if not thousands of people made the trip to Lancaster every year or two, and the steady stream of magazine articles about Amish and Pennsylvania Dutch life continued well into the 1960s. Yet the number of tourists who returned to Lancaster also suggests, on the contrary, that even increasingly “authentic” depictions of Amish life failed to satisfy many tourists for long. Repeat visitors, one suspects, were looking for something that tourism in its present form could not possibly supply. Had curiosity or entertainment been the chief draws, tourists would have been satisfied with a single visit, or would at least have been satisfied with attractions that were obviously staged. But interest in the Dutch Country was not about to die out. The Amish way of life and the rural her-

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figure 3.4. The Village Store in Bird in Hand, like many gift shops, merges the Amish motif into a seamless display of Americana for tourists. Here, 1950s-era gas pumps rust uselessly in front of a store designed to resemble a barn, complete with hex signs. Photograph by the author.

itage it represented resonated too deeply with postwar Americans. For many tourists, a visit to Lancaster County was more than metaphorically a pilgrimage, and in the coming decades more and more pilgrims would come to Lancaster in search of more and more authentic experiences of rurality. However much money could be made piquing sideshow curiosity and providing cheap entertainment, Amish tourism had tapped into a far deeper desire in postwar America than mere entertainment could satisfy. The impact of all this attention on Lancaster County was, as yet, unclear. By the early 1960s, the county was widely associated with the Plain people; promoters within and writers without rarely failed to note, when discussing Lancaster County, that it was the home of the Amish. “Pennsylvania Dutch,” too, was becoming nearly synonymous with “Amish” in popular parlance; the two terms were used interchangeably in many magazine articles, and when writers tried to explain the difference between them, they often did so incorrectly. The version of traditional Pennsylvania Dutch life presented at the Folk Festival or in magazine articles so closely resembled common portrayals of the Amish that the distinction was easily lost. The result was that both Lancaster County and the Pennsylvania German people were increasingly identified with a way of life that no longer existed. The Amish were seen as a people out of time, living relics of a bygone age. The dwindling response to the Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center’s research

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efforts suggests that folklife was coming to be seen as a relic even by the people who still lived it. Amish tourism had completed the work of Pennsylvania German writers in the 1930s, coating the Pennsylvania German people and their home with nostalgia and turning their culture into a museum exhibit rather than a living folklife. If there was a place for the real Dutch Country in the second half of the twentieth century, it was unclear what it might be. And if Lancaster’s rural nature, the very existence of the Garden Spot, was tied up with the presence of the Amish, what about non-Amish farmers who tried to improve their farming and their way of life with the technological innovations of modern America? Popular portrayals of the Amish associated not only the Amish way of life but by extension rurality itself with innocence and, therefore, with the past. Just as the view of Amish as living history absolved tourists of the responsibility to take Amish values seriously, the equation of rurality with the past would seem to absolve Americans of the responsibility to take rural people and rural communities seriously. The invention of Dutch Country was both a product and a cause of that association between rurality and the past—and it would make things more difficult than ever for Lancaster Countians trying to define a future for the Garden Spot.

✸ 4

DOMAIN OF ABUNDANCE Food and Farming

We have always had a feeling that there is something basically sound about having a good portion of our people on the land. Country living produces better people. The country is a good place to rear a family. It is a good place to teach the basic virtues that have helped to build this nation.Young people on a farm learn how to work, how to be thrifty and how to do things with their hands. It has given millions the finest preparation for life.—Secretary of Agriculture EZRA TAFT BENSON, 1960 Unfortunately for agriculture, its loudest and most conspicuous admirers are constantly lavishing upon it expressions of respect, while, at the same time, they disdain the idea of proving their sincerity by any act whatever.They admire the profession but advise their sons to pursue another.—Southern Cultivator, 1846

In 1943, Life magazine featured a photo essay entitled “Spring on the Farm in Pennsylvania” depicting an idyllic family farm. The central photograph, “The Barnyard Comes to Life,” suggested all the harmony of man and nature described in any back-to-the-land book. The farmer, his dog panting happily behind, attends a team of draft horses; behind them, cows graze in a meadow fenced in white pickets. A sow leads her piglets past the corner of the fence. “Here the men and horses start out early,” the text reminds us. “Cows that have been penned up in stalls during the cold months come out in the barnyard to get a whiff of sunshine and the good green grass to come. Chickens and ducks wander in and out;

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sometimes a mother sow parades her brood along the fence. And over and around everything are the warm sun and the earthy odors of spring.” Nothing in the photographs or the accompanying text suggested that the way of life shown was passing; this was meant to be simply a typical farm in southeastern Pennsylvania. The star of the piece was not even Amish.1 Sixteen years later, Life ran a very different photo essay, titled simply “The Farm Problem.” The “problem” was a combination of massive farm surpluses, federal incentives to farmers, and exploding technology, a combination that the magazine charged was making big farmers filthy rich and putting small ones out of business. The idyllic farmstead of the spring of 1943 was replaced by photographs of a self-propelled cotton picker (“Mechanical Monster”) and a “Millionaire Farmer” standing at the door to his mansion in Fresno, California. Life’s sympathies remained with the small farmer, but only wistfully, for he represented “a class which must eventually leave the land.”2 For Lancaster’s farmers—Amish and not—agricultural progress and timehonored methods of farming had always gone hand in hand. Yet even in Lancaster, farming changed in dramatic ways between 1943 and 1959. Federal assistance to farmers became a way of life rather than a temporary expedient to solve the problems of the Great Depression. Tractors became the rule rather than the exception. By the early 1960s, a bevy of gasoline-powered farm implements were in the fields or on the horizon, along with hybrid seed and chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. The combination of technology and federal aid programs particularly aided large-scale farmers, and in the 1950s the average size of farms in the United States grew dramatically while the number of farmers plummeted. The trend was not as evident in Lancaster as in the Midwest, but even there the number of farms and their total acreage declined. Not even the Amish, however hard they tried to remain unaffected, were immune from these changes. In the mid-1950s, Farm Journal rejected Lancaster County as a home for its new model electrified farm because the county was already too thoroughly modern. Despite the region’s popular reputation for tradition, the editors explained, “people expect to find such [modern] things in Lancaster County.”3 While the American family farmer scrambled to keep pace with technological innovation and with his neighbor’s production, however, popular impressions of farming lagged behind. Until the early twentieth century, the farmer had been the symbol of rural America, industrious, religious, living frugally and simply on the land. But by mid-century, the farmer seemed an increasingly irrelevant figure to most Americans, who, in general, had no personal memories of growing up on farms, as previous generations of urbanites had. What was more, farmers themselves had changed, adopting big machines and modern business practices, and they no longer made a suitable symbol of the idyllic rural Arcadia of urban dreams.

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Americans from cities and suburbs instead remade the country in their own image—and food, rather than farming itself, became the focal point of their idealizations. Just as they saw consumer abundance and domestic harmony as proof of American greatness, they also found these domestic and consumer values in their idealizations of rural America. If modern farming failed to fit the bill, the produce of farms still could. After all, nothing summed up domesticity and abundance better than big family dinners—and these, it turned out, were in good supply in the Pennsylvania Dutch Country. Tourists to Lancaster County and readers of popular magazines nationwide eagerly accepted the idea that Pennsylvania Dutch food embodied all of the values associated with traditional farming and the country. As a result, it was Pennsylvania Dutch food, not the Pennsylvania Dutch farmer, that came to symbolize the region’s rural character. But “country cooking,” both in urban imaginations and on rural dinner tables, was becoming a creature of the city. By the 1960s, the image of the Garden Spot was changing from one of rural production to one of urban consumption.

The Pennsylvania German Family Farmer Popular ideas about farmers and their value to a democratic society had changed little between the American Revolution and the Second World War, certainly in comparison to farmers themselves. Commentators on the nation’s agriculture continued to hold up the family farmer as vital both to democracy and to progress. Even as the family farmer appeared perilously close to extinction in the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, could proclaim that “young people on a farm learn how to work, how to be thrifty and how to do things with their hands. It has given millions the finest preparation for life.” O. E. Baker of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Agricultural Economics and Rural Welfare similarly insisted that “continuity of family proprietorship in farming is essential . . . to the integrity of the family [and] the preservation of democracy.” And a correspondent to the Lancaster Sunday News, bemoaning the lack of individual responsibility and resourcefulness in the world of 1950, held up the family farmer as an exception: “He plows his own field, keeps his own accounts, sends his daughter to the college he helped to build. . . . I hate the thought of his leaving the scene. We can’t all move in with him but we’ve got to learn what he’s got and go after it.” The farmer this correspondent described was traditional in many ways, but if he also sent his daughter (not his son!) to college, he clearly had the best of the new and the old.4 With the revival of interest in Pennsylvania German folk culture in the 1930s and 1940s, there was a similar blossoming of interest in the Pennsylvania German family farmer. More than a few mid-century studies of American and Pennsylvania agriculture singled out the Germans for praise. Stevenson Whitcomb Fletcher,

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who produced a two-volume study of rural Pennsylvania in the early 1950s, pointed out that although few farmers prior to 1800 bothered to keep up the quality of their soils, most of those who did were Germans. They built large, solid barns for their livestock even in harsh frontier conditions, he argued, and conserved the manure for prodigious application on their fields. Similarly, a Pennsylvania German writer argued that throughout American history no segment of the population of our country has been as intimately, as continuously, and as productively associated with agriculture as the Pennsylvania Germans. . . . The Pennsylvania Germans were trained by their ancestors to love the life of an independent farmer. Upon arrival in Pennsylvania they practiced, to some extent, conservation of top soil on steep hillsides, and rotated crops long before the days of scientific agriculture. Pennsylvania German preeminence in agriculture resulted in part from their belief in and practice of one of their own axioms, “Fertility stored in the soil can create greater economic security than money stored in the bank.”5 But it was not only Pennsylvania Germans who promoted their people as paragons of agricultural virtue. That Pennsylvania German farmers were as able as any in the country, and perhaps in the world, seemed an article of faith among those who committed their opinions to paper. Their prowess was attributed in large part to their progressive methods. Lancaster’s German farmers were among the first to plant red clover, which restored nitrogen to the soil; they practiced, almost from first settlement, diversified agriculture and crop rotation; and their concern for their livestock and for the value of its manure was legendary. However conservative the Germans might have been generally, they “have always been quick to accept new developments in farming, new kinds of agricultural machinery, new ways of fertilizing land, new breeds of stock, new grains and grasses and varieties of fruit.”6 Even the Amish, so conservative in many respects, were seen as not only able but progressive farmers. In the early 1940s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture commissioned a series of studies of American rural communities, looking at factors that made them stable or unstable. A Dust Bowl community in Kansas was chosen as the extreme of instability; the Old Order Amish of Lancaster County were the model of stability. Walter M. Kollmorgen, who studied the Amish, had little but praise for their agriculture. Although they had remained “old order” with respect to social and religious practices, he noted, “In agriculture the old order really means the new order.” The Plain people “epitomize the good farming practices for which the Pennsylvania Germans have long been famous,” having been the first farmers to adopt diversified farming, crop rotation, manuring, lime, and the cultivation of red clover. Today, Kollmorgen insisted, Amish farmers

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“have long ceased to register nostalgia for a self-sufficient form of farming,” and they “definitely want to participate” in commercial agriculture. Except for tractors, “they use the latest and best farm machinery. . . . The more usual kinds of farm implements are adopted as soon as they prove to be practical. Devices that save work are usually as popular in this community as in other farming sections.” Kollmorgen, in making his study of the Amish, seems to have developed a genuine fondness for them and made a heroic effort to portray them as anything but backward. Still, it was clear that their refusal to use tractors bothered him. Their concerns about compaction of land, wasting land at the corners of fields, and depreciation of equipment, he argued, had been rendered “obsolete” by “the improved tractor of today,” and he expressed some hope that the ban on self-propelled machinery would soon be lifted.7 As much as Pennsylvania German farmers were praised for their eager and “progressive” adoption of new techniques, however, they were more often singled out for their maintenance of tradition and traditional agrarian virtues. The traditional Pennsylvania German farmer was naturally independent, as Cornelius Weygandt observed: We have stuck to the farm more faithfully than any other stock in America. That faithfulness has been due as much, I think, to our love of doing what we want to do in our own way, as to our innate love of the soil. Though the farmer may be a slave to his farm he is freer of the domination of his fellow men than any other man in modern life. Yesterday, when he spun his own flax, wove his own woolen cloth, and tanned his own leather, he was still freer.8 To be independent required self-sufficiency, and the Pennsylvania German farmer had that as well, possessing livestock, vegetable gardens, fields of wheat and corn, fruit orchards, a smokehouse, and virtually everything else necessary for the sustenance of his family, while his wife worked nonstop to preserve and prepare this bounty. A National Geographic photograph of an Amish farm showed that “Monday’s Apples Make Tuesday’s Cider for Wednesday’s Apple Butter.” A local study of the “Pennsylvania German Family Farm” described twentyfive separate structures in addition to the farmhouse necessary to the work of an ideal family farm. Agricultural bounty could be produced only with the hard work of the entire family, of course; on self-sufficient nineteenth-century farms, “The boys and girls helped to do the milking, by hand, morning and evening and gained a feeling of accomplishment and developed a sense of responsibility.” This was more than just a grudging acceptance of work; the Pennsylvania Germans had “a love for hard manual labor on the farm above that possessed by any other Americans.” Family members must also possess a frugal spirit, or “thrift and economy which are more appealing terms than stinginess,” as one writer put it, so

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as not to waste any scrap that might be put to use. Farm folk must certainly be religious, in part to supply them with the strength necessary to survive the struggles of farming. They must be neighborly, willing to extend a helping hand in exchange for the promise of one similarly extended in their own time of need—as witnessed by the Amish barn raising. And to continue farming the same land for generations, to desire to pass that land to one’s children in better condition than one inherited it, required a tremendous commitment not only to the land but to family, tradition, and a sense of place.9 The sum of these attributes was harmony—between the individual and the community, family, nature, and God; harmony between tradition and the needs of the present. Even the self-sufficiency and independent spirit of the farmer did not conflict with this harmony, because it was harmony that produced household and community independence. Life magazine’s photographic portrayal of “Spring on a Farm in Pennsylvania” displayed that harmony as fully and as succinctly as it could have been portrayed, and without involving even a single Amishman. In one photograph, farm children peer grinning from a row of milking stalls, each busily milking his or her own cow—the whole family works together, and works hard, but they love their work and find it its own reward. On another page, a farmer happily cradles two prize piglets; the caption points out the animals’ markings, which prove their pedigree—evidence of “progressive” farming. The pigs would one day be someone’s breakfast, of course, but that fact could be ignored for the time being to feature the happy relationship between man and animal. Apple trees drooping with blossoms, cornfields stretching to the horizon, and still more contented livestock displayed the bounty that all this hard work and clean living produces. The centerpiece of the photo essay showed a variety of animals—ducks, pigs, cows, horses—eagerly stepping out into the first warm day of spring. Even the pigs suggest family, for the mother sow is leading her offspring across the barnyard. Noah, sadly, is absent from the picture.10 By about 1950, this image of the traditional Pennsylvania German family farm—as a haven of peace and plenty based on “diligent industry” and traditional virtues—was more or less fixed.11 The sum of all these attributes, of course, had probably never existed in any one man or family or farm, and probably not at any one time. It certainly did not exist in 1950. Indeed, by the Second World War, even the Amish were changing. Kollmorgen observed in 1941 that among Plain farmers, Self-sufficiency is in retreat. In the summer of 1939, five commercial bakers had bread routes running through the Amish community. . . . Grocery trucks and even meat trucks pass through the community to serve numerous customers. During the apple and peach seasons, fruit vendors come up to the Amish houses confident of making sales. The grocer is selling the Amish farmer more and more canned vegetables.

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It was still not unusual for an Amish farmwife to can 500 to 700 quarts of fruits and vegetables, plus apple butter, jellies, and dried apples, beans, and corn. But the economic argument for buying those products instead of producing them at home was starting to win out.12 The old idealizations of family farming persisted, but in the postwar years, changes in real-life agriculture would force it to adapt.

The Second Agricultural Revolution By the Second World War, the traditional family farmer was changing almost beyond recognition. One agricultural historian has called the mid-twentieth century “the great disjuncture” in American agriculture, a period when so much change occurred so rapidly that it rivals the so-called Agricultural Revolution of sixteenth-century Europe. The Second Agricultural Revolution began with mechanization. Already by the turn of the twentieth century, Lancaster County farmers were using steam and gasoline engines for threshing and grinding grain, sawing wood, and pumping water. International Harvester produced a clumsy tractor in 1906, and four years later, the first “sodpacker” appeared on a Lancaster County farm. The shift from draft horses to tractors began slowly. Early tractors were too large for small farms; they packed the soil and were difficult to maneuver. By 1920, only 3.6 percent of American farmers owned one. But as tractors improved, growing lighter and sporting rubber tires to avoid compacting the soil, their numbers began to grow. Nearly one in four American farmers owned a tractor by 1940, and in the decade that followed, the number of workhorses in Lancaster County fell by half. At the same time, companies like International Harvester and John Deere began to produce machines and equipment specially designed to be powered and pulled by tractors. More than just an iron horse, the tractor became a source of power for plowing, cultivating, and harvesting crops quickly and efficiently. Other machines, such as mechanical milking machines and refrigerated milk tanks, soon followed. By the 1950s, gasoline-powered agriculture was the rule rather than the exception on American farms.13 It was also between the wars that the efforts of agricultural scientists to improve the productivity of crops and livestock began to take off. Henry A. Wallace, who later became Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture, developed the first hybrid strain of corn, which was more resistant to insects and diseases than open-pollinated varieties. The new corn produced up to 20 percent more per acre than the old varieties, and by 1940 some three-quarters of farmers had adopted it. Similar improvements were being made in other crops, as well as in livestock; dairy cows now produced more milk, and leaner hogs were raised for consumers who no longer made soap and sausage from the excess fat. The first chemical fertilizers, insecticides, and fungicides appeared on the market in the 1920s, although it was not until after World War II that such chemicals became

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commonplace. Between 1945 and 1960, the use of chemical fertilizer tripled on American farms, accompanied by new herbicides that killed the weed but not the crop and stronger pesticides such as DDT. By 1952, annual sales of agricultural chemicals topped $300 million. Crops were bred for durability to resist the trials of mechanical harvesting, and larger, faster, more powerful machines were developed for nearly every farm task. A revolution had taken place in agriculture, utterly transforming—and in less than half a century.14 The impact of the new technology was even more dramatic than it first appeared. Crop yields skyrocketed, as expected. But increased yields did not necessarily mean increased profits for farmers; if the supply of corn rises faster than demand, the price must inevitably drop. Ironically, then, the more productive farmers became, the more difficult they found it to remain in business. Commercial farmers have always faced this problem, of course. The tobacco planters of colonial Virginia struggled throughout the eighteenth century with the problem of overproduction and chronically low prices.15 The Populists, at the end of the nineteenth century, had also grappled with the problem of overproduction. The hurdle that farmers had always faced was one of organization; farming was a solitary business, and unless farmers could organize, there was no way to guarantee that they would respect limits on production. In such a climate of uncertainty, it is always safest for any one farmer to assume that his neighbor is trying to outproduce him and to do unto others as they will inevitably do unto you. Not until the Depression, when agricultural prices hit rock-bottom, did American farmers organize themselves sufficiently to obtain help from the federal government. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1933 restricted production of cotton, wheat, corn, hogs, tobacco, rice, and dairy products to raise the prices of these basic commodities and compensated farmers for their immediate losses. Although the AAA, like so much of the New Deal, was intended as a temporary expedient, it was later expanded to cover other crops and was supplemented by the establishment of the Commodity Credit Corporation, which granted loans on stored wheat, cotton, corn, and soybeans to keep surpluses off the market. A series of additional programs provided easy credit for farmers to buy and keep land. By 1940, this combination of stopgap measures had solidified into a permanent farm assistance program.16 The combination of technological improvements and federal farm programs proved to be self-defeating, however. While the latter restricted acreage, the former increased yields per acre, and overall agricultural production continued to rise. By the 1950s, the “farm problem” was worse than ever. Acreage restrictions spurred greater use of technology to increase per-acre yields, while increases in yields held prices down and made farmers yelp for more federal aid. Total farm output rose 25 percent in the 1940s, 20 percent in the 1950s, and another 17 percent in the 1960s. Between 1951 and 1956, agricultural prices fell 23 percent while non-

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farm prices remained steady. Farmers complained that they were in effect subsidizing the rest of the economy by keeping overall inflation down. Small-scale commercial farmers, the majority of “family farmers,” found it increasingly difficult to compete in such an economic environment. To make matters worse, both the federal programs and the technological changes in agriculture benefited larger producers. Cash payments for surpluses did nothing for small producers with no land to spare, and loans helped mainly those farmers looking to expand. Technology was expensive, and the more powerful the technology the more expensive it was. A tractor was not cost-effective on only a few acres, let alone a self-propelled combine, but large farmers with big machines could out-produce small farmers without. Competitive advantages multiplied: the farmer who was first to embrace a new technology could out-produce his neighbors, buy them out, and expand his acreage and thus his production, allowing him to purchase even newer and more expensive technology. The new agricultural technology produced a massive economy of scale that forced farmers, as Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson told them, to “get big or get out.” (Or, as then–assistant secretary and future secretary of agriculture Earl Butz put it, “Adapt or die.”) The result was what economic historian Willard Cochrane calls “a selective wringing-out process” in American agriculture. Nationwide, the average farm size rose from 174 to 303 acres between 1940 and 1960, while the number of people living on farms fell by half and the fraction of farmers in the U.S. population dropped from nearly one in four to fewer than one in ten.17 As the size of farms increased and their numbers dropped across the country, other changes were taking place in agricultural communities, changes that undermined the values that farmers had always seemed to represent. Machines and chemicals reduced the amount of labor required on farms, so that an entire family was no longer needed to make a farm productive. Farmwives became housewives and, like other women in the 1950s and 1960s, began to seek off-farm employment. Even many men could not afford to farm full-time and took part- or full-time jobs in nearby factories. Diversified commercial farming became nearly impossible; a farmer could afford the fixed costs associated with, say, dairying or raising hogs, but not both. Just as technology reduced overall demands for agricultural labor, monoculture farming concentrated those demands: if the entire crop of a given farm is to be harvested in a span of three weeks, the farmer needs many workers for those three weeks, and few or none the other forty-nine. As a result, in many agricultural regions, the year-round hired hand was replaced by the migrant worker. As farmers and farm laborers left small towns, so did the people who had served and supported them, and many agricultural communities were dwindling by the late 1960s. At the same time, national marketing was replacing local sales. Vegetable farmers in New Jersey, for example, contracted with Campbell’s to provide huge amounts of a particular crop for processing into

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soup. In such arrangements, the processing and marketing firms often dictated the crop varieties, fertilizers, and pesticides to be used; the farmer was no longer fully responsible for managing his own farm.18 These changes did not take place all at once, of course. Some were under way by the 1930s, while others did not become evident until the 1980s. By the mid1950s, however, the change was clear enough to worry Americans who clung to the belief that the family farm was a unique and vital institution. If the family farm represented family, community, and self-sufficiency, the new agriculture seemed to stand for precisely the opposite. But the contrast between the mythical family farmer and the millionaire agribusinessman with his hand out to Washington made it difficult for many Americans to sympathize with the plight of farmers. Farmers received the lion’s share of the blame for what consumers considered to be high food prices in the 1950s, and Secretary of Agriculture Benson urged Congress to get the government out of agriculture and return it to a free market.19 Yet at the same time, those who backed price supports relied on images of the family farm to win votes. A public debate over the “farm problem” continued throughout the decade, focusing on the growing threat to family farms. In 1955, the House Agriculture Committee created a subcommittee on family farms “to make a special study of the ways and means to protect, foster, and promote the family farm as the continuing dominant unit in American agriculture.” The result was an amendment to the statutes that had created the nation’s land-grant college system, providing for allocations to “Disadvantaged Rural Areas.” The aid would have helped struggling farm families mainly to “get big or get out,” but as it happened, no funds were ever allocated for the purpose.20 If the subcommittee accomplished little beyond public relations, its efforts nevertheless reflected the depth of Americans’ devotion to the traditional family farm. Agricultural economists could argue that small farmers were inefficient and should find other work: such cold logic, however, ran counter to the convictions of most Americans. The extent to which family farming appeared to be threatened in the 1950s also contributed to the growth of tourism in Lancaster County, which seemed to many a bastion of agrarian tradition. True, the developments that transformed American agriculture between 1945 and 1970 had an impact there, as well; even the Amish could not entirely resist economic pressures. Agriculture remained Lancaster’s largest industry, but the number of farms in the county dropped from nearly 8,500 in 1940 to fewer than 6,000 in 1966, while average farm size grew from 60 to 75 acres. Farmers in Lancaster County were, for the most part, as receptive as any to agricultural innovations, and the period from the 1920s to the 1950s brought massive change. Prior to World War II, most farm families in Lancaster retained a measure of self-sufficiency, raising their own grains, vegetables, hogs, dairy cows, and chickens in addition to cash crops such as tobacco. By the 1950s, however, self-sufficiency was in retreat there as elsewhere, replaced by

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more market-oriented production. In the 1920s, most farmers still relied on horses or mules; by 1950, three farmers in five owned self-propelled tractors. By 1964, four in five used them—virtually all of Lancaster’s non-Amish farmers. By contrast, only 10 percent resisted using chemical fertilizers, which were not banned by any sect; fewer, but still nearly half, used pesticides on crops. Milking machines replaced the traditional twice-a-day milking by hand on dairy farms. About a quarter of all farmers farmed on the contour to protect against soil erosion, a practice that not only required them to rethink the way they managed their land but also altered the rural landscape, as strips of crops along rolling hillsides replaced rectangular plots. To many, the result appeared less carefully planned, but the rural observer knew better. Rural lifestyles, too, were changing rapidly. By 1950, rural electrification had reached nearly all farmers whose religion permitted it, and about as many farms had telephones. By the mid-1960s, two-thirds of the county’s farmers owned at least one automobile, and almost half owned a television.21 Lancaster Countians not only used the new farm technology but took the lead in producing it. The New Holland Machine Company, a “small, run-down machine shop on a side street” in the village of New Holland, had been founded in the late nineteenth century and by the 1930s was turning out a variety of gas and electric lawn mowers, conveyors, feed mills, and other machines for local farmers. New ownership and a new invention—one designed specifically for the needs of local farmers—propelled the shop into national prominence in the 1940s. A local Mennonite, Edwin Nolt, had been a thresherman since he was seventeen years old, making the rounds of local farms each season to cut wheat. In 1936, he sold his thresher and bought a combine, but the new machine left the wheat straw all over the ground with no good way to pick it up. That was fine for dairy farmers with tractors; cows, with no upper teeth, couldn’t chew the tough straw anyway. Amish and Mennonite farmers, however, needed the wheat straw as winter fodder for their horses and mules. To save his business, Nolt took a small mass-produced baler, made adjustments to it in his barn over the winter, and by spring had produced an easy-to-use baler designed to be pulled by horses. Four years later, he sold the patent to the New Holland Machine Company, and his baler gained the local company a national market. Although it was bought by the Sperry Corporation in 1947, the business remained locally run until the 1970s. Its product line showed its Lancaster County roots, including a wide range of machines to improve management of pasturelands for raising livestock. By 1960, the company had more than 2,000 employees and $70 million in annual sales.22 Only the Old Order Amish resisted tractors and other self-propelled farm machinery, and then with a compromise. Since the 1920s, the Amish had permitted tractors to be used to power other machinery, but only inside barns; no self-propelled machinery was allowed. Diesel-powered machines for field use must be

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pulled by horses. The conversion from horses to tractors, bishops maintained, would displace labor and undermine the communal nature of farmwork. No such argument, however, could be made against agricultural chemicals, hybrid seeds, or improved methods of cultivation. And, like other farmers, the Amish found it necessary to specialize in the postwar years; in Lancaster, most focused on dairying. Specialization required another compromise: in 1968, dairy companies told Amish farmers that, for reasons of sanitation, they must store milk in bulk refrigerated tanks with automatic stirrers to prevent the cream from rising and inviting bacterial growth. The Amish avoided connecting their homes to electric power lines by using diesel generators to cool the milk and to charge batteries that powered the automatic switch for the stirrers.23 In general, though, Amish farms still conformed more or less to the traditional model of family farming. They were small, family owned and operated, and more self-sufficient at least than most non-Amish farms. Their continued reliance on horses in particular made the Amish look like traditional farmers, whatever mechanical and chemical supplements they might have adopted. In addition, Lancaster’s farms were less susceptible to the ravages of agribusiness than midwestern or southern farms. Most of the new machines for field work aided in the production of cereal crops or cotton. Cotton, of course, was never grown in Pennsylvania, and Lancaster’s farms had for a hundred years been too small to compete with midwestern corn and wheat growers. The bulk of Lancaster’s agricultural income now came from dairy products and poultry, which, though they were being transformed by technological innovation, could be produced on small farms with purchased feed. The same was true of tobacco, still an important cash crop, which remained far more labor-intensive than other staples and thus more profitable on small acreages. Even more labor-intensive was the cultivation of fresh fruits and vegetables for local markets, which—thanks in part to tourism—remained vital, though fewer farmers each year sold their wares there.24 Because growers at farmers’ markets and roadside stands sold directly to the consumer, quality remained more important than sheer quantity, and there is no economy of scale in growing a wide variety of high-quality fruits and vegetables. It is interesting to note that dairy farming and “truck farming” (the cultivation of vegetables to be trucked to nearby cities) had developed in Lancaster County because of its proximity to urban markets. Unlike corn and cotton, milk and tomatoes cannot survive long storage or slow shipment to distant cities. Somewhat ironically, then, city-based farmers’ markets played an important role in keeping Lancaster County rural.

Farmers’ Markets If Lancaster’s farmers’ markets were increasingly vital to keeping the county rural, they played an even more important role in keeping up the appearance of rurality,

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especially for tourists. Farmers’ markets had always been among the city’s main attractions and a point of pride for residents. Lancaster’s Central Market was established in 1730 and was maintained by order of the borough’s charter granted by George II twelve years later. The borough’s burgesses, and later the city council, maintained the structure of the market at public expense, as the council still does today. As the population of the city grew throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so did the market, and by the 1880s, four competing private markets had sprung up in Lancaster’s four quarters, the Northern, Eastern, Western, and Southern. In 1907, a sixth market, the Fulton, opened, and the demand for produce was so high that curbside markets were also licensed by the city. Lancaster’s markets were unusually long-lived; by 1918, only 237 municipal farmers’ markets in 128 cities remained open in the entire nation. After the First World War, however, the spread of automobiles, refrigeration, and neighborhood grocery stores lessened the need for the farmers’ markets, even in Lancaster. The curbside markets were discontinued in 1927 for reasons of sanitation, and the private markets slowly went out of business, the last converting to a modern supermarket in 1965. One, the Southern, survived by operating at public expense—a burden the taxpayers happily accepted to keep the market open. There was not enough business to keep the market profitable any longer, but Lancastrians could not bear to see it go.25 Not surprisingly, as the markets began shrinking in the years before World War II, Lancastrians responded with an outpouring of sentiment for them. One former resident, writing on the eve of the closing of the curb markets in 1926, lamented their decline. He marveled at the service he received from the market folk, mostly Plain people who, despite their generosity, gave every appearance of prosperity. The vendors were “as interested in my picayune purchase as if I had bought an ox. . . . I looked for irony on the faces of the broad-brims, at so much fuss over nothing, but I did not find it there.” Another local man, writing after the war, boasted that “every bit of garden and farm produce brought in from the fertile fields are of choicest and freshest quality. The thriftiness and resourcefulness of the Lancaster County ‘Dutch’ farmers made all the land . . . bring forth the finest fruit and food for human consumption.”26 With similar purpose but more poetry, Bernice Steinfeldt described for tourists the produce at Amish market stalls: Crisp green heads of lettuce are piled at one end of the counter, with darkgreen topped bunches of scrubbed carrots next; beside these are evenly matched stalks of white celery fastened together with bright red string, nearly the shade of the luscious tomatoes next to them. Perhaps some young spring chickens, immaculately cleaned and trimmed with sprigs of parsley, are placed next, with gay bouquets of yellow and pink flowers in tall vases to

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provide a climax for the front row display. . . . Sometimes there are big, red, juicy apples, roughly shaped packages of home-churned butter, and real country cheese. And this was not to mention the cakes, pies, schnitz, Lebanon bologna, and homemade potato chips also available. Of course, she concluded, “The purchaser is confident he is buying fresh foods without the farmer’s assurance.”27 What else would one expect from a Pennsylvania German family farmer? Lancaster’s farmers’ markets had always been one of the city’s main attractions, but as the boom in tourism began just prior to World War II, they became a mecca for outlanders seeking evidence of traditional farm life. Travel promoters were careful to point out market days (Wednesday and Saturday) so tourists could plan their visit to the city accordingly. Nearly everyone who wrote about the Amish or Lancaster County waxed poetic about the glorious bounty of produce available, and long catalogs of vegetables, fruits, meats, dairy products, and baked goods became ubiquitous in tourist literature. Some observers could hardly believe it was real: Look at those apples shining as though individually and painstakingly polished; crisp, cool lettuce having a handled-with-white-gloves freshness about it; big tomatoes, red and firm, glistening like clever wax copies; gourds and pumpkins, fresh and full, glowing like plump children just out of the tub.28 Others, more knowledgeable about what to do with this bounty, were already thinking of the table: Piles of apples—summer rambo, smokehouse, winesap, each according to its season; boxes of little white onions, all peeled and ready to pop into the pot; tender, succulent sugar peas to be boiled in the pod; rich, brown apple butter, smelling of spice and sassafras. . . . Fat Lebanon bolognas and ropes of sausages; shellbark meats and kernels of black walnuts; sweet-apple schnitz and dried corn; homemade bread fresh from a farm bake oven; the Dutch coffeecakes in all their glory—crumb cakes, potato buns, shoofly pies, and even schwenkfelders and fastnachts.29 Most, however, simply wondered at the beauty, freshness, variety, and abundance of it all. Artists, too, found the farmers’ markets a choice subject. In William Gropper’s 1948 painting Ephrata Market, a crowd of Amish and Mennonites bustles about, buying and selling, unloading produce from wagons, showing, as the artist said, the region’s “spirit of peace and plenty.”30 A few years later, a local reporter found two New York artists sitting in Central Market, painting the farmers and their produce.31

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That visitors to Lancaster should be drawn to its farmers’ markets was nothing new, but the new emphasis on the produce for sale suggests a shift in priorities. To describe in such glowing terms an array of fresh vegetables suggests that one is not used to seeing them—certainly that one does not grow them oneself. By contrast, visitors to local farmers’ markets in previous centuries and decades had a ready context for what they saw. Although they may have been urbanites, they were likely to be only a generation or two removed from the farm and would have had an intimate knowledge of farming. Even if they lacked personal memories of farm life, agriculture pervaded American culture and society; farmers did not become a minority until after the Civil War. By the mid-twentieth century, however, with personal memories (if not cultural ones) of family farming receding, farmers’ markets were often the primary contact urbanites and tourists made with real farmers. Visitors touring the “Amish Country” might have seen Amish farmers working in their fields, but only at a distance. They might have toured the Amish Farm and House, or in special cases even a real, working Amish farm, but the emphasis of such tours was on Amish culture and tradition, not on the actual work of farming. At a farmers’ market, the farmer (or the farmer’s wife or children) appeared only as vendor, not as producer. That the produce was more important than the producer is clear from the descriptions of the markets, which focused almost exclusively on the food. Farmers, by contrast, were mentioned only in as much as they were “picturesque” or interested in giving the customer a good deal; few authors discussed farmers’ markets in the context of farming. This emphasis on food rather than on agriculture in effect removed the farmer, culturally speaking, from the farm. Lancaster was again becoming the “Garden Spot” in the biblical sense, of an Edenic land where fruit sprang from the earth without toil and sat on the market stand, ready for the picking; a “country of ‘fatness,’” as one visitor said, in “the fine, Old Testament sense,” or even a “land of milk and honey”—a gift from heaven, not the product of human labor. Or, if one was not quite so religious, one might opt for the passive voice, as a magazine correspondent did in observing that Lancaster’s “well-watered farms, fertilized and guarded against soil erosion for centuries, have improved with the passage of time” (emphasis added).32 This shift in perspective allowed observers to forget the changes in American agriculture, even in Amish agriculture, and hold on to the ideal of the Pennsylvania Dutch family farmer. Tractors, petrochemicals, and millionaire agribusinessmen might jolt one out of one’s cherished beliefs about farming; they were concrete, present, and active, with unavoidable (if still debatable) implications for the family farmer and for society. Food, however, remained spiritually malleable. Food was a still life, capable of representing whatever values the viewer desired. Its origins remained hidden behind a pleasant facade of crisp, cool lettuce and glistening tomatoes. If the food produced by farmers looked the same, it was easy enough to believe that farming was the same.

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Agriculture was fading into the background; what remained was, as one travel writer put it, merely a “Domain of Abundance.”33

Country Cooking Farmers’ markets were wonderful proof of the region’s agricultural bounty, but as a symbol of abundance and agrarian virtue they could reach only so many people. Not every tourist to Lancaster County visited the city markets, despite the advice of travel literature. Millions more only read about Lancaster or the Amish in popular magazines, never seeing the markets in person, and even the most sensuous prose was a poor substitute for firsthand experience. But if fresh produce could not always travel, recipes could. Readers in New York or Chicago or California could reproduce Pennsylvania Dutch cooking at home, even if they could not experience the sight and smell of fresh-picked vegetables from Pennsylvania Dutch farms. Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine was not only a moveable feast but also a culturally malleable one, even more so than fresh produce. Urbanites eating shoofly pie, whether in a Lancaster restaurant or a New York apartment, were free to imagine almost anything they liked about the rural culture that had created it. In restaurants or at home, unlike in farmers’ markets, real-life farmers were not present to spoil anyone’s idealizations about rural life. Pennsylvania Dutch cooking could represent all the values associated with traditional family farming whether or not the family farmers were willing to cooperate. In part for this reason, and in part simply because just about everybody likes to eat, cuisine quickly became far and away the most popular aspect of Pennsylvania Dutch culture. Pennsylvania Dutch restaurants came first, to feed the growing numbers of tourists after the war. Miller’s Dutch Restaurant had opened at Ronks in 1931 to serve locals, but by the early 1950s it had moved into the tourist trade, advertising “daily specials prepared from famous Penna. Dutch recipes” and relying on photographs of the Amish to get attention. The Dutch Haven opened in 1947 in the heart of the “Amish country” east of Lancaster, advertising “Root Beer, Candy, and Sandwiches,” but as tourism and the reputation of Dutch cooking grew, the owners converted it into a full-scale Pennsylvania Dutch restaurant specializing in warm shoofly pie. Visitors loved the pies so well that the bakery began shipping them across the country, and by the 1980s the Dutch Haven was producing some two thousand pies annually for mail-order business. Restaurants with similar themes opened around the county in the 1950s, particularly next door to the most popular tourist sites.34 For tourists who could not get enough of Pennsylvania Dutch cooking while in Lancaster, and for those who preferred other vacation sites, local food writers produced cookbooks to allow urban and suburban housewives to recreate the cuisine at home. Edna Eby Heller of the Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center wrote several cookbooks based on her columns in the Pennsylva-

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figure 4.1. The Dutch Haven restaurant and gift shop in Ronks, built in the late 1940s, popularized wet-bottom shoofly pies “geared to modern-day tastes.” The windmill was added in 1967 when the restaurant was rebuilt after a fire. (New Era, 23 August 1977, 28, 30.) Photograph by the author.

nia Dutchman, with recipes adapted for outlanders ignorant of what “potpie” meant in these parts. Magazines and regional newspapers picked up on the popularity of Pennsylvania Dutch cooking as well, and a steady stream of articles, columns, and photo essays appeared throughout the 1950s and 1960s.35 Pennsylvania Dutch food was popular in part simply because it was something different. To many Americans, in fact, it seemed quite exotic. It is a bit difficult to see how so simple a cuisine could be thought exotic, but the use of saffron, a pie consisting almost entirely of molasses (shoofly), and the seemingly endless array of pickled fruits and vegetables might have disconcerted someone with limited culinary experience. Guests at the Hotel Brunswick seem to have found the cuisine a bit strange; later versions of the hotel’s Pennsylvania Dutch menu warned that “because of the unusual flavors created by Pennsylvania Dutch cooking, you may not care for a particular dish” and offered to replace any dish a diner found objectionable. Americans in the postwar era, with its newly internationalist politics, were fascinated by anything exotic, although they tended to want the exotic safely circumscribed. This was an era that produced “Spanish rice,” made Spanish apparently by the addition of green peppers and a dash of chili powder, and a variety of Polynesian delights based on catsup and canned pineapple—different, perhaps, but not too different. A 1960s magazine advertisement for Knorr Soups

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and Premium Saltines pictured a series of suggestions for “‘snack suppers’ seasoned with the enchantment of Europe” that included a French meal of miniature hamburgers topped with pimento-stuffed olives and an Austrian supper featuring canned Vienna sausages. For people who wanted to reach out to new cultures, but not too far out, Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine was just the thing. Potpie was chicken and dumplings, but with a pinch of saffron; and if nothing could be more familiar to Americans than a pie, few people had ever seen anything quite like shoofly pie before. Pennsylvania Dutch food was foreign, but safe.36 But American fascination with Pennsylvania Dutch cooking long outlived its newness: what kept the cuisine always at least on the back burner, so to speak, was its association with traditional rural values. Pennsylvania Dutch food, like the Pennsylvania Dutch people, was seen as fundamentally of the country, producing the same harmony and self-sufficiency in the diner that farmers supposedly felt. City food might be more sophisticated, more refined and elegant, but it could also be unnecessarily luxurious, morally suspect, or, at the other extreme of the urban class scale, scarce and of poor quality. Country food, by comparison, was simple and egalitarian, plenty abundant to fill everyone’s plate, with a heavy side of agrarian virtue. When a bit of country food occasionally works its way into the hearts of urbanites, the difference becomes particularly clear. Scrapple, for example, had been made by Pennsylvania Dutch farmwomen and butchers since the eighteenth century, but by the nineteenth century it had been adopted by Philadelphians. Originally a way of using up leftovers from butchering, scrapple is a kind of meat pudding, a rich pork broth (traditionally the by-product of head cheese or liver pudding) thickened with cornmeal and seasoned with herbs, spices, and scraps of meat too small for other uses. Its Deitsch name, panhaas (literally, “pan rabbit”), probably referred originally to a Central European pudding of rabbit broth and buckwheat or spelt flour. In colonial Pennsylvania, where hog raising became common and butchering a seasonal event, farmers found in panhaas a way to salvage the last bits of pork and broth. They molded the pudding in crocks, covered it with rendered lard for preservation, and stored it for the winter. In this form it became, by the mid-nineteenth century, a staple of winter breakfasts not only in rural parts but also in Philadelphia, where farmers brought it to market. So popular was the dish among city residents that it quickly became known, in Philadelphia and elsewhere, as “Philadelphia scrapple.” It remained primarily a “poor man’s food,” but even a century later, memories of childhood winter breakfasts caused Tom Daly of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin to wax poetic: Come! It is a nippy morning Frosty lace, the panes adorning, Takes the sun from many angles

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And the windows glow with spangles. From the kitchen range are rising Odors richly appetizing; Paradise is in the skillet, For the scrapple slices fill it, And each flour-encrusted piece Smiling in its fragrant grease, Takes a coat of golden tan From the ardor of the pan. Crisp and brown the outer crust, Oh! Food to rouse the gourmand’s gusto. From your platter gives you greeting; Truly, this is royal eating.37 Scrapple, like many foods born of necessity, rides a fine line between delicacy and disgust. It occupies a special place in the hearts of those who grew up eating it; even if they prefer not to know what it contains, they may defend it tenaciously to outlanders. Admittedly, few consumers of the stuff were moved to poetry. But by the 1940s scrapple had come to symbolize the region’s cuisine, and both Philadelphia and the Dutch Country claimed it as their own. Joseph Hildreth, a city businessman, claimed in 1940 that urban butchers had gradually improved upon Pennsylvania Dutch panhaas, adding spices and meat scraps to the original bland concoction. But the balance of opinion, particularly as Pennsylvania Dutch food became nationally known, was against him. Paul Beers, writing in defense of Dutch culture a generation later, insisted the country panhaas was the superior dish, “a kind of richer scrapple.” Other commentators, agreeing with him, disparaged city scrapple as “commercial,” arguing that “the more removed from the tradition [of country butchering] a company is, the more likely it is to interpret ‘scraps’ as anything left over, rather than choice small pieces of meat.”A self-styled Pennsylvania German gastronome, speaking in 1928, went further. “What a lean corn-mealy, pepperless slab of melancholy mush masquerades under that name [scrapple]! And how it cries out for ketchup, Worcestershire sauce or whatever palate-jogger you will.” In the country, scrapple “is luscious, dark, and as dignified as black walnuts. It groans for no alien condiment . . . the seasoning was done by an artist when it was made.”38 In part these claims are simply patriotic posturing, but the debate over the true nature of scrapple reveals the different ways “country” food—and by extension all of rural culture—is characterized. On the one hand, country cooking is primitive, bland, heavy, uncreative; on the other, it is rich, pure, homey, full of simple goodness. No one denied the Pennsylvania Dutch (and therefore the rural) origins of scrapple; the question was whether its move to the city had enhanced or

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corrupted it. Everyone agreed that scrapple was proof of Pennsylvania Dutch frugality—“a prime example of that thrifty Dutch desire to waste nothing and want not,” as Bill Wolf, a native of York County, put it. Dutch cooking was also democratic and unpretentious; food writer Archie Robertson commented that scrapple shows Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine to be “completely without class consciousness.” In the city, however, frugal became cheap and egalitarian became poor man’s food, what mothers served their children for breakfast because they could afford no better. “Philadelphia scrapple” might perhaps be more thoughtfully seasoned for an urbane palate, but it was more likely of suspect quality, produced cheaply for a mass market.39 Frugality could cut both ways, but on balance, the country seemed to be winning the war of words over its food in the 1950s and 1960s. If Pennsylvania Dutch writers of cookbooks were apt to apologize for their cuisine’s silence on the subject of salads, the New York Times Magazine could praise Dutch cooks for their “remarkable talent with vegetable cookery,” and a Berks County gourmand could sneer at salads “as grass, and unfit for consumption.” Writers of cookbooks and magazine articles found ways to turn every culinary vice into a virtue. The artlessness of serving all the dishes at once, without courses, became a refreshing freedom from the contrivances of modern society, a democracy of the dinner table that privileged no man and no dish. Even Hildreth, who made his associates presents of fresh “Philadelphia scrapple” each Christmas, was quick to link his beloved dish to the “Garden Spot of America.”40 If the Pennsylvania Dutch family farm stood for country virtues, so would its food. In farm kitchens and restaurants, just as at farmers’ markets, visitors were most often struck first by the sheer abundance of food at Pennsylvania Dutch family dinners. The vast array of dishes served seemed even greater because of the habit of placing all—salads, meats, pies, pickles, what have you—on the table at once. As a magazine writer explained of the “Country Style” meals served at a local restaurant, When a farmer eats, he eats. When a Pennsylvania Dutch farmer eats, he eats for two. What’s more, he wants his groceries where he can get at them with a simple and inspired reach. He is too hungry to be bothered with waiting for courses, even if his flushed womenfolk had time from their kitchen duties to be running back and forth from the table during the whole meal. So with beautiful simplicity the entire dinner is plunked down on the table at once, smoking and steaming hot. A little grudging room is allowed at both sides for the plates and silverware; but the rest of the cloth is hidden under platters and dishes and bowls, each with its cargo ready and waiting. All the diner has to do is go for it. . . . [Y]ou’ll be led out [of the restaurant] feebly bleating, amid the mildly surprised stares of the locals who are just getting started.41

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However much this description might suggest animals being fattened for slaughter, it was quoted proudly in a local cookbook produced for tourists. Other correspondents described the bounty of a Pennsylvania Dutch feast in less derisive and more appetizing terms, but amazement at Dutch appetites was nearly universal. The Pennsylvania Dutch, one cookbook author explained,“remain a plain, reverent, family-centered folk who take their few and simple pleasures—among them the pleasure of eating very well—with innocent gusto.” Even the most sympathetic Dutch writers warned visitors that “there’s nothing popular about a piddling appetite among the Pennsylvania Germans!” If one stops to consider the physical labor required by traditional farming, that farm folk should get hungry by the time the dinner bell rings is not terrifically surprising. But it was easy for urbanized outlanders to forget, amid scenes of gustatory excess, the labor that produced the appetites. The hearty appetites of traditional farm folk suggested a lost age of innocence when people could eat as much as they desired and “fatness” connoted joyful abundance rather than mindless gluttony or ill-fitting swimsuits. Cheery slogans like “Fill Yourself Up, Clean Your Plate” and “Eat Hearty, It’s Plenty” became titles of magazine articles on Pennsylvania Dutch food. As a local wag remarked, the “proud tradition” of the Pennsylvania Germans “is that every infant comes into the world equipped with a cast-iron stomach.” And well it should, for Dutch food was “so fondly prepared, so succulent and distinguished,” that guests unschooled in the cuisine “lost their heads and forgot the polite art of knowing when to stop.” Appetite for good food knew no bounds—nor should it.42 All this abundance, moreover, meant more than the opportunity to gorge oneself at will; it meant, in the context of the traditional family farm, self-sufficiency. To live in a house where “90 percent of that [food] consumed was produced within a few yards of the farmhouse where it was cooked,” as one grown-up farmboy recalled, meant freedom from want, fatness in the biblical rather than the anatomic sense. A typical photograph in a Saturday Evening Post article showed a proud Pennsylvania German farmwife standing before shelves reaching floor to ceiling and overflowing with jar after jar of preserves and pickles and fruits for pies. This side of abundance was money in the bank; it represented hard work, although, of course, work already complete. Accompanied by ham and sausages from one’s own smokehouse and home-baked breads and pies, that well-stocked larder would feed a family for months, just as similar stores of food had sustained pioneer families. Another Saturday Evening Post correspondent reminded her readers of the connection between farmwork and farm food: Around each farmstead was set the cluster of outbuildings that supplied the table—a dairy, the shelves full of pans of cream; a springhouse to store stone crocks of cheese and butter; a drying room with trays of fruit, the ceilings

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festooned with strings of beans and mushrooms; a bake oven large enough to hold a dozen crusty loaves, a smokehouse hung with hams and bacon— each building a little monument to the land and its richness.43 Self-sufficiency did not permit luxury, of course, but that was all right; simple food was good, provided it was well-made. The key was to make good of the ingredients at hand and to waste nothing. Free use of butter and nuts might seem today like “extravagances,” but “years ago” they were simply “bountiful farm products.” Pennsylvania German women, boasted one native, “consider cooking next to godliness. They cook with vinegar, pepper and spices, dough, the cheaper meats, savory gravies and great ingenuity,” and butchers frugally use “all of the pig, discarding the squeal only because they couldn’t put pepper on it.” Waste not, want not, indeed. “To a good Pennsylvania Dutch housewife,” said another local, “a piece of burnt toast or a pot of oversalted beans is not a trifling accident but a sin against nature.” Cookbook writers prefacing a recipe for potpie or chicken corn soup often felt compelled to apologize for the addition of saffron to the dish, explaining that although it was terribly expensive today, the saffron crocus had once been a staple in Pennsylvania Dutch gardens. No Pennsylvania Dutch cookbook was complete without recipes for apple butter, jams and jellies, various pickles, and perhaps even scrapple, souse, or stuffed pig’s stomach. Local writers were more likely than outlanders to include recipes for the latter delicacies and far more likely to recommend the inclusion of “variety meats,” but even Craig Claiborne of the New York Times gave his readers instructions on making scrapple from the more presentable parts of the pig. One suspects that relatively few readers tried such recipes at home, however, at least compared to the number tempted by shoofly pie or schnitz un knepp. No matter; all of Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine had the air of frugality about it. If, as Helen Papashvily wrote, “The delights that crowd their table . . . all are sustenance not only for the body but for the spirit, symbols of God’s everlasting bounty to those who work to deserve it,” any housewife could partake of that bounty—and feel that she had worked to deserve it— by preparing the simplest of Dutch dishes.44 If that housewife shared the bounty with her family, as she presumably would, she could also partake of the family spirit that seemed to pervade Pennsylvania Dutch cookery. If there was Dutch food on the table, there was sure to be a family eating it. Photographs in magazine articles showed women doing the cooking, of course, but with children stirring and men tasting. Cooking was often portrayed as a communal activity, through pictures of a group of women standing around a stove at a fair or tales of schnitzing and apple buttering bees. Pennsylvania Dutch restaurants were known for offering dinners “family style,” with large bowls placed before the entire group; how often patrons took advantage of the opportunity is impossible to say, but advertisements and reviews suggested it was a popu-

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lar feature of Dutch dining. The needs of a large family also explained some of the larder’s abundance, as the following conversation between a food writer and a Pennsylvania Dutch woman shows: As I sat in Mrs. Miller’s big, low-ceilinged kitchen beside her spotless woodburning cookstove . . . we discussed her doughnut recipe. She got it from her mother. “First,” she began, “you take nine cakes of yeast and 27 cups of flour—” I nearly fell off the chair. “Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “How many doughnuts are we going to make?” She seemed puzzled. “Why,” she said, “I don’t know. I never get a chance to count them. You see, my family likes to eat them as they come from the pan.”45 Not only the experience of preparing and eating the food but also the food itself connected one with family, for the recipes had been passed down through countless generations. “Pennsylvania Dutch are not imaginative in the kitchen,” one food writer explained. “‘Creative’ cookery based on . . . the spur-of-the-moment inspiration they leave to others. Theirs is a classic cuisine with a long tradition.” As evidence she quoted a Dutchwoman’s response to a suggestion that she add nuts to her Moravian sugar cake: “I would no more try to improve butter semmel,” she said,“than Bach’s Mass in B Minor.” This was a cuisine passed by word of mouth and mother’s example, informally, one based on “a pinch of this and a handful of that” rather than on precise and standardized measurements. But just how big a handful was a matter not only for tradition but also for individual flourish. An oral tradition of cooking left room for “a family specialty, such as Grandmother’s delicious Crumb Cakes that were just a bit different from any other Crumb Cake.” If Granddaughter learned to make the crumb cakes by her relative’s example and continued to make them from memory and experience, measuring only by hand and eye, the food she made would both tie her to the past and free her from the constraints of teaspoons and thermometers. The cakes would always be her grandmother’s but would at the same time become uniquely her own. Ironically, then, while it was rooted in tradition, “country” cooking also allowed greater creative autonomy than the up-to-date modern housewife would have been used to.46 In idealized Pennsylvania Dutch cooking, as on the idealized Pennsylvania Dutch family farm, simplicity and harmony prevailed. This was a cuisine in harmony with nature and with the past, produced by (and contributing to) the harmony of families and communities. As preface to a set of recipes for vegetable dishes, one cookbook writer harkened back to the kitchen gardens of old: In the intimacy of her garden, just off from the summer kitchen and outdoor bakeoven . . . the Pennsylvania German housewife cultivated her kitchen vegetables. Her men folks turned the rich earth for her in early

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spring and with her own hands she sowed the seeds and set plants at their proper time and in accordance with ancient tradition. . . . And thus with zeal and with a mystic faith in the unknowable processes of nature she furnished her family with garden produce.47 Here were work, nature, family, and tradition, all in balance and harmony, with fresh vegetables the reward. Garden vegetables were a simple reward, but simplicity in this context meant not the simplicity of a fool but security, contentment with what one already has and freedom from striving for more. By implication, a modern housewife preparing the dishes in a Pennsylvania Dutch cookbook could partake of those values, invoking the spirit of farms and families past in her own kitchen. ✸ By the mid-1960s, the parade of articles in national periodicals on Pennsylvania Dutch food had made the connection between the cuisine and traditional rural values virtually automatic. So automatic, in fact, that by 1965 Better Homes and Gardens could quite seriously suggest that harried housewives cook a “Pennsylvania Dutch dinner with a package start,” serving chicken potpie constructed from canned fricassee and biscuit mix, heated canned potato salad, and ice cream with pretzels. If Pennsylvania Dutch food served as a vicarious experience of country virtue, this was doubly vicarious. But it showed that “Pennsylvania Dutch” was becoming a trademark of quality in food, much as “Vermont” had become in the late nineteenth century with respect to dairy products. Vermont’s Board of Agriculture, starting in the 1890s, had mounted a tourism campaign based on the popular association of their state with high-quality produce such as maple syrup, dairy products, and vegetables. Tourism, it was hoped, would promote intensive, diversified agriculture by creating a seasonal market for it. At the same time, turnof-the-century New England writers assigned to Vermont farmers the same values of simplicity and community that mid-century Pennsylvania German writers found in their own region. Vermont’s cuisine, however, was never in such high demand as were its raw materials. Summer tourists to Vermont at the turn of the century expected “plain country fare,” meaning far more fresh vegetables and far less pork than was common in northern New England, and none of it fried. The typical heavy diet of traditional farm workers did not appeal to suave urbanites, nor did it even seem evidence of a “domain of abundance.”48 Even allowing that Pennsylvania German cooks traditionally served more fresh vegetables and had a heavier hand with seasonings than most New England farmwives, the way that urban and suburban, middle-class Americans saw country cooking had changed by the 1950s. Now, farm food seemed to represent only the positive side of traditional rurality.

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In part, the change was a continuation of the prewar fascination with the country. Personal memories of actual farm life had receded further into the past, and the lack of “real” memories allowed urbanites more freedom in creating idealized cultural ones, particularly once they no longer felt the need to prove their urbanity by distancing themselves from the farm. The nature and strength of those idealizations, however, were products of postwar America. The fascination with Pennsylvania Dutch food was not part of any back-to-the-land movement; it was felt by residents of cities and suburbs who, whatever occasional fantasies they might harbor, had no serious thought of moving to the country. Although they associated the cuisine with traditional agrarian virtues, certain of those virtues— most notably industry, in the old-fashioned sense of hard work—were largely absent. What remained were domestic virtues and values—family, peace, abundance, harmony—and, interestingly, they came in a form (food) that could be consumed. This was, after all, both a domestic culture and a culture of consumption. To recommend making a dish rich in tradition and symbolic of rural values by combining clever purchases from the supermarket—and to imply that to do so would get one closer to those values—might have been absurd, but it was only the extension ad absurdum of postwar Americans’ feelings about the country.

The Family Farm and Postwar America Although the family farm had always symbolized the “American Dream,” it fit almost perfectly the desires of middle-class, suburban Americans during the 1950s and 1960s. The Depression, World War II, and the disappointing segue into Cold War made the world seem an uncertain, even dangerous place. The home and the nuclear family offered a haven from that dangerous world. Sixteen years of economic hard times and war had forced young men and women to put off marriage, children, and prosperity; now, they eagerly embraced all three. The postwar “baby boom” saw a rise in the birthrate for the first time in American history, and tens of thousands of tract homes in new suburban communities sprang up to accommodate the growing families. The quantity and variety of consumer goods grew just as rapidly, as people with rising incomes rushed out to equip their new homes with the latest appliances. But the postwar family was more than just a reaction against years of deprivation. The terrors of the Cold War encouraged not just an emphasis on home and hearth but a retreat into it. The suburban household became a stronghold against the outside world, bursting with technological abundance and isolated from whatever might threaten it—its own miniature “domain of abundance.” Elaine Tyler May, in writing about the postwar American family, chose the bomb shelter as the symbol of this household-as-stronghold. In the summer of 1959, Life magazine featured a couple who spent their honeymoon in a backyard bomb shelter, utterly alone except for a vast array of canned goods and

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supplies. They were, as May says, “isolated, sexually charged, cushioned by abundance, and protected against impending doom by the wonders of technology.”49 The leap from nuclear bomb shelter to traditional family farm is not as great as it might seem. Sex and technology the idealized family farm might not have, but abundance and isolation it surely did. (And, after all, those big Amish families had to come from somewhere; tourists could guess for themselves that those farmers weren’t always so dour.) The image of a family in a bomb shelter, safe from the world, supplied by canned foods and consumer goods, is not so different from that of a Pennsylvania Dutch farmwife in her cellar with hundreds of jars of home-preserved vegetables and meats. Civil defense authorities took advantage of this connection in their literature. Jean Wood Fuller, the director of women’s activities for the Federal Civil Defense Administration, appealed to rural church women in her plans for postnuclear survival, observing that “it’s just second nature for them to put on large dinners. Aren’t they just perfect naturals for our mass feeding groups?” The issue was driven home by a government pamphlet that showed an old-timey kitchen with a woodstove and shelves of jars, with the admonition that “Grandma’s pantry was always ready. She was ready when the preacher came on Sunday or she was ready when the relatives arrived from Nebraska. Grandma’s Pantry was ready—Is Your Pantry Ready in Event of Emergency?”“With a well-stocked pantry,” the pamphlet concluded,“you can be just as self-sufficient as Grandma was.” The civil defense campaign was also an extension of wartime efforts to make home food preservation seem virtuous. Canning was the feminine parallel to Victory Gardening, a patriotic answer to scarcity that suited women’s domestic role. After the war, the need for home canning was less urgent economically but just as valuable psychologically, as a way to establish an island of abundance and self-sufficiency in uncertain times. Certainly “Grandma’s Pantry” was a more comforting image than the bomb shelter. Few Americans actually built shelters, presumably because they could not bear to imagine what life would be like after a nuclear war. It was far easier to find comfort in a happy imaginary past than to prepare for a horrible imaginary future.50 The traditional family farm differed from the postwar suburban home in one important factor—technology. The suburbs had it; the farm (at least in the suburban imagination) didn’t. This difference only made the farm a more appealing refuge, for if technology had created the prosperity of the postwar family, it also threatened its very existence. The Bomb was first on the list of dangerous technology, of course, for it was difficult to imagine prosperity and abundance in the wake of a nuclear war. But the prospect of nuclear war threatened not only the physical survival of the family but its spiritual survival as well. Such devastation would surely destroy the fabric of society, pitting neighbor against neighbor for the remaining necessities of survival. Even everyday technology was spiritually suspect, making Americans “soft” and destroying the spirit of entrepreneurship

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and self-help that had built the nation. That technology, automation, and the accompanying bureaucracy of the modern economy could undermine creative autonomy and independence was a feeling held not only by popular authors but also by individual men trapped in corporate jobs. For the unhappy breadwinner who wanted to be independent and enterprising and strike out on his own but had too many responsibilities to do so, the idealized family farm provided the best of both worlds, security and independence. And for the unhappy housewife who cherished the ideal of homemaking but grew bored with the lack of creative work to be done in a modern automated home, the self-sufficiency of the farm kitchen could be similarly appealing. At the same time, the harmony of the idealized rural community made domestic life less isolating; families there were not forced by fear or technology into isolation.51 With or without technology, however, this was still a culture of consumption. It was not technology per se that made it so; the family farm of postwar imagination was also a place of consumption. On a deeper level, the emphasis on consumption was mandated by the combination of the emphasis on home and family with the economic legacy of the Industrial Revolution. In modern, urban or suburban America, the household was no longer a place of production, but only of consumption. Just as craftsmen had gone to work in factories and traditional diversified farmers had become “agribusinessmen” or quit the farm for the city, the farmwife who smoked hams, canned tomatoes, and sewed quilts and clothing had become the housewife whose primary economic contribution to the household was to clip coupons, shop wisely, and hunt bargains. Production was located elsewhere, in the outside world. But in postwar America, the “outside world” of production was the same world of corporations and iron curtains and atom bombs that seemed to threaten the home and the family. To set the domestic world against the external, as postwar culture in some respects did, was, in this economic context, to set consumption against production; to set the domestic above the external rendered consumption supreme. In such a culture, the household, even the household of an idealized family farm, could not easily represent productive virtues, but only the virtues and values of consumers. The idealized family farm became, not the seat of industry and frugality, but a “domain of abundance.” Urbanites seeking the harmony associated with the family farm must seek it vicariously, through acts of consumption: buying quilts and antique furniture to vicariously experience the creative autonomy of traditional craftspeople, eating farm food at touristy restaurants to vicariously experience the selfsufficiency and independence of traditional farm families, or—at the extreme— by purchasing canned chicken fricassee and calling it Pennsylvania Dutch potpie. There was a noteworthy exception in the growing do-it-yourself movement and the efforts of certain housewives at home canning. These hobbies provided a sense of creative autonomy, independence, and productive work that might

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otherwise have been absent in daily suburban life. But this was the exception that proved the rule. Doing-it-yourself might act as a palliative for the ills of modern society, much as a carnival might provide a release from the strict order of a premodern society, a chance to turn that order on its head for a day. Like a carnival, however, the do-it-yourself movement ultimately reinforced the order it pretended to threaten. Once the deck was built, it was back to the jacket and tie and business as usual, if presumably with a broader smile on one’s face and renewed tolerance for the corporate doldrums—or, from the other gender’s perspective, once the preserves were made, it was back to the supermarket for another round of cornflakes and canned vegetables. In this role, doing-it-yourself was not a way of life but a lifestyle, more a part of leisure than of work: one built a deck but not the house, canned jam or relishes while still purchasing basic foodstuffs. And, of course, few do-it-yourselfers could resist the latest technological improvement to make their hobbies easier. The suburban lawn, too, might make an office worker feel like a farmer tending his pasture, communing with nature—but in a safely ordered and utterly nonproductive way that required the purchase of increasingly expensive mowers and fertilizers.52 One could, in fact, see these pseudorural hobbies as an extension of agricultural tourism. Tourists to Lancaster County who came not merely to view the Amish but to recapture lost values left, for the most part, unsatisfied. For thwarted pilgrims, the next step toward an “authentic” understanding of traditional farm culture would be to emulate that culture at home, albeit in ways safely contrived and bounded by consumer culture. The suburban housewife who put up a few pints of strawberry jam each spring was perhaps a kind of “experimental tourist,” trying on agrarian values much as one might try on a new outfit. It was as if home canners and do-it-yourselfers, no longer content to watch staged demonstrations of farm life, took a turn on the stage. The housewife, like the summer vacationer, had no real intent to move to the farm; like any form of tourism, her culinary adventure was an escape, far more recreation than rebellion. And, of course, not all hobbyists were frustrated agrarians, any more than all tourists were frustrated pilgrims. To the extent that they were, their hobbies suggested an underlying discontent with modern, urban society; the same discontent was reflected in idealizations of farmers or the Amish. But for now, at least, that discontent blossomed in ways still entirely consistent with that society and with its culture of consumption.

Rural Foodways Rural people were equally conflicted, but in somewhat different ways. They shared, certainly, the postwar delight in home and hearth. The most up-to-date Pennsylvania Dutch farmers valued their traditions, particularly their culinary

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ones. When the Lancaster city council tried to tear down the Southern Market building in 1950 to build a parking lot, public outcry kept the market open. In 1963, the City Planning Commission again recommended its closure, and again Lancastrians opposed the recommendation. The opposition was not based entirely on sentiment: a Planning Commission study suggested that at least 90 percent of the market’s customers were weekly shoppers and bought nearly all of their food there. But there were simply not enough regular customers by the 1960s to keep the Central and Southern Markets profitable, however tenacious the few thousand that remained. Locals continued to spend most of the money at the two markets, and in the early 1970s a few stalwart customers even urged the city to consider increasing the number of market days. Few customers, however, were under the age of forty, and sales were declining even as tourists continued to clog the aisles—as some standholders believed, driving away many residents who might otherwise have been regulars. A large majority of Lancastrians voted to keep the market open not because they relied on it to set their tables, but because they could not imagine their city without it.53 Rural Lancaster Countians were subject to the same feelings as urbanites about country cooking and farm-fresh produce; certainly they never denied the bounty of their gardens and tables. But while it was easy enough for people surrounded by technological affluence to pooh-pooh the wonders of technology, ruralites wanted desperately to keep up with the city Joneses, not the ones next door. They were very much like the Dust Bowl woman in the 1920s who sold her bathtub to buy a car: “You can’t,” she explained, “go to town in a bathtub.”54 Farmers’ embrace of agricultural technology was only one manifestation of this mentality. Rural foodways, too, were changing, as large-scale meat processors replaced country butchers and small-town supermarkets replaced farm stands and home production. In Lancaster County, the suppliers and processors of food were often owned by local families—Weaver’s Chicken, Kunzler Meats, Ferguson and Hassler’s Grocery—and many had already been around for decades, but they were big and growing bigger, providing customers with up-to-date foods in up-to-date packaging. Even farmers increasingly relied on supermarkets to feed their families, as the diversified farming that had survived into the 1940s gave way to a narrower focus on cash crops.55 More important, the foodways to which rural Lancastrians aspired were changing. Traditionally, the best indicator of culinary aspirations might have been the competition at a county fair; by the late 1960s it had become the fundraiser cookbook, a collection of recipes submitted by local women to raise money for a church or community group. The contents of these cookbooks were as new as the cookbooks themselves. Few of the recipes Lancaster County women published in this period would have appeared on the display tables at a county fair— or on the dinner table of a traditional family farm. Few, in fact, suggest any sense

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of the “Dutch Country” at all; the great majority seem to be neither Dutch nor Country. True, every cookbook had its shoofly pie and its several crumb cakes; most had a pickle or two, a boiled dressing, perhaps even a raisin pie. But the bulk of the recipes were moderately fancy, typically middle-American dishes: Watergate salad, a seemingly infinite variety of hamburger casseroles (including one titled “Minnesota Hot Dish”), chicken à la king, and lasagna. More daring recipes, such as cold cucumber soup, quiche, and olive paté, were as common as shoofly pie. When these recipes were not striving to be exotic, they often relied on supermarket convenience foods. Not even the famous pickles, when they appeared, could be counted on to have the flavor of the country; one cookbook provided a recipe for “Maraschino Pickles.” One suspects, in fact, that a great many of these recipes originated not in Grandmother’s kitchen or even the author’s own kitchen but in the pages of a national magazine. Consider the presence in one Lancaster County community cookbook of a recipe for “Corned Beef Salad” that also appeared in a similar cookbook produced in Maine; the recipes are virtually identical in their convenience-food ingredients, right down to the flavor of Jell-O (lemon) and the use of Miracle Whip instead of mayonnaise.56 The frequent appearance of such “modern” dishes in local cookbooks suggests that, in several ways, regional foodways were being absorbed into a broader, standardized American culture. True, one would expect these books to show less what the women cooked for their families day in and day out than what they cooked for special occasions. And, of course, the women might well have assumed that their neighbors could already make potpie and shoofly pie. But women in small towns tend to have few opportunities for publication, and one would expect them to take full advantage of these cookbooks. It is one thing to serve a failed dish for supper, even to guests; one can blame the ingredients or the oven, and most meals are short-lived and soon forgotten. A published recipe, however, is forever; it becomes not just a dish the author has made but the dish for which she is known. These cookbooks represent the recipes of which the authors were most proud, those they thought would impress and delight readers. Additionally, of course, the women were competing among themselves, whether or not they would have admitted it; recipes were about a cook’s reputation as much as about serving the community. Just as other Americans found Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine exotic enough to liven up their dinner tables, Lancaster County women were turning to foreign cultures to add interest to their own cooking. But the “foreign” dishes in local cookbooks said less about the cultures they allegedly represented than about the tastes of middle America, of which Lancaster was a part. Lancaster County was becoming ever more part of a culture that prized newness and technological innovation, which, in the kitchen, meant “exotic” recipes and supermarket convenience foods. This was not entirely a new trend, of course, but only the acceleration

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of an old one; local foodways had never been static.57 Lancaster Countians in 1970 still relied heavily on traditional regional foods—certainly more than community cookbooks suggested. But when they wanted to show off, to compete with their neighbors, the playing field they chose was a modern, urban one. Even if ruralites had not fully adopted urban or suburban foodways, they suspected, perhaps unconsciously, that those foodways were superior to their own. Not only their content but the very format of these cookbooks revealed the change. Consider the difference between community fundraiser cookbooks and cooking competitions at a county fair. Like the cookbooks, a competition of biscuits or pickles at a county fair allowed room for personal pride and achievement in the context of a community activity, but the similarity ends there. A community fair allows for competition only on a limited playing field, that of traditional foods shared by the entire community. Suppose a woman enters a shoofly pie in the local fair. She could only innovate so much and still call it a shoofly pie; she could not, for example, add applesauce to the filling or make the crust out of biscuit dough. There is still room for innovation and personal taste—the consistency of the filling, to what extent the crust should be tender or flaky—but individual touches are bounded by community standards. At the same time, the pie would be uniquely hers, because only the finished product would be entered in the competition. Her “secret” would be perfectly safe, because only the most experienced cook could determine from taste alone the exact proportion of ingredients. If, like most traditional cooks, she had never written down her recipe, no one could “steal” it without watching her at work. Traditional cooking would therefore be—as so many food writers observed—both completely personal and inextricably woven into one’s community. A published collection of recipes is quite different. There are, first of all, no real limits on what can be included; the individuality of the cook is given free rein. Nevertheless, the recipes in local cookbooks show a remarkable similarity from one region to the next. Traditionally, women in Maine and Pennsylvania might well have been unable to reproduce each other’s recipes precisely; local ingredients would have varied from region to region. Now, anyone anywhere in the United States could buy the same scientifically contrived flavor of the same brand of gelatin or the same canned corned beef from the same megafarm in Argentina and learn how to prepare it from the same national magazine. The very nature of a cookbook encouraged uniformity. Written instructions required precise and repeatable measurements; they also limited the depth of technique that could be easily explained. Unlike competitors at a fair, authors of recipes had to show off with their knowledge of ingredients rather than techniques, and this led naturally to a preference for innovation over experience. And recipes, unlike finished creations, could (at least in theory) be copied precisely and anonymously, without a second thought to the creator.

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While the medium of the recipe encouraged individual freedom at the expense of tradition and community, it also limited creative autonomy—exactly the opposite of the combination of values prized by urban food writers fascinated with “country cooking.” Although the twin shifts from community to individual freedom and from creative autonomy to technological precision may seem contradictory, both meant a shift from the traditional rural focus on local community to a “modern” society whose model was the suburbs. Women cooking identical dishes in isolated kitchens a thousand miles apart were no different from their children watching the same television programs in their isolated living rooms. Rural “progress,” even in terms of food, was measured on an urban model. And what about authors of Pennsylvania Dutch cookbooks who worked to preserve their native cuisine? They, too, by codifying traditional cooking and enforcing modern, urban standards of precision, in effect cut it off from its roots in traditional rural culture. “Country cooking,” both real and imagined, had become a creature of urban society.

The Consumption of the Country If subtle changes in foodways—in the ways urbanites imagined the country, or in the culinary aspirations of ruralites—had no further impact on real communities, they might hardly be worth writing about. But idealizations of Pennsylvania Dutch food, and of “country cooking” in general, had very real implications for rural places like Lancaster County. As so often happened in idealizations of the country, the tourists’ image of Pennsylvania Dutch food replaced the integration that had characterized traditional rural life—of individual and community, of economic and emotional needs, and so on—with harmony. Life on a traditional family farm, though it might make the needs of the farm and of the family one, was no more harmonious than life in any other setting. To identify that way of life with harmony made it less realistic, less relevant to the present. Such idealizations went hand in hand with the rural assumption, unspoken but nonetheless present, that urban foodways (or “modern” farming techniques, or other urban innovations) were somehow superior. Working to maintain a way of life that integrated its various components might be admirable, but working for utopian harmony seemed a bit silly, particularly to farmers with bills to pay and crops to harvest. Better to join the rest of America in the twentieth century and accept the inevitability of progress. At the same time, the shift in focus of urban idealism about the country from the farmer to food was a shift from production to consumption. The small farmer was a producer; his virtues—industry, frugality, simplicity—were productive virtues. If the countryside was a land of peace and plenty, it was made so by hard work and self-restraint. Increasingly, however, the farm was seen as a place of con-

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sumption, and the farmer as merely another consumer—or, as at the farmers’ market, merely facilitating consumption. The peace and plenty were cut off from their roots in productive virtue. We might see row after row of home-canned chowchow and apple butter, but not the farmwife chopping head after head of cauliflower or standing for hours over a steaming kettle. We might also see succulent hams hanging over farm stands, but not the farmer slopping the hogs or wrestling a runaway back into the sty. And if we saw loaves of fresh-baked bread and warm doughnuts, we certainly did not see the farmer sitting on his tractor plowing endless acres of eroding soil to cultivate the wheat. Whether farmwork was joy or drudgery is not the point; the point is that urbanites rarely considered it at all. True, they might look at photographs of an Amish farmer plowing his fields, but at such a distance that the sense of real work was lost; the emphasis was on the landscape, of which farmer and horses were only a part. The nearest one got to work on a farm was cooking, and that so directly preceded consumption as to presume it—preparation of food rather than actual production. To see the farm as a place of consumption rather than of production allowed urbanites and suburbanites to relate it to their own lives, for of course the emphasis of postwar American culture, as we have seen, was on consumption. But on a deeper level, the emphasis on produce rather than on production meant that the farmer, culturally speaking, had been removed from the farm. This was aided, locally, by the emphasis on Amish farmers; the farmer and his work were subsumed, particularly photographically, by his clothing, his horses, his community, his religion, or the landscape. Whatever lip service might be paid to the rural or agrarian roots of Amish culture, far less was said about the Amish as farmers than as paragons of peace and plenty. But, in general, despite idealizations of “the country” or of country cooking, positive portrayals of individual farmers were becoming hard to find by the 1960s. Individual farmers in the media were most often either millionaire agribusinessmen lobbying Congress for bigger handouts or the Beverly Hillbillies, relics of the past marooned hysterically in a modern world. When a real, live family farmer snuck through, as in the Life magazine portraits, it was often as an object of pity, a last survivor of an endangered species: we’ll be sad to see you go, buddy, ain’t it awful, but that’s the way of the world— bigger is better, don’t you know, and progress means more for everybody. The farmer was literally disappearing from American life; farm consolidation and expanding technology were making him ever harder to find in the endless acres of waving wheat. At the same time, the disappearing farmer was a figurative compromise for a culture that needed what the traditional family farm represented but could not find those values in modern farming. The removal of the farmer from the farm left two things: food and landscape. Both share an essential quality that is apparent when one imagines them painted: they are both, after a fashion, still lifes. A display of Pennsylvania Dutch cooking

figure 4.2. A Pennsylvania Dutch dinner at a “family style” restaurant. The photograph appeared in magazines in the 1960s as an advertisement from the Pennsylvania state Travel Bureau. An accompanying message from the governor reminded readers that “everybody should have at least one to remember” (Homer Tope Rosenberger, The Pennsylvania Germans, 1891–1965 [Lancaster: Pennsylvania German Society, 1966], 319).

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used by the state tourism department to draw visitors (figure 4.2) is fairly typical: massive quantities of food spread out, ready for the taking, with neither farmer or cook present. The landscape of a farm, minus human activity, has similar implications. Both food and landscape exist, after a fashion, to be consumed. All landscape, in as much as it is landscape, exists to be consumed by the eye; the landscape of a farm exists to be consumed literally as well as figuratively. Culturally speaking, the farm—and by extension, all of rural America—had become not only a place of consumption but a place to be consumed. Once that leap had been made, no association with traditional values, however strong or serious or well intentioned, was sufficient to protect a rural community. The country was ripe for picking.

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✸ 5

THE LANDSCAPE OF PROGRESS Urbanization and Planning

In the past, land has been seen primarily as a commodity to be traded, with its value mostly an economic function of its developability.Today, land which was once considered useless or waste has value. Floodplains are being put to use for park and flood prevention purposes, and steeply sloped land is prized for its scenic beauty and watershed value. Land is now seen as a resource as well as a commodity.—Lancaster County Planning Commission, 1975

Lancaster Countians had always been proud of their home, for its rural character and its prosperity. In rural communities across the United States, the decades after World War II left rurality and prosperity increasingly irreconcilable, but not so in Lancaster. Agriculture remained supreme, while new industries—not the least of which was tourism—provided thousands of new jobs. While sons and daughters of farmers elsewhere headed for the city in search of work, native Lancaster Countians could stay home. But success, too, had a price. A rural community was a delicate balance: too much progress, and it became urban or metropolitan; too little, and it eroded from within. One path led to the city, the other back to wilderness. If Lancaster County avoided the latter demise, it was, by 1970, in danger of the former. Some residents seemed to recognize the change and tried to fight it, but even their efforts to find a solution brought them ever closer to urbanization. Tourists bore more than their share of the blame, but there seemed no way to control the mushrooming industry—and little will to find one. Population growth was a greater problem and even harder to handle.

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As Lancaster Countians dealt with these issues in the 1960s and 1970s, they found themselves tripped up by their own assumptions about the Garden Spot and by urbanites’ idealizations of it. An attempt at countywide planning to control growth failed to gain widespread support, because while Lancastrians wanted to preserve their rural heritage, the language and methods of government planning assumed urbanity as a fait accompli. Planners looked at rural Lancaster County from the urban perspective of consumption and saw it as resources and landscape—not, as many residents still saw it, as an expression of a way of life or of communal values. The so-called “rural renaissance” of the 1970s, which brought tens of thousands of Americans “back” to the country, might have shored up a disintegrating farm community, but in the end it proved to be neither rural nor a renaissance. Migration to the country was more about personal fulfillment and pretty landscape than about the dedication to place and community that had always seemed to define rurality. Despite their asserted desire for an “authentic” experience of the country, most exurbanites, like most planners, saw the country as a means to gratify urban desires. By the 1980s, there were simply too many people in Lancaster County, and they all wanted a piece of the country—usually, their own private piece. And as Lancastrians struggled to understand their changing home, what they ultimately revealed was that the root of the problem—the cultural root—was growing within themselves. Not only tourists, now, but residents themselves were coming to see the Garden Spot from an essentially urban perspective. Lancaster County was urbanizing not only demographically but culturally, and that was the greater problem.

Warning Signs Lancaster County, like most of the United States, experienced rapid population growth in the 1950s. In the first half of the century, the county’s population had grown at an average rate of only 8 percent per decade; now it grew by 19 percent in ten years, from 235,000 to nearly 280,000 people by 1960. Growth slowed only slightly in the 1960s, when the population shot up another 14 percent. By 1970, the county had 320,000 residents.1 Most of this growth was natural increase, the result of the postwar baby boom that pushed up birthrates nationwide for the first time since the eighteenth century. The baby boom affected the entire county, urban, suburban, and rural. In Lancaster County, in fact, the growth was even more dramatic in rural townships than in the suburbs. The area south of Quarryville had slowly lost population since the late nineteenth century, as changes in technology spurred farm consolidation and landless farm children headed west for cheaper land or to nearby cities for jobs. The Depression provided the only exception, when cities held few jobs and farmers could at least be sure of a meal. The baby boom was the first growth some rural townships had seen in half a century.

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But the years after World War II were for Lancaster as for much of the country a period of suburbanization. Of the county’s sixty-one municipalities, only the city of Lancaster lost population in the 1950s, while neighboring townships burst at the seams, adding half again their prewar population. By 1960, the suburbs represented 12 percent of the county’s population, more than twice their 1950 share. The bulk of jobs after the war, as before, were in or near the city, and young families took up residence within commuting distance. Until the mid-twentieth century, “commuting distance” had located most workers within the city limits; now, as cars became cheaper and more common, a daily commute of several miles was perfectly reasonable. The federal government made suburban living even easier, offering veterans guaranteed mortgages on new homes. Throughout the United States, young families looked to the suburbs for a smaller, updated version of that idealized family farm that fascinated Lancaster’s tourists, complete with green grass and a fully automated kitchen. For urban families in need of housing, new suburban developments offered private homes and a safe place to raise children at a price and on a scale that cities simply could not provide.2 Lancaster’s new suburbs, however, represented more than just a “flight from the city.” Urbanites leaving the city and ruralites looking for work met in the middle, and the suburbs they built, as well as Lancaster’s growing reputation within the region, attracted people from outside the county. Lancaster had more than its share of in-migration in the 1950s from more urban parts of Pennsylvania and the mid-Atlantic. Some 50,000 newcomers poured into the county in the decade, so that by 1960, nearly one resident in five had lived outside the county ten years earlier. The expansion of manufacturing jobs in and around the city as much as the county’s rural image drew new residents. Young women and men who attended local colleges and nursing schools often remained in the county after graduation. Some migrants from Philadelphia and New Jersey simply thought that Lancaster sounded like a nice place to live and looked for work after they arrived. For most of these newcomers, as for Lancastrians leaving their own city, the suburbs provided a more rural atmosphere than the one they had left. But many of the new suburban homes were occupied by rural-born Lancaster Countians moving inward for city jobs, just as previous generations of farm children had done. For these exruralites, the move to the suburbs was a move to the city, not away from it. The suburbs were, for them, not a quasi-rural refuge from the evils of modern, urban life, but a compromise with the demands of the modern economy and a chance to hold on to a piece of the rural life they remembered from childhood. If Lancaster’s suburbs, like most new communities of that kind, were uniform demographically (white, middle class), they were far more diverse culturally, and they combined a variety of attitudes about what Lancaster County was and ought to be.3 Whoever occupied them, new houses needed new land—especially big suburban houses with big suburban lots. New homes also required new roads, new

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businesses, and new utility plants to serve them. The baby boom and the resulting increase in school-age children created a need for dozens of new schools throughout the county. As fewer married couples shared households with extended families (a quarter as many in 1960 as in 1950) and life expectancies continued to rise, a growing retired population demanded the construction of nursing and convalescent homes. All of this required, in turn, more land. In Lancaster County, that meant farmland. Between 1940 and 1966, more than 50,000 acres of farmland, much of it prime agricultural land, was developed for housing, business, industry, and transportation. The loss amounted to a tenth of the county’s farmland. Both the farm population and the total number of farms in the county fell by nearly one-third in that same period, as farmers mechanized and consolidated their farms to compete in the national farm economy. By the early 1970s, fewer than 5,000 farms remained in a county with nearly 400,000 people. The loss of farmers and farmland would likely have been even greater had it not been for the Amish. While farmers across the country were retiring without children willing to take their place, Amish children eagerly took over the family farm and indeed bought land from non-Amish farmers getting out of the business. Their relatively small farms kept average farm size down countywide. If ever larger farms pleased agricultural economists—some of whom argued that still more consolidation would be necessary if Lancaster’s farmers were to remain competitive—even the experts had to shudder at the vision of some of the world’s most productive farmland growing only fescue and bluegrass. Nor could the average Lancaster Countian have been pleased by either trend. Newspaper editorials still held up the family farmer as model citizen, and the loss of model citizens had to worry even the most vigorous proponents of agricultural modernization. Whether one favored traditional farming or modern agribusiness, the loss of farmland was cause for concern.4 The most galling symbol of the changes taking place in Lancaster County, however, was its tourist industry. What had begun as a way of teaching curious outlanders about the county’s agricultural and religious heritage was, by the early 1960s, a multimillion-dollar industry thrumming to its own internal beat. The summer of 1961, when the number of tourists first topped one million, marked a shift in residents’ perceptions of the industry. Revenue that year was, incredibly, expected to reach $45 million—half the countywide income from farming, and nearly fifty times the amount generated by tourism only six years earlier. But despite tourism’s economic benefits, its rapid growth was bound to generate other kinds of complaints. The first Pennsylvania Dutch “Harvest Frolic,” held by the Pennsylvania Folklife Society that August as a Lancaster counterpart to Kutztown’s Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Festival, forced residents to face the negative side of tourism. A group of Amish bishops protested the commercialization of their religion, and an Amish crew, following the bishops’ lead, boycotted the barn

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raising demonstration. Advertising for the Frolic outstripped planning, and hundreds of visitors drove around the county in a fruitless search for hotel rooms. A bad situation grew worse when torrential rains washed out the Frolic’s Saturday schedule and thousands of tourists poured into the city in search of something to do, choking downtown streets and irritating residents. Locals, for the most part, avoided the event. Despite the Folklife Society’s assurances that the Harvest Frolic was actually better organized than the Folk Festival at Kutztown, hundreds of visitors returned home angry about the mud, the jumble of events, the poor lighting, the lack of real Amish and Mennonites, and the dearth of hotel rooms, while residents argued about the wisdom of staging so grandiose an affair in Lancaster.5 Concern about tourism had been growing for several years before the fiasco of the Harvest Frolic, but most Lancaster Countians were only now realizing just how big an industry it had become.6 Tourists were for the first time interfering with daily life in the county. The Amish and Old Order Mennonites bore the brunt of the tourism, of course. Despite the pleas of guidebooks to treat the Plain people with respect, tourists increasingly pestered them with questions, drove onto their farms, and followed them around with cameras. In 1963, Leacock Township officials had to post signs on one-room schoolhouses saying “No Tourists Allowed” because tourists occasionally “walked into the school rooms and photographed children without permission, interfered with teaching practices and made general nuisances of themselves.” Some parents even reported that their children often returned home late from school, having been held up on the road by camera-wielding tourists. Amish people interviewed by a local newspaper said that most tourists were sensible and polite, but that a relative handful “get around you and act as if they’re not civilized.”7 There were now so many tourists, though, that a “relative handful” was, in absolute terms, far too many. The real lightning rod for anti-tourist sentiment was Dutch Wonderland, a children’s amusement park that opened in 1963 on Route 30 east of Lancaster. Responding to tourists who complained that existing attractions held little interest for children, Lancaster resident Earl Clark bought a fourteen-acre tract of farmland on which he built a theme park fashioned in the shape of a castle. The castle’s white facade dominated the view from the highway; in fact, Clark relocated a historic eighteenth-century inn that would have partly obscured it. Clark’s neighbors were furious. Some, said Marlowe Hartung, a founding member of the Pennsylvania Dutch Tourist Bureau, “were ready to run him out of town on a rail.” In the winter of 1963, while the park was under construction, Tourist Bureau director Robert Shoemaker blasted the park and its proprietor in a speech before the Lancaster Rotary Club. Though he was careful not to mention the park by name, Shoemaker deplored the “summer carnival atmosphere” created by “fast buck operators” trying to “draw and exploit persons of poor taste . . . at the expense of those of us who were in all honesty playing up to the public interest in

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figure 5.1. Dutch Wonderland, built in 1963 on Route 30 east of Lancaster, horrified many residents with its garish facade and contributed to what one resident called “a honky-tonk neon nightmare.” Photograph by the author.

history, religion, and rural American culture.” The dividing line between “honest” business and exploitation was by no means as clear as Shoemaker made it sound—the Kutztown Folk Festival was proof enough of that—and he may have strained credulity by portraying his colleagues as victims. Still, both of Lancaster’s daily newspapers cheered. Shoemaker’s comments, said the Intelligencer Journal, were “a community service.” Lancaster’s “religious, historical, and cultural heritage . . . can be shared with visitors without being cheapened by phony castles, gadgets and gimmicks.” The New Era pleaded with tourist operators to cease exploiting the Amish and to create only authentic representations of the county’s character. “It is time,” the editorial proclaimed, “that the many persons who take pride in the heritage of this community band together to take active steps for preserving its character. If nothing is done, this Lancaster we love will disappear before our very eyes.”8

A Plan of Action In the spring of 1958, as public concerns about growth were emerging, the Lancaster County Board of Commissioners established the county’s first Planning Commission. Although city plans had addressed regional land use as early as 1929, the county as a whole had never formally considered the question. Their failure to act was due as much to a lack of jurisdiction as to a lack of concern; township and borough governments held most of the power at the local level, and the county commissioners had no authority to dictate land use anywhere in the county. Regardless, by the late 1950s the need for countywide effort was clear. The

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Planning Commission, made up of nine members appointed by the board to represent the various regions of the county, immediately undertook studies of the various aspects of the county’s growth. These early studies of the local economy, housing, past and future population growth, and parks and open space were designed to lead to a comprehensive, countywide plan for the remainder of the century. In the late 1960s, the commission’s planners, who then made up a permanent staff, met with local officials throughout the county to ask their input on countywide planning. Their Sketch Plan, including a lengthy volume of background material and another of the commission’s goals and objectives, was printed in 1971 and 1972 and made available to the public for a nominal fee. The plan was, indeed, comprehensive, covering issues of housing, economic growth, poverty, education, transportation, utilities, recreation, and culture and projecting Lancaster County’s needs in each of these areas to the turn of the twenty-first century.9 Although the planners claimed that there was no relevance to the order in which they addressed these topics, agriculture usually received top billing. After all, more than three-quarters of the county’s land area was farmland, and agriculture led the local economy despite the growth of other industries. Most of the planners’ concerns were practical ones, including soil conservation, the diminishing supply of local farm labor, and the potential for local processing and marketing of county-grown foodstuffs to cash in on the popular image of Pennsylvania Dutch goodness. At the same time, the planners recognized the psychological value of farmland, pointing out “the need for strategically located open spaces that can help provide for the physical and emotional development and well-being of urban and rural dwellers alike” and suggesting that some agricultural land could be “multiple use” land, providing for “outdoor recreational opportunities” such as camping, hunting, and hiking. Agriculture was, of course, the heritage of the county, even though the planners asked not only whether “Lancaster Countians wish to preserve their agricultural-rural heritage,” but also if they would “be justified in doing so.” It surprised no one, then, that the very first objective listed in the commission’s Sketch Plan was “preservation of agricultural land as an appropriate use of Lancaster County’s outstanding soils, as a means of preserving our cultural heritage, as a means of preserving open space, and as a means of retaining agriculture as an important sector of the economy.”10 Hardly anyone could argue with such clear and practical reasons for preserving farmland. But hardly anyone could be inspired by them. The Planning Commission made overtures toward a moral justification for preserving the county’s heritage, but it was, after all, a planning commission, and its members’ ideas tended to find sociological means of expression. The results were reminiscent of the writings produced by the Country Life movement more than a half-century earlier. One study, for example, listed a “sense of place” as the greatest justification for historical preservation efforts:

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We need a sense of place, an understanding of our relationships and roles in society. Individuals benefit from the degree of perspective on current affairs. It is important that we maintain a sense of continuity, a feeling of relatedness with our heritage. A realistic sense of association with our past achievements contributes to a desirable self-respect and pride in our society. An environmental pattern which is amenable to the human scale offers a meaningful framework for living. Our physical heritage can play an important role in fulfilling these needs, presenting citizens with tangible evidence of their heritage and providing a sense of proportion and continuity in a rapidly changing world. Destruction of our physical heritage, on the other hand, can only increase an already uncomfortable sense of alienation and lack of understanding in the midst of a chaotic and increasingly unattractive environment.11 In its core content, this passage differs little from tourist pamphlets that stressed the harmony of traditional Amish culture, yet its impact was quite different. Pastoral reverie might ill suit a government study, but torpid statements that “an environmental pattern which is amenable to the human scale offers a meaningful framework for living” were not going to ignite the populace to action. Planners, disdaining moral or emotional arguments for preserving Lancaster’s heritage, had to find more practical justifications, one of which was to turn the issue of preserving farmland into one of preserving open space. And why was open space important? Here the commission’s Park and Open Space Guidelines quoted New Jersey senator Harrison Williams: We need to save open space for a variety of reasons; to meet our recreation needs which can’t be met by a weekend trip to the country, to give the kids of our cities and suburbs a place where they can play ball or romp in the woods, to save especially scenic areas from the bulldozer, to conserve valuable agricultural land around the urban fringe, to protect our flood plains and wildlife, to provide buffers between communities to keep them from merging into one sprawling sea of subdivisions, to enhance adjacent property values, and help curb the spread of decay and blight.12 Despite their apparent variety, these justifications all had one thing in common: none envisioned people living in these places to be left rural. “Valuable agricultural land” might perhaps require resident farmers and laborers, but the senator’s words suggested that such land had mainly economic value, and Lancaster’s planners agreed with agricultural experts that consolidation of farmland—accompanied inevitably by depopulation—was the most profitable means of using such resources. Residents would have personal contact with this open space primarily through recreational activities. The commission’s number-one suggestion for

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preserving open space was, in fact, to build more golf courses. Planners even expressed concern that rising land costs would force builders to develop golf courses for housing, and then the county would fail to meet the National Recreation Association’s recommendation of one “standard 18-hole golf course” (at a minimum of 100 acres each) for every 50,000 persons.13 Again, no one would argue with the value of outdoor recreation, but here more than ever the language of government planning resembled that of Country Lifers struggling to teach rural children how to play in a suitably structured fashion. Good or bad, golf courses in a rural community were not something to be saved from rampant development but were—as ruralites well knew—evidence of the development itself. Underlying most of the reasons for preserving open space, as for historic preservation, was a concern for appearances. Certainly open space had economic benefits, and not only as farmland; it kept up property values, helped stave off urban decay and “blight,” and produced revenue from recreational activities. Preserving historic and agricultural sites would also keep tourist dollars flowing into the local economy. But even most of these economic considerations rested ultimately on visual ones. Unattractive golf courses and hiking trails made little money, and tourists came, of course, to see Lancaster’s rolling hills and Plain people. If property values would decline amid a “sprawling sea of subdivisions,” it was largely because residents didn’t like the way mass subdivisions looked. Historic architecture, by contrast, created “aesthetically pleasing environments.”14 Open space, to be of benefit to society, must above all else be seen: To be part of the fabric of everyday life, open space must be visible during the course of a normal day. If open space is not present between home and work or home and shopping center, little relief from the congestion of urban living is provided the average citizen. Even valuable open space along our major highways such as extensive farm acreage, if hidden from view by strip development, provides little open space benefit.15 Nor would “a littered vacant lot or a billboard-cluttered, weed-overgrown field” provide “useful” open space. “To be truly effective,” planners insisted, “open spaces require some maintenance and occasional improvement to insure that their attractiveness is preserved and enhanced.” In its comprehensive plan for the county, the Planning Commission grouped these concerns about appearance under the heading of “visual resources.” The county was “famous as an historic, picturesque area not far from some of [the nation’s] most ugly . . . urban areas,” but “its positive visual attributes are diminishing daily. . . . Those resources which remain must be inventoried, analyzed, and preserved now, while there is something still visually unique about Lancaster County.” Although such an inventory was meant to encompass “both small objects and entire panoramas; both secluded objects and ones seen by thousands of persons daily,” the economic

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language of resources tended to emphasize the biggest and most obvious vistas— the landscape visible from major highways. A covered bridge, the planners reasoned, might provide a “quaint, positive contribution to the visual environment,” but it was only a “special attraction” with little direct impact. Far more important were “the buildings, the signs, the traffic signals, the other man-made elements, and the natural forms” framing the major thoroughfares between the city and its suburbs, sights that residents could not avoid but had to endure every day. Preserving a sense of place boiled down to appearances, and the most important sights were those seen from the window of one’s car.16 Tourism, another issue at the heart of the county’s identity, raised similar concerns about appearances. The tourist industry could not survive without picturesque farmland visible from the highways. Tourism was, first and foremost, sightseeing, and if there were no sights, there would be no tourists. But despite tourism’s obvious economic benefits, planners could not ignore its negative side. They expressed concern about outside-owned attractions, the violation of Plain people’s right to privacy, and the interference of tourist traffic with residents’ daily business. “No residents of the County,” they argued, “should be harassed or alienated by any activity of the tourist industry”; they should, rather, participate in and benefit from tourism. Some of the worst side effects of tourism were, nevertheless, visual. Attractions “must avoid a cheap, commercial appearance” and should be placed where they would not detract from the landscape that inspired them. The “country atmosphere” of the county had been “replaced by commercial shops, motels, and restaurants” as well as ugly signs and billboards along highways, and this change must be halted or reversed. A Lancaster man, rising to speak at a public meeting, put his concerns more succinctly: the highways through Amish country were, he said, a “neon dumpheap.”17

Landscape and Community It would be unfair to suggest that the Planning Commission’s sole concern, even with regard to the county’s identity or heritage, was with appearances. In several of their studies, the planners tried to address philosophical, personal, or emotional arguments that a sense of place was vital to a community. But the language of government planning and social science provided a poor means of expressing such impractical concerns, and moral arguments are rarely afforded a place in serious academic or policy discussions. As a result, when they addressed the issue of Lancaster County’s identity, planners usually fell back on the sociological language of “visual resources,” reducing the county’s history, culture, and agrarian heritage to a matter of landscape. Lancaster’s heritage became something to be seen from the window of one’s automobile, the entire county a giant tourist attraction for its own residents.18

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But landscape alone does not create a sense of place. Landscape might be made to represent heritage or community, but it could not be equivalent to those things, for a landscape is first and foremost something to be viewed from afar. As Raymond Williams argues, the effect of seeing the country as landscape is to sever the viewer from it.“A working country,” he writes,“is hardly ever a landscape. The very idea of landscape implies separation and observation.” The aesthetic appreciation of landscape is “an experience in itself.” It reflects the observer’s own desires, remaking the country in the observer’s own image rather than integrating the observer into the country. Williams is referring specifically to eighteenthcentury English landlords, but his description of the way they transformed their lands into landscapes applies equally to the way twentieth-century tourists and photographers transformed Lancaster County. “They succeeded in creating,” he writes, “a rural landscape emptied of rural labor and of labourers; a sylvan and watery prospect . . . from which the facts of production had been banished.” Such a landscape, seen from above, was “the expression of control and command”— something for the observer to use and enjoy, as it suited him.19 “Open space” similarly transformed a “working country” into an object of consumption, whether it was to be used as a resource, for recreation, or for aesthetic appreciation. There was no community in open space land; the only person present was the viewer. Like restaurant reproductions of farm cooking or tourist representations of Amish life, the landscape of a farm provides a blank slate on which the viewer can write his or her own values and idealizations. To turn the country into landscape separates the viewer in terms of time, as well. The window of an automobile, like the lens of a camera, separates the world into discrete snapshots, each cut off from the reality they represent. As John Berger points out, a photograph that is created in an instant lasts for years, a ratio in time of as much as twenty billion to one. “Perhaps,” he writes, “that can serve as a reminder of the violence of the fission whereby appearances are separated by the camera from their function.” A photograph viewed by a third party is simply “information severed from all living experience,” void of intrinsic meaning and ready to be stamped with the viewer’s own arbitrary choice of meaning.20 The landscape seen from an automobile is similarly severed from personal experience. Knowing nothing about the workings of a farm, let alone of any particular farm, the sightseer is free to make his or her own assumptions and attach his or her own values to the scene. The complex relationship between a dairy farmer and his Holsteins, the intertwining of economic investment and personal attachment, is superseded by the sight of a cute animal in a green field, something to yell “moo” at out the window of the car. The centuries of agronomy and nurture, the blend of art and science that built a farm, the decades of memories of the people who farm it, and the modern economics that threaten it are supplanted in a momentary glance at a picturesque landscape. Lancaster’s

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heritage—by definition a sense of continuity between past and present—could not be preserved in a landscape. It was bad enough that tourists came and went with only a snapshot understanding of the life of a rural community, but if Lancaster’s own residents no longer had a personal connection with their home county beyond the view from the highway, there was hardly any point in discussing preserving local heritage, for there was none to be preserved. But were Lancaster County’s residents really becoming tourists in their own homeland? Certainly they had, from all appearances, little interest in the county’s new comprehensive plan. The Planning Commission held Citizens’ Forums, published questionnaires in the Sunday News, and broadcast a series of half-hour television programs in the summer of 1974 to elicit public response to the draft plan. Without public support, the plan had little hope of fruition, but response to the commission’s overtures was at best lukewarm. In April 1975, as planners were finalizing the plan, three public meetings were held to give residents a last opportunity to offer comments and suggestions. Despite the New Era’s plea for citizens to “Speak Up,” the first meeting in Brownstown drew meager attendance. The next day’s newspapers painted a portrait of apathy: “Only 35 Attend Session on the County’s Future,” announced a back-page headline. Planning Director John Ahlfeld could not hide his disappointment. “This plan is our future,” he said. “One would like to think the people are satisfied with the plan. . . . But since we’ve sold only twenty copies [at $1 each], I doubt that can be said.” Attendance was slightly better at later meetings, but the impression that remained was one of general apathy. “What if,” asked the Intelligencer Journal, “somebody charted the future of Lancaster County and nobody cared?”21 There could be any number of reasons for the lack of interest in the planning process. In large part, as Ahlfeld later suggested, Lancaster Countians simply were not yet aware of the magnitude of the changes taking place around them. Despite increasing traffic, the “neon dumpheap” east of the city, the spread of subdivisions, the decline of Lancaster’s downtown, and the loss of farmland, the county’s growth did not yet appear to be spinning out of control.22 People needed more than vague misgivings to turn out at public meetings, and regional planning rarely inspires mass action. The Planning Commission, moreover, had no power to enforce its vision. Each of the county’s sixty-one municipalities (the city of Lancaster, nineteen boroughs, and forty-one rural or suburban townships) retained jurisdiction over its own growth and development; countywide coordination of planning efforts was possible only through voluntary cooperation and careful persuasion. To make matters worse, the local press, particularly the morning Intelligencer Journal, gave the plan only perfunctory attention, so that interested citizens had difficulty following its development. Residents who did speak out, however, provided a clue to their neighbors’ silence. Their comments suggested, in fact, that many residents were very much

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interested in the county’s heritage and the threats posed to it by unchecked growth, but that the plan failed to address those issues in the ways that concerned them most. Several residents complained that the plan made no reference to the county’s “rich religious heritage.” Others thought the planners were too quick to assume the inevitability of growth and argued that to accommodate development would perpetuate a vicious cycle. The proposed Southern Beltway, claimed Boyd Abbot of Manor Township, would encourage rather than prevent the development of prime farmland. “Why build a road at all?” he asked. “It’s nice to say we need a road, but all it does is create more cars. Everything you put in to help people just brings in more people.” Douglas Wiedman, a Lititz resident, agreed. “Lancaster was great before the Reading bypass was built,” he said. “Nobody could get in here.” The comment most often expressed at public meetings was that the plan did not go far enough in protecting farmland from development. In fact, it accepted a future loss of one-third of the county’s remaining agricultural land. When a resident suggested that construction of shopping centers be halted until existing, vacant centers were in full use, the audience applauded enthusiastically.23 Residents were worried about saving more than just “open space” and landscape; they wanted to preserve the heritage of the county. K. L. Shirk, Jr., a local attorney, summed up criticisms of the plan with the comment that what it really needed was “a statement . . . adopting a philosophy of the community.” One of the county’s highest priorities, he said,“should be the preservation of the whole environment, tenor and way of life in Lancaster County that results because farmland is here.”24 The practical-minded planners must have shuddered at the thought of writing such a document, but the New Era took up the challenge, spelling out a draft “Philosophy of the County” later the same week: A love of the land, and a desire to see the farming tradition upheld by succeeding generations. An insistence on self-reliance, rather than having government do what they can do through the private sector. A wish to have a minimum of government at all levels, but preference for grass-roots control. Emphasis on hard work and high productivity in all types of endeavor. An interest in progress, but not in change just for the sake of change. Tight watch on finances, not only in households, but in any government or large private undertaking—everything from new water lines to new hospitals. Strong family life. Deep devotion to religion, whatever the belief might be. Generally conservative, living the old time virtues.

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High degree of support for charities and philanthropies. Good neighborliness, in daily lives and in emergencies.25 This was, clearly, a conservative philosophy, not just politically but literally so. It is, at the same time, a distinctly rural philosophy. It contains the same basic elements as popular magazine articles and tourist booklets about the Amish: the centrality of family, the importance of hard work and frugality, the desire for personal independence as the basis of a strong, vital community. Its authors intended it as a rural philosophy, for underlying everything was “the desire to keep as much of our fertile farmland in agriculture as possible.” Farming was not just a combination of profits and pretty landscape; it was a way of life, the raison d’être for an entire social order and a way of thinking about the world.26 Neither economics nor appearances could capture this sense of what Lancaster County was and should be, of what a rural place meant to the community that dwelled in it. The New Era’s philosophy stemmed, rather, from a union of practical and spiritual ways of understanding rural life. Consider the next day’s editorial, “Coloring the Landscape Green,” an essay ostensibly about the county’s appearance in springtime. Nature’s coloring book is open to the pages marked Spring, and green is rapidly being painted in to replace the black, brown, and beige that formerly prevailed. Some of the green has a blue tinge to it; some has yellow. It varies from lawns to shrubs to small plants. It is transforming the countryside, bringing new rejoicing to all who are sensitive to the progress of the seasons. . . . Here and there an early dandelion shows its ocher head. A weed not welcomed by meticulous homeowners who dote on well groomed lawns, it is much sought by others who enjoy its tender leaves in salads, or utilize it in making wine. In farm fields and home vegetable gardens, the good earth is being turned and prepared for planting. Soon new color will be visible there— measured by the acre in the country, by the square foot in back yards. We are lucky to live where we do—where Spring colors have so many happy meanings—new life in the land, new confidence for the present, new hope for the future.27 Spring was beautiful, and flowers were pretty to look at. But flowers could also be useful, and the landscape could be divided into plots and made to feed a community. This is neither a hard-nosed accounting of agricultural economics nor, quite, a pastoral reverie. It takes both a practical and a spiritual view of spring, with each view augmenting rather than diminishing the other. This kind of rural philosophy was nowhere to be found in the county’s comprehensive plan. The

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plan was, ultimately, an urban-oriented document, equally appropriate to any growing metropolitan area, and the residents who turned out at public meetings seemed to sense this. Planners accepted growth—and therefore urbanization—as inevitable. They imagined urbanites driving through, playing in, and consuming the produce of the country but paid less attention to the ruralites who would live there. And without a vision for preserving a rural community, efforts to preserve its “heritage” were doomed to failure.

Rural Renaissance Despite their constituents’ uncertain response, Lancaster County’s Board of Commissioners adopted the new comprehensive plan in the spring of 1975, and the Planning Commission began coordinating efforts with local officials to implement its provisions. By the late 1970s, every municipality but one had a set of zoning ordinances and a plan for growth that were, if not quite in line with the county plan, at least not in direct conflict with it. Officials were hopeful that, armed with a new set of ordinances and guidelines, they could work together to manage the county’s future growth. But by the time planners and local officials began work on implementing the Planning Commission’s recommendations, patterns of growth were already changing. The plan had assumed that, left unchecked, existing growth trends would continue—heaviest in Lancaster’s suburbs, with scattered development of farmland and open space. Over the next fifteen years, however, population growth outstripped their projections by 20 percent. And though planners tried to keep the suburbs from spreading, people increasingly ignored the suburbs completely, building homes in rural areas far from the city. In the 1970s, it was rural Lancaster County, not the suburbs, that became the hotbed of new development.28 Across the nation, rural areas experienced similarly rapid growth, as residents of cities and suburbs suddenly turned to small towns and country roads for new homes. Most, though not all, of the growth occurred near metropolitan areas, especially on the East Coast and in the Sun Belt, as the southern and southwestern portion of the country was now known. More isolated agricultural areas— communities that most needed an infusion of new population and new money —continued, on balance, to decline. But nationwide, the balance of population was tilting somewhat back to the country. Rural population, which had declined in absolute terms in the 1950s and 1960s, grew nearly as fast as the nation’s urban population. Counting small towns as rural, rural places grew more rapidly than urban areas. The shift was as dramatic as it was sudden. Throughout the twentieth century, the dominant demographic trend in the United States had been migration from nonmetropolitan to metropolitan areas. In the 1960s, some 300,000 people each year left nonmetropolitan areas across the United States; by

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the mid-1970s, 380,000 people per year returned. Even within metropolitan areas, population was deconcentrating, as urbanites moved out of the cities and suburbs into outlying areas. So sudden was this change, in fact, that sociologists were slow to recognize it and even slower to accept it. One demographer admitted, not far from shock himself, that “a common first reaction to these . . . figures is sheer disbelief.”29 The new rural growth was not, as it might first have seemed, merely an extension of the suburbs. Although large numbers of new ruralites were in fact longdistance commuters to urban jobs, they often leapfrogged convenient locations adjacent to older suburbs in search of more isolated, genuinely rural areas. Even many areas from which commuting was impossible, areas that had been in slow decline before the 1970s, attracted new residents. As sociologist Peter Morrison observed in 1976, “More remote kinds of places—those that as a group used to be regarded as ‘nowhere’—have today become ‘somewhere’ in the minds of many migrants.” But if exurbanites repopulated rural places, did those places remain rural? Improvements in transportation and communication encouraged rural growth by removing the main reason to locate in the city—proximity to other people and businesses. Ruralites now had relatively easy access to urban economy and culture via interstate highways, telephones, and satellite television; as Morrison said, technology had made it possible to be of the city without being in it. Opinion surveys consistently recorded that Americans wanted to live in small towns or rural hamlets—but, if at all possible, within thirty miles of a major city. Many Americans had dreamt of this in the 1920s, when the cities swelled to unprecedented size; they had dreamt it in the 1950s, when they settled for the compromise of the suburbs. Now, they were acting on their desires. What kind of communities they were building in their new rural homes remained in question.30 Demographer Calvin Beale, among the first to recognize the new migration trend, saw several potential causes for rural growth in the 1970s. Farm employment had stabilized as agricultural exports increased, while decentralization of manufacturing created thousands of new jobs in nonmetropolitan areas. Greater residential sprawl around metropolitan areas brought necessary services to previously isolated areas, and modernization of rural communities since the 1930s had made them more attractive to Americans with a choice of where to live. Much of the new growth occurred in locations suitable for recreation or retirement communities. Beale and his colleagues also noted “noneconomic quality-of-life reasons” that made up for lower incomes in rural areas, a desire for the simple life “expressed either in terms of negative perceptions of life in the large cities and their suburbs or in terms of positive conceptions of the merits of living in smaller communities.”31 These “noneconomic quality-of-life reasons” were the fountainhead of the new rural growth. If changes in economics, transportation, and housing explain

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why Americans could move “back” to small towns and rural areas, they fail to explain why so many did return to the country. Rural development was neither the physical extension of the suburbs nor the cultural extension of suburbanization. Previously, Americans might have tried to recreate pieces or symbols of idealized rural life, farm food and green lawns, but they had not actually wanted to live in the country. The suburbs, not the country, had dominated popular culture and represented the ideal place to live. Popular television shows of the 1950s and early 1960s took place in the suburbs; it is difficult to imagine a show like The Waltons garnering much of an audience in the years after World War II. By the mid-1970s, however, more and more Americans wanted, if not the reality, at least the more complete pretense of genuine country life, and they were willing to consider more seriously the values that went along with that life. Exurbanites in the 1970s, like suburbanites in preceding decades, were pushed by the city as much as they were pulled by the country. Even the suburbs seemed increasingly unsafe, as urban problems spilled beyond the city’s borders. Urban crime continued to rise, strengthening the association in Americans’ minds between crime and the city. Racism certainly played a part in growing anti-urban sentiment; since World War II, the migration of blacks from the rural South to northern cities had accelerated, and many cities, including Lancaster, also had a rapidly growing Latino population by 1970. If pure racism was not enough to spur “white flight,” the social strife produced by the new racial mix made the city an increasingly unattractive place to live. Race riots in the late 1960s terrified many white Americans who lived too close to the “inner city” for comfort. Busing forced racial integration on previously isolated whites and threatened to bring the consequences of poverty into middle-class neighborhoods. To many, the problems of the city seemed at the same time shockingly new and distressingly intractable. Perhaps these problems could be solved, but it was easier simply to leave.32 But the country made an attractive destination in and of itself for urbanites and suburbanites. Some of the impetus behind the move “back to the land” can be traced to the counterculture and youth movement of the late 1960s. Charles Reich tried to sum up that movement in his 1970 book The Greening of America. American culture, Reich argued, had fallen prey to the decline of democracy, the artificiality of work, a loss of community and self, and uncontrolled technology that “pulverize[s] everything in [its] path: the landscape, the natural environment, history and tradition, the amenities and civilities, the privacy and spaciousness of life, beauty, and the fragile, slow-growing social structures which bind us together.” Their vagueness as much as their sensibility made his points difficult to argue with; echoes of them can be heard in the more philosophical musings of even so practical a body as the Lancaster County Planning Commission. But Reich’s remedies were cultural, not institutional. The youth of America

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were creating a new consciousness, he claimed, and would lead a revolution whose “ultimate creation will be a new and enduring wholeness and beauty—a renewed relationship of man to himself, to other men, to society, to nature, and to the land.” This would be a revolution of individuals and communities, based on simple living and brotherly love, a cultural change that would render current political institutions and other forms of organization irrelevant.33 Reich’s version of the hippie vision was seductive, even if he strained credibility by claiming that “bell bottoms” were “part of a consistent philosophy” and that “Bob Dylan . . . changed the world.”34 Thousands of young men and women across the country who shared his idealism decided to leave behind the materialistic world they detested and go back to the land in search of spiritual awakening. Their efforts, like those of their transcendentalist predecessors, usually took the form of agrarian communes. Helen and Scott Nearing, whose 1954 account of their experiences homesteading in Vermont was virtually ignored at the time, now found themselves transformed into cult figures; the 1970 reprint of Living the Good Life sold more than 100,000 copies. But few of their young followers could duplicate the Nearings’ achievements. Though its spiritual rewards were great, homesteading in northern New England required, as the Nearings eagerly pointed out, a great deal of hard work, commitment, and sacrifice. But, as David Shi writes,“The youthful populists were frequently the victims of their own liberationist philosophy and their bourgeois backgrounds. In their disgust for the modern work ethic, they tended to exchange the materialist hedonism of the consumer culture for the sexual and sensory hedonism of the counter culture.” The hippies, unlike the Nearings, had little concept of what they were getting themselves into, of the work involved in coaxing survival from the land or of how they might marry spiritual idealism to the practical necessities of day-to-day life. Even the Nearings were disturbed by the jaded attitude of the youth who visited them at their farm, and they reluctantly concluded that homesteading simply was not for everyone.35 But utopian visions have a way of trickling into the mainstream. The hardiest of the idealists who moved back to the land survived and succeeded as homesteaders, and a few offered the benefit of their experience to others dreaming of a similar move. John Vivian’s 1975 Manual of Practical Homesteading encouraged discontented suburbanites to try their hands at farming but warned of the difficulties facing them and gave step-by-step advice on managing daily life on the land, including procedures for milking goats and cleaning chicken houses. More common were books and courses on traditional craft that appealed to people looking for more meaningful work than their jobs allowed. Roy Underhill, who had at one time “lived for several years in a tepee with a canvas door” and with a herd of Toggenberg goats, learned from his rustic experience both the value of sturdy furniture and how to wield an ax and by the early 1980s was teaching a

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national audience, via his PBS show The Woodwright’s Shop, the art of traditional woodcraft. Underhill, like others of this more practical bent, hoped that his pupils would learn to “work by eye and by feel” rather than by “numbers and measurements” but did not deny that work with hand tools could be as difficult and dangerous as it was spiritually rewarding. Rodale Press in Emmaus, Pennsylvania—perhaps not coincidentally in the “Pennsylvania Dutch country”—published a series of books on traditional skills, including Stocking Up, which adapted old methods of preserving and storing food to modern health concerns and technologies. Magazines such as Country Journal, Mother Earth News, and Rodale’s Organic Gardening reached an increasingly broad audience with practical advice on growing at least a portion of one’s own food, sans chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and on living by “doing it yourself.”36 The move to the country in search of the simple life did not, of course, require such total commitment. Several books written in the late 1970s and 1980s found the roots not only of homesteading but of the rural renaissance generally in the yearning for a simpler, more peaceful lifestyle. Julie Haywood and Ken Spooner, themselves recent migrants from the city, interviewed people around the country who had recently moved from urban to rural areas. They focused their study not on migrants who had moved in search of work or because they were independently wealthy or retired and could live wherever they chose, but on those who made a conscious choice to make the sacrifices necessary to live in the country. Haywood and Spooner described several people who left well-paying jobs in the city to escape noise, pollution, and crowding in search of self-fulfillment and a better place to raise their children. A New York filmmaker whom they interviewed had sold his share of a lucrative business to become a woodcarver in rural Vermont; others left secure incomes for the satisfactions of part-time farming. Robert McGill found similar stories when he canvassed the Ozarks in search of recent migrants from the city. The exurbanites he interviewed tended to be people who “methodically and persistently insisted that they could learn the skills of living with less money instead of more and, thereby, increase the quality of their lives.” Like Haywood and Spooner, McGill intended his book as a guide for city dwellers considering a similar move.37 How-to books on traditional skills, organic vegetable gardening, and the repopulation of the Ozarks may not have heralded the revolution Charles Reich was looking for, but these small efforts at simple living appealed to Americans disillusioned by the economic and political crises of the 1970s. Just as Watergate and Vietnam had eroded trust in politicians and government, fears of annihilation had eroded faith in technological progress, and the failure of the economy had raised doubts about the future of America. Feelings of frustration and alienation left many people searching for new values and new forms of community and connectedness. The oil embargo and the resulting downward spiral of inflation and

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unemployment suggested to many professional economists and ordinary citizens that America had reached an “age of limits” in which ambitions would have to be reduced and consumption sharply curtailed. In response to these twin economic and spiritual crises, a “voluntary simplicity” movement arose whose advocates encouraged spiritual and civic commitment, human-scale technology and decision-making, and conscientious consumption. Proponents of voluntary simplicity were mostly young, well-educated, white, and middle class, but the movement was mainstream enough for Reader’s Digest to publish, in the winter of 1976, an article by Laurence Rockefeller entitled “The Case for a Simpler Life-Style.” Rockefeller advocated not a cultural revolution but merely “reducing reliance on mechanical things and discovering the joy of self-reliance and the satisfaction of physical work.”38 The movement’s impact was less than its founders hoped, for it evaporated quickly enough when prosperity returned in the 1980s. Even if the vast majority of Americans made no serious move toward simpler living, however, they relished at least the idea of simpler living. Whether or not they put rural values into practice, millions of mainstream Americans now considered them something to be taken seriously.

Plain and Fancy, Part II Generations of Americans had claimed to love the simplicity of country life, but most people had always settled for symbolic representations of rurality. Perceptions of rurality had now changed, if large numbers of urbanites and suburbanites were moving to isolated small towns. But whatever future directions the rural renaissance might have suggested at the time, it did not result in a mass return to farming or to other rural ways of life. Lancaster Countians’ experience in the “rural renaissance” suggests how deep these new currents really ran. New visions of the Garden Spot in the 1970s, as before, began with the Amish, but they ended in a real threat to the way Lancastrians thought of their home. In mainstream American culture, the Amish, like the simple life they supposedly led, were being taken more seriously. Popular fascination with the Amish had always ridden an undercurrent of yearning for a simpler life, of concern for the future of mainstream America. Now that yearning was bubbling to the surface. In the context of the troubles facing the country in the 1970s, the Amish seemed much wiser, even prescient: they had known all along that modern society and technology were headed for trouble. Tom Braden, writing for the Los Angeles Times in 1975, recalled how his daughter’s school paper on the Amish, in which she concluded that the Plain people were not “with it,” made him stop and think. “Is there anything to be said for not being with it?” he asked himself. The “peaceful Amish, going about their business . . . ignoring the bustling American society which sometimes threatens their . . . farms,” had long ago said “Stop” to

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technology. Now, it seemed, other voices were joining them—banning the Concorde, for example, despite the fact that it celebrated American values by flying higher, better, and faster than other jets. “Suddenly within the lifetime of a father,” he concluded, “‘Stop’ doesn’t seem quite so silly anymore.”39 If the Amish had not said, exactly, “Stop,” to the march of technology, and if this idealization of them was as simplistic as so many others, Braden’s questioning still marked a shift in the way mainstream Americans looked at the Amish. Earlier observers had often looked at the Amish a bit wistfully, but only rarely had they compared the Amish directly to themselves. Now, more and more people admitted that Amish values merited serious consideration—and abandoned the comforting pretense that eating Amish food or visiting Amish farms was a useful substitute for practicing the values they represented. Archibald MacLeish, visiting Lancaster County in the early 1970s, found himself similarly, and perhaps more accurately, struck by the apparent wisdom of the Amish way of life. “Generations before the rest of us had even begun to recognize that there is a world under all other questions [i.e., a spiritual one] and that our future depends on our ability to answer it,” he wrote, “the Amish had faced up to the question. . . . It wasn’t technological inventiveness that was going to define the future for the Amish. They themselves would do the defining.”40 The Amish were no longer mired in the past, too simple to move in the modern world; they seemed, rather, masters of their own destinies—if only inasmuch as they accepted the limits of their own mastery. It was the rest of the world, the moderns, who played the fools, in danger of becoming victims of their own cleverness. Serious consideration of Amish values was no more universal than the voluntary simplicity movement, but it began, slowly, to have an impact on tourism. A few travel writers thought it appropriate to note, with considerable dismay, that their visits to Lancaster County had left them unfulfilled. The English Lord Snowden, after his own visit, commented that although “I encountered maps and brochures of Amishland at every turn . . . I could find no literature about their religious beliefs. It is almost as if one is not expected to take them seriously in terms of what they believe but rather only in terms of what they look like.”41 Gideon Fisher, a local Amish man, agreed. “Upon arriving in our county,” he wrote in a memoir, “many visitors become confused, and realize they have been brainwashed to a certain extent. They find [tourism] is partly a money racket. After they arrive and travel over the countryside, they inquire for information as to where they could see an Amish farm, and where the Amish people live. This proves they have been misled by a wide margin.”42 A few tourist operators responded by creating attractions that were—or purported to be—more authentic. “The demand for authenticity is satisfied when you visit ‘The Amish Homestead,’” promised a brochure from the early 1980s, for a genuine Amish family lived there and tilled the land. A Mennonite couple, Merle and Phyllis Good,

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opened the People’s Place in Intercourse to educate as well as entertain tourists with a “three-screen documentary feature” and a feature film set in the Mennonite community. The Goods’ wish, they said, was “to foster better understanding and people-to-people conversation. None of us likes to live in a zoo. It takes effort to understand other people.”43 A few local farmers, struggling to make ends meet and to pay their rising property taxes, tapped into the public’s growing desire for an “authentic” experience of the country by opening their homes as bed-and-breakfasts. Galen and Eileen Benner’s Rocky Acre Farm, which they turned into a bed-and-breakfast in 1965, offered families a chance to “discover the simple joys of feeding a newborn calf, fishing and boating in a sparkling stream, riding a gentle miniature horse, milking a cow, petting the lively goats and sheep, gathering eggs from the hen house, cuddling a purring kitten, riding a bike along a country lane, enjoying a country picnic, and so much more.” Kreider’s Tourist Farm Home in Ronks offered “the experience of a working farm with our family”—but not too authentic an experience.“Of course,” the brochure admitted,“you’ll not need to get out of bed at 5:00 a.m. like we do, but wouldn’t it be nice to know you could help us milk our 41 dairy cows or feed the 20 heifers and calves if you really wanted to get up early?” Guests could pretend to help out, but what they were really being offered—and what most of them really wanted—was an idyllic country vacation with the appearance of authenticity, one that would confirm their idealizations about farm life and allow them to experience it vicariously. “When you get up in the morning,” the Kreiders promised, “you can pet our calves and play with our pets.” Bedand-breakfast farm vacations did offer tourists a vision of real life on a working farm and certainly a more authentic vision than they were likely to find on television or in a museum. But a farm vacation was still a vacation, a period of leisure rather than work, and locating a bed-and-breakfast in a farmhouse did nothing to change the growing sense of the country as a place for rest and recreation. The owners of the aptly named Verdant View Farm, promising “modern accommodations” in “the warmth and charm of an 1896 farm house,” understood what their guests really wanted. Even when it came to authenticity, it was appearances that mattered most.44 In fact, even many of the supposedly “authentic” tourist attractions had not changed significantly since the 1950s. Mindy Brandt and Thomas Gallagher, acting as investigative reporters for Pennsylvania Folklife in the early 1990s, described for readers their visit to several Lancaster County tourist attractions. At one attraction, a former Amish house that had been opened to tourists in the 1950s, they found a version of Amish life that had, indeed, been accurate—forty years before. The tour guides failed to mention, or quickly glossed over, recent changes in Amish domestic life such as gas cookstoves, propane-fueled refrigerators, and polyester garments. When Brandt and Gallagher asked polite questions about

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these things, the guides proved quite knowledgeable about how the Amish live today, although less so about the spiritual meaning behind the way they live. The tour guides, they concluded, were simply telling tourists what they wanted to hear. “What [tourists] would like,” the authors agreed, “is that the Amish would conform to their preconceived notions about them.” Tourists had grown more skeptical, perhaps, but no less eager to have their idealizations of the Amish confirmed by willing tour guides. Merle Good understood what tourists wanted, though he tried to show them something more. “The crassest places,” he wrote, “stamp ‘genuine’ and ‘authentic’ on every story they tell . . . as if a label guarantees understanding.”45 Postcards tell a similar story. In the 1970s and 1980s, farming motifs appeared more often on postcards, suggesting that tourists were interested in the Amish as farmers. As always, however, animals nearly always appeared in the foreground, dominating the people, the work, and certainly any machinery being used. One postcard, for example, shows Amish men harvesting feed corn with the aid of mechanical implements, probably powered by diesel fuel but drawn by horses as the Old Order required (figure 5.2). But the machine is easily missed, and neither the photograph nor its caption (“Many Amish farm with mules, but still others prefer a beautiful team of Belgians”) suggests its power source. Occasionally, too, modernity appeared in postcard photos; snapshots of Amish children walking to school might, accidentally, catch one child carrying her lunch in an Igloo cooler. Similarly, postcards commonly displayed an Amish horse and buggy in front of Zimmerman’s hardware store in Intercourse, which had soda machines and an ice cooler on its front porch. But the technology of vending machines only offered a contrast to the traditional ways of the Amish; never would an Amish person be seen in such a photograph buying or drinking a Coke—though one might in real life. The most common motifs for postcards remained children, animals, landscapes (often with horse and buggy traveling a country road), and produce at farm stands. Even clothing could be offered without an Amish person to wear it, as laundry on a line, yet still be made to convey “the closeness and harmony between generations in an Amish family.” (See figure 5.3.)46 Such photographs appeared to be authentic simply because they were not posed; if they had human subjects, the subjects were usually unaware of the camera. They appeared, therefore, to show Amish life as it really was. But they were nonetheless composed by the photographer to show what tourists wanted to see. That much had not changed since the 1950s. The only substantive difference was that another layer of fake authenticity had been laid over the first, as if to say,“Yes, we were fooling you before—but now it’s really authentic.” Farm bed-and-breakfasts, similarly, seemed to allow tourists a look “behind the scenes” at real farm life, but guests’ experiences were as carefully packaged there as at the Amish Farm and House. Portrayals of the Amish, and of rural Lancaster County as a whole,

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figure 5.2. Amish men farm with horses in this postcard photograph, as the caption points out—but also with machinery, which is largely hidden from view. Courtesy of Steven Witmer.

still left readers and tourists with the feeling that everything was all right. At a time when many Americans already faced challenges to their beliefs, the “authentic” country gave them not the solution they seemed to long for but simple reassurances. One senses in Lancaster County’s tourism of the 1970s, even more than in that of the previous generation, a lost opportunity for serious cultural introspection. Tourism continued to grow, even in hard times. It was slowed only at the end of the decade by the sharp rise in gasoline prices; Americans remained as interested as ever in the Amish and their Garden Spot. If they now sensed the cartoonish naïveté of “Yonnie” and Plain and Fancy, they received instead only the same themes in more sophisticated packaging. And, for the most part, they seemed to be satisfied—and could continue to be, so long as tourist operators could think of new packages and reassurances.47 ✸ Lancaster County also became the dubious beneficiary of the same demographic boom experienced by other strategically located rural areas in the 1970s. The county’s population continued to grow by more than 4,000 residents each year, to 362,000 by 1980. The new growth was not quite as impressive numerically as the explosion of Lancaster’s suburbs a generation before but was in some ways even more significant: the most rapid growth was not even near the city but in rural

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figure 5.3. “A simple clothesline bespeaks the closeness and harmony between generations in an Amish family,” says the caption on this postcard, but the family is nowhere to be seen; the Amish are represented solely by their clothing. Courtesy of Steven Witmer.

townships bordering the county’s small towns. East Drumore Township, located in the most rural part of the county and lacking even a significant crossroads village within its borders, grew by a shocking 45 percent in the decade. By the early 1980s, East Drumore had gained enough population to qualify, by U.S. Census Bureau standards, as an urban area, even though its residences bore the address of neighboring Quarryville—which had a third fewer people than East Drumore. The county’s boroughs, which had grown somewhat in the 1960s, now apparently could provide the resources people needed on a day-to-day basis, while the network of county highways allowed easy access to the city when something more was desired. Small towns, while welcoming economic growth, tended to have stricter zoning laws than the rural townships they served, and people in need of housing (and more to the point, the developers who provided it) found it cheaper, easier, and more pleasant to build their new homes on old farmland within several minutes’ drive of town.48 Farmers felt the most direct impact of this new growth. Rising land prices and ever-declining profits made irresistible the temptation to sell generations-old farmland, and developers easily outbid farmers seeking to buy land for their children. As property values rose, so did taxes, and profits did not always cover the increase. Consolidation and loss of farmland continued as they had since the 1950s. But now, as the pressure on farmers increased, it began to affect even Lancaster’s

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most visible farmers, the Amish. The pressure on the Amish was in part a result of their own success as a community. Their numbers in Lancaster County had more than doubled since the Second World War and had increased sevenfold since the turn of the century. Since the Depression, they had bought farmland from nonAmish farmers getting out of the business, spreading south and west through the county’s southern end, but there was never enough land for everyone. Some young Amish men and women left, as others had since the eighteenth century, to build new communities elsewhere. But most decided to stay, despite the lack of farmland for the rising generation. They moved, instead, into other trades. For several decades, a small number of Amish men had always worked off the farm, mainly in trades such as carriage making that were necessary to Amish life but had become obsolete to the rest of society. Now, however, half of all newly married Amish men were working off the farm, most in mainstream jobs involving some form of manual labor—and especially in the construction industry. Some started their own businesses; by the 1980s, Amish contractors and construction companies were considered some of the county’s best.49 The number of Amish men taking nonfarm jobs was a problem for Amish leaders, who feared that a generation of Amish raised off the farm would not remain within the faith or would remain only to liberalize it. “Leave this one generation grow up off the farm, and their sons won’t want to farm,” said an Old Order Amish bishop. “That’s when we’ll have the real trouble.” Amish faith and community, they had always felt, were rooted in an agrarian way of life; Amish who took commercial and manufacturing jobs would be tied more strongly to the outside world, and their children brought up under its influence. These concerns were shared by other Lancaster Countians who wished to preserve the county’s heritage. “Their interest in the land,” warned the New Era in 1975, “is integral to our county character,” and Lancaster Countians must preserve farmland—by legal means, if necessary—to ensure that future generations of Amish could continue to farm there. A reader responded in dismay that “greed for the mighty dollar” had overtaken the county. “The Amish people have been exploited as a . . . tourist attraction. As a result of this hordes of tourists have filtered into the county, hence the more tourists the more attractions are built and the more attractions the more tourists and so the kettle has boiled over and caught fire. The more fire the more the kettle boils over. Now after the fire has finally burned out what will we have?”50 The metropolitan audience to whom so much tourist promotion had always been directed also sympathized with the plight of the Amish. In 1970, Ann Geracimos, who had grown up in Lancaster County in the 1940s and 1950s, wrote an essay for the New York Times in which she bemoaned the fate of her native land. The “privileged isolation” of her youth, she recalled, in which “I could sit on a picket fence late at night under a clear sky, bright with stars, and listened to the

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bells of two dozen burly sheep nibbling the grass,” had once been broken by “the arrival of a motel across the street from my house,” whose neon sign shone in her bedroom window at night. Now, tourism was changing Amish life as well. John F. Beiler, an Old Order minister with whom Geracimos spoke, said that although “the tourists aren’t driving the Amish out as yet . . . a number of people in the church feel things are going that direction.” Even Amish women’s decision to patronize supermarkets was the result of tourism, for “ogling tourists” thronged “the smaller stores they used to frequent.” Readers shared her sentiments. A Paradise man responded that “I’m afraid that success has already spoiled [Lancaster County]. I have watched with increasing chagrin as tourist attractions have sprung up, smashing the tranquility of the countryside, creating a honky-tonk neon nightmare.” But metropolitan readers, predictably, were less eager to blame their own fascination for the imminent demise of the Amish. A Bronxville, New York, resident, recalled a visit to Lancaster County in 1930 and “how pleasant [it was] for those who lived there in peace.” For the loss of that peace he blamed not tourists but Lancaster Countians who sold their land to developers. Zoning and careful planning, he chided, could prevent this tragedy. “Such treasures as ‘Amishland’ . . . should be kept for the joy and enlightenment of all. One way toward safekeeping the treasure is for those who have it to cherish it.” A woman from Kingston, New York, who had visited Lancaster County agreed. “The folkways of other cultures and religions are fascinating to watch and study and learn,” she wrote. “We question whether Lancaster County is seriously interested in helping the tourist—or the Amish folk—in this venture.” The responses of these New Yorkers seemed to confirm the worst fears of Lancaster Countians: that tourists did, indeed, think they owned the place. James E. Lee, a former Lancaster County planning director who now resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts, added a more evenhanded view to this exchange. He appreciated Geracimos’s sentiments but thought that “it would be wise . . . to strike a sharper note of urgency.” Tourists, he argued, were part of the problem, but only part.“The rich, beautiful, undulating farmland is steadily being consumed by industrial sites, housing developments and shopping centers. . . . And it is industrially stimulated urbanization, rather than tourists, that is primarily responsible for pushing the Amish out” by means of rising land prices and property taxes. “Time,” he concluded, “is running out for the county.”51 It seemed that nearly everyone, within Lancaster County as well as without, was beginning to see rampant development as a problem. But who was to blame? Tourists made the easiest scapegoat, but James Lee was correct; tourists and tourist attractions were only part of the problem. Far-flung housing developments and shopping centers consumed more farmland than tourist attractions. The two kinds of development were related, of course: Lancaster County grew in the 1970s in large part because people saw it as a good place to raise their children,

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figure 5.4. An Amish buggy waits in peak-season traffic in Intercourse in front of “Kitchen Kettle Village.” Photograph by the author.

a seat of rural tranquility and a haven from the evils of the modern world. The tourism of the previous quarter-century had made Lancaster the poster county for simple living. If most tourists came and went, this new kind came to stay. But much of the new housing—more, probably, than most countians recognized— was built for native Lancaster Countians. Young couples born during the baby boom after World War II were now grown and starting families of their own. County planners had, in fact, anticipated this as the main source of housing needs in the 1970s. More than 40 percent of Lancaster Countians in 1980 had moved in the past five years, and of these, two-thirds had moved within Lancaster County. Some of these baby boomers had grown up on farms, or at least in the county’s more rural areas. A greater number, however, had been raised in suburban Lancaster, where they had little more exposure to rural life than their equivalents in suburban Philadelphia or New York. These suburbanite Lancaster Countians had an outlook little different from that of any outlander, except, perhaps, with a more personal pride in the county’s rural heritage.52

Rural Development? Just what kind of development was this, then? Was it rural, urban, or suburban? Census data, a social scientist’s first resort, provide conflicting answers. By 1980, more than 40 percent of Lancaster Countians lived in the urbanized area

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around Lancaster city—a significant jump since 1970. But these figures are misleading: the size of the urbanized area also grew in the 1970s, to include previously rural territory and residents. New homeowners were moving not to the existing suburbs but adjacent to them, in effect suburbanizing the rural areas to the immediate north and west of the city. Considered by borough and township, however, growth was most significant in squarely rural parts of the county. Rural townships around the county’s perimeter, that is, added a greater share of their existing population than suburban townships or boroughs. Two kinds of growth, it seems, were occurring simultaneously. On the one hand, the suburbs continued to grow, both in area and in population. On the other hand, people increasingly looked farther from the city for land, building homes not on the city’s fringe but in rural townships bordering small towns. One might call this latter growth “microsuburbanization”—if the idea of a town of 2,000 residents having suburbs is not completely nonsensical. But the idea of microsuburbs does make some sense. Lancaster’s suburbs themselves have only a short history. When World War II ended, they housed barely 5 percent of the county’s population. They nearly tripled in size in the 1950s and doubled again in the 1960s; by 1980, two in every seven Lancaster Countians were suburbanites.53 Such explosive growth cannot be expected to progress in an orderly fashion, carefully filling in a circle around the city before moving to a wider one; there was no time for county planners or city services to keep up. Developers built new homes and businesses where it was convenient, near the highways that branched out from the city. But Lancaster was not an isolated city. Even in 1950, one could not drive more than several miles from Lancaster along any significant highway without reaching an established small town. As development grew out along these highways, it soon neared existing population centers, which became nucleation points for new growth. Even in rural areas, new houses were often built in suburban-style developments. Though farms and woodland might surround them, these developments had the same cul-de-sacs, split-level houses, and neat half-acre lawns as their counterparts nearer the city. And after all, where had nineteenth-century Lancaster Countians built their homes but along highways and near small towns, for easy access to trade? An 1875 map of Leacock Township, Intercourse, and Gordonville shows the similarity between the new development of the 1970s and the crossroads villages of the 1870s, with houses lined up along major roadways. Farmers, too, sought easy access to trade and neighbors: Pennsylvania German writer Cornelius Weygandt noted in the 1920s that as Lancaster County’s farms had been divided into smaller and smaller parcels, they were cut into “ribbon-shaped farms” with houses lined up along the road.54 Even then, Lancaster Countians wanted the convenience of town life with a rural backdrop. At the same time, microsuburbs, like “real” suburbs, had a distinctly rural flavor in Lancaster County. Like most of these new microsuburbs, “Country Acres,”

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figure 5.5. “Country Acres,” a housing development built in East Drumore Township in the 1970s, resembles a suburban neighborhood but is bordered on three sides by farmland. Photograph by the author.

the housing development in figure 5.5, is surrounded by farmland, and either crops or farm buildings are visible from almost every house. The lots, too, are bigger than in most traditional suburbs; many of these newer houses sit on an acre or more of land. Backyards often abutted pasture or cropland, and even new golf courses had cornfields in place of the more traditional rough.55 In the 1970s as in the 1950s, it was native Lancaster Countians, not outlanders, who built most of the new houses—people who thought of themselves as rural and wanted to keep the city at arm’s length. After World War II, it was ruralites seeking jobs and housing, not urbanites seeking refuge, who built the suburbs. Their children, and the children of rural residents who had stayed put, now built homes in the newer suburbs and microsuburbs alike. There was no clear division of country from city folk; children of farmers, natives of Lancaster’s city and suburbs, and outlanders all mingled in the new developments. Even many newcomers were refugees from places such as Bucks County, north of Philadelphia, which had been as rural as Lancaster in the 1940s but was now overgrown with suburbs. Most Lancaster Countians were at most two generations removed from the country, and they wanted to keep close to their roots. They wanted more than an occasional visit to the country, more than a suburban compromise between country and city; they wanted the country all the time.

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But if Lancaster’s growth had rural roots, it was nonetheless urbanizing, both to the land and to its inhabitants. The generation of new suburbanites had much in common with the urban Pennsylvania Germans of the 1920s and 1930s who glorified traditional rural culture without ever quite wishing to return to it. That they lived within sight of farms and woodland might make their situation more rural, but they were not necessarily any less urban in character and culture. They worked in the city or its fringe. They shopped in the city and watched television programs broadcast from the city. They bought their food from a supermarket in town while their farmer neighbors sold their produce to a conglomerate. Having only rarely grown up in the corner of the county where they now lived, they had no lengthy relationship with the farmer to fall back on. He was just another neighbor, and a fairly noisy one at that. Though the suburban dweller might feel some sentiment toward the idea of a farm, it was in practical terms just a pretty landscape. Lancaster’s new suburbanites were no different in that sense from the tourists who trampled the county each summer—only more permanent. Rural Lancaster County was becoming a thing to behold, not to be a part of, even for its own residents. To carve it up into one- and two-acre lots only individualized the experience of landscape, and atomized aesthetic experience is hardly what people thought of when they imagined a rural community. To say that Lancastrians were becoming tourists in their own county might be too strong, but many seemed to be heading in that direction, and there is certainly no evidence that most natives were significantly different from outlanders in their attitudes toward the country. This individualized version of rural life was, in fact, typical of “rural renaissance” settlement. John Herbers, a correspondent for the New York Times in the 1970s and early 1980s, wrote a book about his travels through changing rural America and the people he met there. He saw the rural renaissance as a new thing entirely, not rural, urban, suburban, or metropolitan but a mixture of them all. The new growth, Herbers said, was distinctly “anti-city,” in that people were moving to the country to escape problems associated with urban life; yet these exurbanites usually commuted to cities or brought urban conveniences with them. A rural native who had recently returned to his hometown from New York City told Herbers that “with Lincoln Center performances as well as major sporting events coming to me ‘live’ in my living room, with far-flung friends no more than ten digits away, and New York itself only five hours over the horizon, I feel no more isolated here than I need to be.” His last words are particularly instructive: the country allowed him peace and quiet, tranquility, a respite from urban frenzy; yet urban people and culture remained his main focus. “There are,” he added, “few distractions here, none of them pressing.” Herbers described these new ruralites as people who wanted to spread out along rural highways to combine

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access to goods and services with a pleasant country view from the backyard. It would be easy to say that such “adventuresome people” put an undue burden on society, demanding resources for new roads, schools, and sewer and water systems. But an attempt to stop them would be futile. “Spread of the population is too far gone,” he argued, “too much ingrained in our habits and our culture and too much a part of the prevailing political philosophy to suggest that we can go back.” Nor should we. “We have created a whole new form of the American community,” he continued, “one that is diffused, fragmented, and without a center, but also one that is charged with energy, individual initiative, and the capacity to organize around particular interests.” It might look rural, but the rural America Herbers described was not that of American ideology; it was individualized, held together by networks instead of communities, ruled economically and culturally from the city. The city, apparently, was now colonizing the country.56 The changing view of the country colored even portrayals of the Amish, seemingly the last bastion of communal peace and innocent rural tranquility. Although photographs in books and brochures still focused on children and animals, the sensibility behind some of them was changing. A 1970 book of photographs, Fields of Peace, portrayed the Old Order Amish and Mennonites as a people alienated from the rest of the world, almost even from one another. “Love is their insurance, brotherhood their security,” wrote Millen Brand, but George Tice’s photographs told a different story, one of stark beauty, set out both literally and figuratively in black and white with harsh and discomfiting divisions between light and shadow. This was, in Brand’s words, “the aesthetics of purity.” Tice’s landscapes lay just on the boundary between wistful and foreboding, beautiful but far from welcoming. The same could be said of his Plain people, who appear patient, bemused even, looking viewers in the eye as if to challenge their beliefs. As Brand wrote, These good and innocent people live in a world of possible atomic destruction. Their challenge is mainly disaffiliation and withdrawal. Such withdrawal, good or well-intentioned as it is, leads to a subtle co-operation. . . . Admirable as the Amish alienation is, even healthful, it is also less than a complete answer in a troubled world. There is a possible emptiness to the murmuring and beautiful landscape.57 Even when writers and photographers praised the Amish for their community, they shared this idealization of rural life as peaceful, a place of retreat from the world rather than work and daily life. In James Warner’s The Quiet Land, another book heavy with photographs, there is no conflict, no buoyant joy, and little work. Even the once ubiquitous barn raising, the symbol of happy communal labor, faded into the background. Warner, like Brand, notes the “isolation and inde-

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figure 5.6. “Primitive Home Accents” for sale in Intercourse: old tools and machinery, once implements of work, have now become objets d’art.

pendence” of the Amish. “A general atmosphere of peace and serenity prevails in this countryside,” he writes,“a peace which allows me to escape, if only for a short time, the pressures and problems of the business world.”58 Books like this focused on the cozy hearth, the peaceful landscape, the tools of work as objets d’art. Even community seemed more about serenity than communal labor. The country was about aesthetics—the aesthetics of landscape, but also the aesthetics of peace and purity, values beautiful to behold but of tenuous relation to the real world. ✸ From the 1950s to the 1970s, portrayals of rural America became more colored by urban culture, not less. The country was still a place of quiet and harmony, but with less focus on community and less than ever on work. The new rurality came in convenient packages for individual consumption: microsuburban lots carved from farmland with individual backyards and views; “authentic” weekend experiences of farming designed to reassure the troubled urbanite; “open space” set aside to provide food, recreation, and aesthetic pleasure for growing cities. It was about rest and recreation, a pretty landscape, an escape from modern society rather than an alternative community in itself. It was, in essence, tourism writ large, with all the blessings and evils of Lancaster’s tourist strip. Like visitors to Amish exhibits, the exurbanites who created the rural renaissance might have

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come in search of spiritual fulfillment, but they stayed to eat, to buy, or to look. Living in the country without ever becoming of the country, they lived their lives in a state of perpetual tourism. By the end of the 1970s, urban- and suburban-born Americans were consuming the landscape not only figuratively but literally. And what was the impact of this consumption on the rural places being consumed? For Lancaster Countians, it raised the almost unthinkable question of whether their home was still rural at all. The “rural renaissance,” at least in Lancaster, was neither rural nor a renaissance. The influx of population did not reverse any stagnation or decline; the county’s economy had grown remarkably since the Second World War. New residents and natives who built new homes in rural parts of the county did not stress or bring to life the county’s rural character but in fact urbanized it, both demographically and culturally. And although they blamed tourists and newcomers for the accelerating development, Lancaster Countians themselves were equally at fault. The Garden Spot was coming to see itself through urban eyes, and that cultural urbanization foretold a more obvious change. If most residents could ignore the Planning Commission’s pleas in the early 1970s to consider their county’s future, the decade that followed brought the future to hand. By the early 1980s, it was clear that Lancaster County was changing, and the question of how to deal with that change would dominate local politics and culture for the remainder of the century.

✸ 6

PRESERVING THE GARDEN Development and Farm Preservation

And God blessed them, and said to them,“Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”—Genesis 1:28 The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with me.—Leviticus 25:23

“It’s a day in the country,” announced a tourist brochure in the early 1980s. “The fresh smell of grass and new-mown hay. Animals tranquilly grazing by the roadside. Farmers leading mule teams through the fields. Centuries-old homes nestled among even older stands of trees. . . . Away from bustling crowds and buses . . . no rush, no hustle.” An advertisement for another Amish attraction, perhaps? Or a farmhouse bed-and-breakfast? Why, no: this was Lancaster County’s first Outlet Shopping Guide. Tourists could now shop at a brand new outlet center conveniently located in the heart of Amish country. Stores promised “super savings . . . and we mean real savings. Yes, Pennsylvania Dutch frugality touches our entire way of life. So rock-bottom prices mean savings galore for you on quality merchandise.”1 Amish appeal still drew crowds to the Garden Spot, and now it would sell coats and glassware, too. And after shopping all morning, tourists could drive just a few miles down the highway—if the traffic would part to let them through, that is—to see an authentic little red schoolhouse and have a slice of warm shoofly pie. More signs of the times: Early each year the New Era published a supplement promoting Lancaster County as an attraction to business. The supplements—

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called Progress ’88, Progress ’89, and so forth—conveniently omitted mention of any unpleasant issues that might divide the county, even when the newspaper itself was full of them. Progress ’89 featured on its cover an aerial landscape with the caption, “As Lancaster County continues to grow new housing development, business and industry blend with the beautiful farmland to make this area not only a prosperous place to do business, but also a beautiful area to call home.” For Lancaster resident Bruce W. Flannery, this was just a shade too rosy. The entire supplement, he wrote, was “ludicrous,” and the front-page caption provided “as inane an observation as I believe I’ve ever seen on your pages.” He continued: I have yet to see a new housing development “growing” that made an improvement visually or otherwise to the landscape. . . . Let’s face it, your caption writer is either overworked, doing dangerous drugs, or has possibly been on the Chamber of Commerce beat a little too long. . . . It’s no secret that the willy nilly growth that has plagued the county in recent decades is at best controversial and unquestionably damaging to countians’ quality of life.2 By the late 1980s, hope that Lancaster could have its agricultural heritage and “progress” too had nearly vanished. What remained was a series of difficult questions. How many new houses were too many? What price would Lancastrians pay for good roads and easy commutes? How valuable were the Amish to Lancaster County—or, to turn the question around, how valuable was Lancaster County to the Amish? Battles over development crowded the local news and, when they threatened to affect the Amish, spilled over onto the front page. And, as always, any threat to the Amish way of life was not only local but national news. Both sides in any argument could claim, with some truth, that “outsiders” were responsible for the opposition. Close to the surface of all of these battles, whether over roads, housing, tourism, or general planning, lay the real question facing Lancaster Countians: was there any future for rural Lancaster, for the Garden Spot of America? For those who cried that there must be, a few rays of hope shone into the battleground. Farmland preservation groups, funded by both public and private money, removed the threat of development to much of the county’s choicest agricultural land. Public outcries averted a number of poorly placed developments and roads. A new countywide comprehensive plan created urban growth boundaries around the city, suburbs, boroughs, and villages to contain development into the next century; the plan was supported even by major developers. Indeed, by the end of the 1990s, support for farmland preservation was nearly universal in Lancaster County, and public officials talked axiomatically of the need to save farms. Yet this seemingly remarkable turnaround masked lingering questions about the viability of Lancaster County as a rural place. Despite the successes of farmland

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preservation in the 1990s, the county was culturally more urban at the end of the century than it had ever been before, and farm preservationists were as much at fault as proponents of “progress.” Progressives confronted economic pressures, rarely paying more than lip service to other needs. Preservationists were often unable to reconcile their ideals with economic realities, and planners, eager as always to avoid seeming overly idealistic, couched discussions of farm preservation as much as possible in economic terms. Many farmers, too, supported preservation for economic reasons, desiring the cash payments they could get for conservation easements. Ordinary residents were more divorced than ever from the realities of farming and productive rural life while at the same time (we should not by now be surprised to learn) more idealistic about it than ever before. Decades-old debates about the value and meaning of rural culture, acknowledged by only a few of the county’s leaders, churned beneath the surface of an uneasy truce. In the battle between preservation and progress, neither side could reconcile the cultural and economic needs of the county—and neither side could shed the cultural baggage of the past sixty years.

Witness Though more immediate concerns had begun to overshadow it, tourism remained as useful a scapegoat as ever for the Garden Spot in the 1980s. Tourist income had declined slowly through the previous decade, but now it began to increase again, and with it the old concerns about its impact—thanks, in large part, to Hollywood. In the early spring of 1984, word spread around the county that Paramount was considering filming a movie there. All anyone in Lancaster knew for certain was that the film, then tentatively titled “Called Home,” would star Harrison Ford and would have something to do with the Amish, but that was more than enough to generate excitement. Lancaster remained enough of a small town to be easily starstruck, and a sighting of Ford, fresh from Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Star Wars trilogy, was front-page news. And if Hollywood stars didn’t get every Lancastrian’s heads spinning, Hollywood dollar signs might. The state Bureau of Motion Picture and Television Development predicted that the film would bring more than $3 million into Lancaster County, not counting the dramatic impact that a film about the county might have on tourism. Business leaders and government officials could barely contain their excitement; they eagerly offered the studio whatever help they could provide.3 The movie’s plot, as residents gradually learned, concerned a young Amish boy, Samuel Lapp, and his recently widowed mother, Rachel. While the two are traveling by train to visit relatives, the boy witnesses the murder of a police detective in the men’s room of the Philadelphia train station. John Book, the detective assigned to the case (played by Ford), learns that the murderer was another

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detective and takes Rachel and Samuel back to their home in Lancaster County to hide and to recover from a gunshot wound he suffered when confronting the murderer. Book’s stay with the Amish provides a device for contrast between the life of a Philadelphia police detective and that of a traditional, pious farming community. Book and Rachel fall in love and are forced to reconsider their values and commitments. The film’s final title, Witness, reminded viewers not only of the boy’s literal witnessing of the murder but also of the Christian witnessing the Amish performed in their daily life. Witness, like so many other projects involving the Amish, seemed to set up a clash between the interests of money and the preservation of Amish values and culture. Paramount spent millions of dollars in Lancaster County, creating jobs for construction workers, extras, seamstresses, and advisors. But soon after filming began in May, interviews with Amish people began to appear in Lancaster newspapers and even in the New York Times, questioning the studio’s motives and the film’s potential impact on the Lancaster County Amish. “We don’t want it,” said one older woman, summing up the feelings of her community.“It doesn’t belong here. It really makes hard feelings.” Added a Strasburg man,“I think it’s a disgrace to the Amish people.” Bishops forbade their flock having anything to do with the movie. Pennsylvania secretary of commerce James Pickard promised that Paramount would “respect the sensibility of [the Amish],” but the Amish had heard similar promises before. Looking for an outside expert, reporters also contacted John Hostetler, the Temple University sociologist whose 1963 book Amish Society remained the standard work on Amish life and who had become the unofficial spokesman for the Amish with local and national media. Hostetler explained that the Amish opposed the movie because it contained violence, murder, and illicit love; and, like any movie, it violated the biblical commandment against graven images. “Many [of the Amish] are very despondent over this major moral intrusion into their community,” he said. Worse, the film would assuredly draw more tourists (“maybe of the rougher type,” said one Amishman), placing further strains on the relationship between the Amish and the rest of the community. “Any further invasion of their privacy,” Hostetler warned, “is going to cause a breakdown of trust between the Amish and the public.”4 This much was par for the course; Lancaster Countians expected these arguments by now, and except for a few letters to the editor both pro and con, most of the interest in the film remained in trying to catch glimpses of the stars. Unfortunately, the criticism did not stop there. Rumors surfaced that the film’s producer had placed an actress (presumably Kelly McGillis, who starred as Rachel Lapp) in an Amish home under the pretense of being Amish herself. When the family learned who she was, they immediately asked her to leave. The rumors were unsubstantiated, but that did not stop Hostetler from repeating them. The sociologist claimed that director Peter Weir had shrugged off the incident, saying,“There

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have been worse deceptions.” Hollywood, Hostetler charged, “wants the freedom to fictionalize and alter reality in any way that will maximize entertainment and profit,” and he singled Weir out for blame. Over time, his comments grew increasingly shrill. The Amish, he seemed to suggest, should be off-limits to filmmakers entirely; their “right to be left alone” extended even into purely cultural arenas. He claimed that the film portrayed the Amish as a violent people, that the mere juxtaposition of violence with Amish life suggested a connection between the two—when, in fact, Weir’s intent was for viewers to draw a lesson from the contrast. Witness, Hostetler concluded hyperbolically, would “signal a milestone in the erosion of the social fabric of the Amish community. Divorce, violence, and taking human life will be made thinkable and more commonplace in a community relatively free of those ills. . . . By gaining surreptitious entrance into Amish homes, schools, and gatherings, intruders with cameras will destroy much of the friendly disposition the Amish have for visitors.”5 The issues raised by the film were hardly that simple. Weir responded angrily to the criticism, calling Hostetler a hypocrite, for he, too, profited from his books on the Amish—including one written for tourists that included photographs of Amish people. Whereas Witness attempted to show the Amish as real people, Hostetler as sociologist treated the Amish as “objects, as some sort of exhibits in a museum.” Hostetler had even collaborated on a documentary for which real Amish people had been filmed surreptitiously from a curtained van—and had profited from it when the film was bought by the television news program 60 Minutes. Some people questioned to what extent Hostetler really spoke for the Amish. The Amish, in fact, had somewhat mixed feelings about the movie. They were as curious as anyone else in Lancaster County about the film and its stars; as one man told a New York Times reporter, although the Amish “want no part of ” the movie, they were nonetheless eager to “hear all about it.” Emma and Paul Krantz, whose farm was used as the Amish farm in the movie (but who were not Amish themselves), said that their Amish neighbors would lie in the grass and look down on the set with binoculars. “We talked to them . . . before we agreed with Paramount,” said Emma Krantz. “They said it wouldn’t bother them, and now they are even asking for souvenirs.” Although they had concerns about how they would be portrayed, several Amish people admitted to newspapers that the attention was really nothing new.6 In fact, the Amish received a remarkably fair and balanced treatment from the movie. Weir had been chosen to direct Witness because of the sensitivity with which he had portrayed Third-World cultures in such films as The Year of Living Dangerously, and to be fair, Witness showed the same sensitivity. It had, as Mennonite writer Merle Good said, “tones of a spiritual quest.” Despite his concerns about the film’s “R” rating, Good had to admit that “in a truly remarkable way, Weir succeeds in giving his audience insight into the fabric and the spirit of the

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world of the Amish.” The film never pokes fun at the Amish, even in moments where the audience might be expected to laugh; when Detective Book buys Rachel and Samuel lunch at a city hot dog stand and the two conspicuously-clad strangers say grace before eating, it is Book who appears foolish and uncomfortable. Amish characters are even shown laughing at dirty jokes, which—though it might offend fundamentalist Mennonites—is an honest portrayal of even the most religious traditional farmers and serves to humanize a people who could easily be portrayed as icons.7 As Book struggles with his own violent nature, the audience is asked to question whether violence is truly necessary and what its impact on us might be. By avoiding easy answers and leaving the question unanswered at the film’s conclusion, Weir enhanced its impact, even if he left himself open to criticism from religious conservatives. The most difficult questions, however, were raised not by the movie itself, but by the controversy over it. Where should the line be drawn between entertainment and education? How, as Merle Good asked, could someone “raise one’s voice against exploitation without, in fact, becoming part of the exploitation”? Ironically, many of those who condemned the movie for marketing the Amish and trading values for profits could not help falling into the same trap. A member of the “Pennsylvania Religious Roundtable” wrote in the New Era after the film’s release that “if such frolics [as Witness] continue, we shall truly be witnesses to the demise of the Amish way of life and the tourist industry in Lancaster County” (emphasis added). Other correspondents chided protesters for their hypocrisy. “Come on good citizens,” wrote one local woman, “who has exploited the Amish more than we, the citizens of Lancaster County?” If tourists do come in increased numbers, she added, “we, the concerned citizens of Lancaster County, will put our greedy little hands out and grab that almighty dollar.” Another resident agreed, asking, “What would we have along Route 30 without [exploitation]? Actual Amish farmland maybe?” Perhaps the film’s real meaning for Lancaster Countians was summed up by an Amish woman who compared tourism to the ticking of a clock. “You don’t even hear it after a while,” she said. But the movie was like the chimes, reminding people of the clock’s presence. For Lancaster Countians who had long been uncomfortable with the exploitation of the Amish—and cognizant of their own complicity in it—Witness was an unpleasant reminder of their internal conflicts. The film and its director made an easy scapegoat, just as tourists and exurbanites always had. “I am sorry we are infringing on their [the Amish] privacy,” wrote a local man, “but why take it out on the filmmakers? We do it to them every day.”8 In the end, the controversy created by the film failed to hold the interest of Lancaster Countians for long. Representations of the Amish, whether visual or literary, had been fodder for debate for half a century, if rarely so openly; this was old news. By 1985, the county’s problems were more immediate. Representations

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of the Amish, and by extension of Lancaster County, might portend changes in people’s lives, might signal trends to watch out for; but now those trends had come to fruition. Tourism, whether real or cinematographic, was not the problem any longer. Development was, and it had become too serious an issue to be ignored.

Roads to Paradise A sign of the changes that had taken place in Lancaster County since the 1960s was that highways, almost more than towns and valleys, defined particular regions and characteristics of the county. U.S. Route 30 symbolized tourism, with its castles, windmills, neon signs, motels, gift shops, ersatz farms, and now outlet malls that stretched from the city limit almost to the county line. It also symbolized traffic, urbanization, and change itself; even Peter Weir had shown the contrast between old and new with a shot of an Amish buggy trying to cross a busy Route 30. Endless construction and outlet traffic at the holidays compounded residents’ frustrations. Some local commuters advertised their plight with bumper stickers: “I Drive Route 30—Pray for Me.” Now another road, Route 23, was taking on equal importance in the cultural war over change. But while Route 30 had remained unchanged in essential quality and location, only growing more irritating to residents through the decades, Route 23 loomed by the late 1980s as a harbinger of a more immediate change—one that might destroy the Garden Spot once and for all. Route 23, known locally as New Holland Pike, runs from Lancaster city northeast through New Holland and Blue Ball to Morgantown in southern Berks County, where it meets the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and from there follows a broad eastward arc to Philadelphia. One of three highways providing direct access from Lancaster to Philadelphia (Routes 30 and 340 were the others), 23 had grown with the county. Businesses in particular, both in Lancaster city and in the eastern part of the county, relied on Route 23 for their link to the metropolis. The narrow two-lane highway was partially rebuilt and relocated shortly after World War II, but by the early 1960s it was already in need of further improvements. In 1963, a citizens’ committee asked the state for a feasibility study of a new Route 23 from Lancaster to the turnpike at Morgantown. The state highways secretary concurred but warned residents that it would be “at least five years” before construction could begin. Far more than five years of studies ensued, as citizens, planning commissions, and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) debated the location for the new road. Eventually, by the mid-1970s, enough land had been purchased and enough money raised to begin construction of a new four-lane highway that would connect the borough of New Holland with Lancaster.9

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But in the dismal economy of the 1970s, highway funds quickly dried up. PennDOT had begun construction in the middle and, after spending $9 million to prepare 4.7 miles of roadbed through rural Upper Leacock Township, abruptly called it quits. In the spring of 1977, before the first concrete had been poured, state workers covered the graded roadbed with eight inches of dirt and planted grass seed. Again, said a PennDOT spokesman, it would be “at least five years” before construction resumed. Neighboring farmers, many of whom had once owned the land under the planned route, immediately asked permission to plant corn or graze their livestock on the vacant land. Some rented their land back from the state; others used it without official sanction. Most industries and businesses that had been relocated away from the route did not have that option; some went out of business, and municipalities lost vital tax revenue. The whole project, said the New Era, was a “fiasco . . . a road to nowhere.” The following summer, an Intelligencer Journal photographer snapped the picture that gave the roadbed its lasting name. Along the clearly visible path of the superhighway—twin arcs of raised, grass-covered roadbed winding through the farmland—strolled a herd of goats. “Now,” said the Intelligencer, “it’s a goat path.”10 Five years later, the superhighway was still a goat path, the county’s great embarrassment. Traffic along the old two-lane Route 23 worsened—as did traffic on Route 30, making the need for a bypass even greater. In 1984, a task force was named to study plans for a Route 23/30 bypass. PennDOT held a public meeting in Lancaster that summer to discuss alternatives for relocating the highway at the eastern edge of the city. Predictably, a majority of the residents attending insisted that something had to be done to improve traffic flow. Just as predictably, those who lived along the proposed route objected that the predicted savings in driving time—13 to 17 seconds—did not justify the high cost of construction and the relocation of families. But the consensus seemed to be that some kind of improvement was necessary, to speed traffic flow in and out of the eastern end of the city—particularly if the relocated highway would eventually link up with the unfinished roadbed to the east.11 What lay to the east was the problem. When PennDOT unveiled plans in 1987 for a combined Route 23/30 bypass, they presented the county with a stark choice. Four of the six suggested corridors cut through the heart of the county’s Amish farmland, from Lancaster southeast to Gap at the county’s eastern border. The other two paths ran parallel to the existing Route 23 from Lancaster to New Holland before turning south. All would finally make use of the goat path, and all would link the Route 30 bypass around Lancaster with the Route 30 bypass around Coatesville in western Chester County, greatly easing travel between Lancaster and metropolitan Philadelphia. But the proposed corridors were not interchangeable. Four routes were relatively short, cheap, and direct but highly destructive of farmland. The other two would avoid dislocating the Amish but

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figure 6.1. The partially built roadbed for a new Route 23 bypass, abandoned in the mid-1970s and dubbed a “goat path” by the Intelligencer Journal when a local farmer began grazing his livestock on it, remains visible today. Photograph by the author.

required cutting through the Welsh Mountains, a region of very rocky terrain, and their location would do less to ease traffic through the eastern part of the county. Lancaster was going to have to pay a price for its new road, one way or the other—even beyond the more than $100 million the state already anticipated.12 When PennDOT and the county Planning Commission held a public meeting at Pequea Valley High School in September 1987 to hear residents’ reactions to the plans, the planners were overwhelmed by the response. Between 1,500 and 2,000 people crowded into the high school cafeteria, the largest number ever to turn out for a local planning meeting. Officials had to repeat their presentation three times as they moved the crowd through the cafeteria in shifts. Even more shocking, two-thirds of the attendees were Amish. For the Amish to turn out at any public meeting was rare enough, but this was the largest group of Amish people ever assembled in Lancaster County—“a human sea of blue shirts, black coats, and white bonnets,” said the New Era’s correspondent. A small group of Intercourse area residents, both Amish and non-Amish, had organized the turnout, distributing brochures, speaking with bishops, and hiring cars and vans to drive the Amish to and from the meeting. Though most of the Amish at the meeting expressed their opinions only through a standing, silent vote, their wishes were clear. To build any of the first four routes, through the heart of the county’s Amish farmland, would split farms, cut rural roads frequented by buggies, and separate families and communities by making local travel more difficult. The affected area

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contained some 800 Amish farms, totaling 65,000 acres. Most of the Amish who spoke considered the new road necessary mainly for truckers and commuters. “I can’t buy any argument that puts traffic ahead of farms,” said farmer Dave King. Another Amish farmer warned of a vicious cycle of road-building. “If they build a big highway,” he said, “isn’t it going to bring more business, more people, more traffic? How soon until we’re back where we started?” Any expressway, warned another, would bring development that “may drive us out.” One Amish farmer wryly observed that the expressway might benefit the county in unanticipated ways.“This could cut down the tourist element,” he said.“First they ruin the community, then the tourists won’t come.” A non-Amish man, Joseph Cook, voiced his concerns more dramatically. The planners, he said, were thinking of “ruining one of the earth’s most fertile valleys. . . . This area is like heaven, and they want to turn it into California.”13 Not only the Amish opposed the plans, though non-Amish residents were more understanding of the need for the road. Some, like Walter Martin, a Mennonite dairy farmer from Blue Ball, suggested a compromise. “We’re rural now and we’d like to keep it that way,” he said. “But we need help with our traffic, that’s for sure.” The usually probusiness Intelligencer Journal endorsed the route through the Welsh Mountains, to minimize impact on the Amish. The New Era, which normally stood behind preservation, saw both sides, arguing that “the type of major highway which this county so desperately needs . . . is essentially incompatible with the farming area of the eastern end of the county.” The new road was “absolutely necessary” but should avoid as much farmland as possible. Even business and government leaders, who strongly favored building the bypass, asked PennDOT to focus on routes that avoided Amish farmland. “There has to be a way to go around the farmland,” wrote a Lancaster resident, but the traffic of trucks, tourists, and outlet shoppers on Route 30 was simply too much. “We need a highway,” she concluded.14 But many residents argued that the best road was no road at all. Highways, said those who had lived near New York or Philadelphia, “are simply the opening wedges for more housing, more congestion, more pollution, and more grinding frustration.” The new road would not benefit people who lived along its path, but only those on either side—and those who stood to profit from increased traffic. “Construction people, suppliers, PennDOT, engineering consultants, Chamber of Commerce, politicians and similar types favor this project,” wrote a Lititz man to the New Era, “as it would benefit them more than Lancaster County. I suggest the routing of all traffic over two tons around the county, except where originating or destined to county addresses.” Others, perhaps the majority of the letterwriters, spoke of the value of agriculture. “Farming,” wrote a Lancaster woman, “is the single most important contributing factor towards the quality of life that we Lancastrians have come to cherish. It is how this area has come to grow and

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prosper, and is the principal reason we continue to enjoy the stability and security we have become accustomed to. We are, however, quickly approaching a point of no return, where . . . the character that makes Lancaster County so unique shall exist only in our memories.” Agriculture and its attraction to tourists were not only a source of income for the county but also a point of pride even to residents who had never lived on a farm. A Lancaster native who had recently moved to North Carolina wrote home happily that when she told people where she was from, “the first comment out of their mouth is ‘You’re from that beautiful Amish farm country.’” Ultimately, wrote a Terre Hill man, Lancaster Countians would have to be willing to make some small sacrifices to keep their farmland. “Paving over a lot of the best farmland in the world just to save a few minutes’ driving time is insane,” he said. “Probably even it’s a sin.”15 The ultimate decision on the new road would not be so simple. In December 1987, PennDOT announced the preliminary results of its formal study of the options for the highway. The planners’ choice was a T-shaped route that would sweep southeasterly through the heart of the densest Amish settlement. PennDOT officials and consulting engineers said that “high volume traffic relief ” was the main requirement for the new highway, but in fact they had rated their selected corridor second in that department. The real key was cost; the chosen route was cheaper per mile than any other, although it would still cost more than twice as much as originally anticipated. But it also required the greatest loss of farmland: 484 acres would be taken for the road itself, and nearly 30,000 acres would be isolated, becoming islands amid major roadways. In all, 7 percent of the county’s total farmland would be lost. The more roundabout dual-route system endorsed by local government and business leaders would more effectively reduce traffic and isolate less than half as much farmland—but it was almost 20 percent more expensive than the straight path PennDOT favored. In principle, the consultants favored allowing the Amish “to continue their peaceful, simple lifestyle” and suggested that a properly built limited-access highway could ease traffic on rural roads frequented by buggies. Almost no one in Lancaster, however, believed this. “What I heard [at PennDOT’s briefing],” said County Commissioner James E. Huber, “was a little too much emphasis on the cost over the environmental concerns and preserving the prime farmland and saving the very unique culture we have here.” John Hostetler was more blunt. “I think that’s crazy,” he said of the proposal. With opposition united from the county government, the Chamber of Commerce, the Pennsylvania Dutch Visitors Bureau, preservationists, and the Amish, said Planning Commission director John Ahlfeld,“I don’t see any possibility” that the county would accept the consultants’ recommendation.16 The proposal lay dormant for more than a year, while groups both for and against the new highway solidified their positions and their supporters. Then, in

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March 1989, the debate resumed and took an uglier turn. The State Transportation Commission met in Lancaster to hear a pitch from government officials, businesses, and citizens’ groups to widen the existing Route 30 and build a new Route 23 using the existing “goat path.” Speaking in favor of the new Route 23 were two state senators, three state representatives, the mayor of Lancaster, the County Planning Commission, and three citizens’ groups. The goat path, said state senator Noah Wenger of New Holland, was an “embarrassment” and must be completed. J. Richard Fulcher, New Holland’s borough manager and spokesman for Citizens United for Completion of Route 23, said that “the problem [of growth] is not going to go away” and presented a petition signed by 1,000 people backing the new highway. As before, not everyone present agreed. Sharon Ressler, a New Holland councilwoman and real estate agent speaking for the citizens’ group FIND (For Improving Not Destroying) Lancaster County, insisted that the new road would “very methodically and deliberately” destroy the county’s uniqueness. A group of Amish and Mennonite farmers also attended to offer their silent opposition to the highway—“a sad stunt,” borough manager Fulcher said with decided lack of tact. PennDOT chief Howard Yerusalim, apparently unaware of the public debate two years earlier, was “somewhat surprised” by the opposition from New Holland area residents. Several residents reacted angrily to his and Fulcher’s remarks, arguing that supporters of the highway stood to profit from its construction and that its true purpose was economic development, not traffic relief. “Almost without exception in this county,” wrote David Jones of Narvon in the New Era, “authority for decision-making is made by people who stand to benefit directly from these decisions.” Support for a compromise was wearing thin. The battle lines had been drawn, and people were taking sides.17 The debate over the new highway was complicated by the national media attention it received. Reporters from National Public Radio and the Wall Street Journal had attended the meeting at Pequea Valley High School, and several television stations had sent cameras. A tour group sponsored by the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce heard about the meeting from NPR while on a cruise through the Panama Canal, and a woman from Wilmington, North Carolina, wrote to the New Era that she had read about the plans for the superhighway in the Wilmington Morning Star News. Most of the attention was directed not at farmland per se but at Amish farmland and Amish culture. This was true of the attention within Lancaster County as well, if not to the same extent; other areas of the county were being developed, even areas that had once been highly productive farmland, but nothing captured public attention even locally like the Amish.18 For activists working to rally opposition to the superhighway, popular feelings for the Amish—both local and national—were a tempting resource. Richard Armstrong, who had moved to the Intercourse area from Maine, and Fred Daum, who lived in his childhood home on the existing New Holland Pike, were worried

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enough about the road’s potential impact that they formed a citizens’ group, the Lancaster Alliance for New Directions (LAND), to fight the new road. By word of mouth and local stump work, they attracted 250 to 300 members from Lancaster County and thousands of dollars in contributions to help spread the word. Daum, the group’s spokesman, attended public meetings and PennDOT briefings to state the case against building the superhighway. Commercial interests needed the road, they argued, not citizens. Tyson Foods and Ford New Holland—once Weaver Chicken and New Holland, Inc., farm implements, respectively, both locally owned businesses that were now part of multinational conglomerates— needed easy access for trucks. Traffic on Route 23 at rush hour, Daum said, was “bad. But other times . . . people will complain, gee, it takes me thirty seconds to get onto the road. Big deal! I could wait thirty seconds rather than destroy a community.” And this, for LAND, was the crux of the matter: a superhighway through eastern Lancaster County, regardless of its exact location, would be devastating to the Amish community and its agriculture.19 Public opinion within Lancaster County—or at least the opinions of residents who made theirs known—seemed to side with LAND. But with so much at stake, its founders feared that local efforts alone might not suffice. With the help of local photographer Jerry Irwin, they put together a slide presentation that Daum took on the road. In just two or three years, Daum estimates, he gave this presentation more than ninety times, to more than 7,000 people—at Penn State University, in Philadelphia, on Cape Cod, for civic groups throughout eastern Pennsylvania, even for the wives of delegates to the United Nations. The presentation, which was later distributed as a videotape entitled A Place Called Lancaster, described Lancaster County in terms people were used to hearing. The land was some of the richest in the world, and its Amish stewards some of the world’s most capable farmers. But the Amish make Lancaster County “a spiritual resource” as well as an agricultural one. “This is a culture and an agriculture which replenishes itself,” says the narrator. “These people may take crops from the earth, but they also give back to the earth—year after year, generation after generation, eternal as tides.” People come here from all over the world “because much of this county looks like home used to.” Growth and development, including but not limited to the proposed superhighway, threatened to destroy this resource, both spiritually and agriculturally. The accompanying slides showed familiar views of Lancaster County farms and farmland, Amish families and communities working together, livestock grazing contentedly, and families sitting down to dinner, heads bowed in prayer. The presentation had the desired effect on its audience. LAND heard from people “all over the world” and received donations of $1 from a woman in Kansas (“I’m sorry I can’t send more,” she wrote) and of $1,000 from a woman in California. No one, it seemed, could argue with the goal of preserving so valuable a culture and so productive an agriculture.20

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In the short run, it appeared by the early 1990s that the efforts of LAND and other groups were paying off. At yet another public meeting in early 1991, business and government leaders again begged the state for a limited-access highway; citizens again opposed it, asking instead that the existing Route 23 be widened. A series of studies—feasibility studies, impact studies, cultural studies of the Amish community—dragged on through the decade, and, as of this writing, the matter has still not been decided. Fred Daum believes that the road will never be built; residents don’t really want it, he says, and the cost of the land would, by now, be prohibitively high. But the debate over Route 23 hardly produced the kind of consensus and harmony that preservationists lauded in Amish culture. On the contrary, it laid bare the philosophical rift among Lancaster Countians, fanning longsmoldering fears about the future of the Garden Spot into activism and angry accusations. And while citizens publicly debated whether to build a superhighway, smaller battles were being fought—and won by developers—all over the county. It was relatively easy to oppose one big new road, particularly for people who didn’t have to drive on the old one; it was proving much harder to stop the slow creep of suburbia across the county’s farmland.21

Progress and Preservation Despite the best efforts of planning commissions and preservation groups, development actually accelerated in the 1980s, spreading over the county with little more direction than before. The county’s population, which reached 362,000 in 1980, ballooned to 423,000 by 1990, and as before, the growth was especially heavy in existing population centers. Tourism revived after the release of Witness; in fact, the tourist industry was so healthy by the late 1980s that it faced a serious labor shortage. The Pennsylvania Dutch Visitors Bureau reported a 25 percent increase in hotel rooms available in the county between 1980 and 1988 to house the 3.5 to 5 million tourists who visited each year. Outlet shopping, the newest attraction, grew the most dramatically; only 17 outlet stores had existed in the county in 1982, but six years later there were 175, most of them along the already-packed Route 30. All areas of the county’s economy were booming. Lancaster consistently had the state’s lowest unemployment rate in the 1980s, and other economic indicators—job creation, payroll, housing permits, commercial contracts—showed similar success and promised more in the years ahead. Even manufacturing, declining elsewhere, was predicted to remain steady or grow slightly into the 1990s. The Lancaster Chamber of Commerce and Industry, proud of the county’s economic growth, posted billboards proclaiming “Lancaster County: The Sweet Smell of Success.” The county’s ethic of growth, boasted the New Era, was “basic to its character.” The booming economy, as it had since the 1950s, attracted new residents. Lancaster County was the fastest growing metropolitan area in the state

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in the early 1980s, and various estimates showed the county’s population approaching half a million by the end of the century. Traffic on major highways increased faster than population, due in large part to the needs of expanding business and industry, and congestion became a daily fact of life for many commuters. Landfill space was running short. And the deluge showed no sign of slowing: as late as 1994, the U.S. News and World Report named Lancaster as one of seven “boomtowns” even then “poised for explosive growth.”22 Loss of farmland, which had raised only moderate concern in the 1970s, became the most talked about consequence of growth. The 1980s were a bad time for farmers generally. The high prices that had encouraged many farmers to expand in the 1970s had crashed by the end of the decade, partly because of the Russian grain embargo, partly because of a series of heavy droughts in the Midwest, and partly because of the inescapable logic of supply and demand. Too many farmers expanded too quickly, and markets could not keep up. The recession of the early 1980s hit farmers hard, driving into bankruptcy even many farmers considered models of good business and agriculture.“Family farms,” privately owned farms producing a moderate income on one hundred to several hundred acres of land, were often among the most vulnerable and the hardest hit, although those with a conservative management style, who had resisted the urge to expand in the 1970s, were able to hold on. Sociologists began to ask whether it was possible or even desirable to save the family farm, and the “farm crisis” sparked a new round of studies about farming and rural communities. The popular response was sincere but ultimately of little help, whether it came in the form of Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid concerts or the series of movies about farmers, including Places in the Heart as well as Witness, that Hollywood produced in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As usual, the more threatened the family farm seemed to be, the more earnestly the average American wanted to be a family farmer: an ABC News poll in 1986 found that more than half of all Americans “would prefer to live in a rural community and would even like to farm if it were possible to do so.” Meanwhile, farmers across the country continued to go out of business.23 Lancaster County farmers were better off than most, but even there the farm economy was stagnant; livestock and dairy industries grew little in the 1980s, and there was little hope for a turnaround. Many non-Amish farmers found their children reluctant to take over the family operation and faced the prospect of selling their land as they neared retirement. The Amish bought up much of this farmland, as they had for decades, but they could not always outbid developers. The rising demand for housing, meanwhile, gave farmers an extra incentive to sell. Market forces set two prices for farmland, one for farming and one for development. The farmer, explained Roger Rohrer, an agrilender at a Lancaster bank, “thinks [the development price is] what his farm is worth and anything less is a disservice to his kids. . . . The more he sees that, talks about that, the more he’s at

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figure 6.2. A cow grazes next door to the Greenfield Estates apartment complex east of Lancaster. Photograph by Keith Baum from “Lancaster County: The (Ex?) Garden Spot of America,” New Era series reprint, July 1988.

peace with selling. If the economics tell him that profits aren’t in farming to justify 80 hours of work a week and he can cash out and live well on his net equity, it’s a driving force that just continues to wear down that sacredness that once existed out there.” Carlton Groff, a farmer in the southern part of the county, agreed. “I doubt seriously if there’s more than half a dozen farmers in the county who economically were more successful last year in farming than they would have been if they sold their land to a developer the year before and put the money in the bank,” he told the New Era in 1988. Faced with that harsh logic, Lancaster County farmers sold about 8,000 acres each year to developers.24 The economics of farm loss were fairly simple. But loss of cropland also created an environmental problem, one less well understood by the public and harder for farmers to accept: excess manure. The very idea that one could have too much manure seemed incredible to many farmers, and from a traditional perspective, it was. Manure was what kept Lancaster’s fields fertile generation after generation; Pennsylvania Dutch bank barns were designed to collect it. Stockyards counted it as part of their profits. Manure was the traditional farmer’s black gold: how could there be too much of it? But as farmland and the market for agricultural commodities continued to shrink, farmers had to find ways to turn a profit on fewer acres. Some dairy farmers stopped growing their own feed corn, preferring to winter their cows on purchased feed. The solution made good

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economic sense; livestock—usually cattle and poultry—could be kept profitably on relatively small lots, and thousand-acre farms in the Midwest could produce grain more cheaply. But specialization had a price: with purchased feed to pay for, farmers needed more animals than ever to cover their expenses. As a result, by the mid-1980s Lancaster County farms were producing enough manure to cover some 70,000 additional acres of cropland. Each acre received, on average, twice as much nitrogen and seven times as much phosphorus as it could soak up. What could not be soaked up simply ran off in the rain, into groundwater and eventually into the Susquehanna River, where it contaminated residential drinking water and local ecosystems.25 In simple economic terms, the Amish did not face as serious a threat as other farmers, yet they faced their own unique problems. The Amish, like the rest of Lancaster County, were victims of their own success; their population more than doubled between 1960 and 1990, and there was no longer enough farmland for all of them. By the mid-1980s, perhaps 50 percent of all adult Amish men in the county held nonfarm jobs. “Our younger generation would love to farm,” said a church leader,“but the means won’t be here to do it.” The Amish frequently found themselves outbid at farm sales, and a few even sold their own farms to developers, something most Lancaster Countians and most Amish had thought would never happen. Some, in response to the pressures of growth, grumbled about leaving Lancaster. Many Old Order Mennonites had already left the county in search of affordable farmland, but the Amish had preferred to stay close to home and family and, as necessary, accept the idea of working off the farm. The idea of leaving a place their families had called home for two and a half centuries was too distressing, and farmland elsewhere could never be as productive as farmland in Lancaster County. Still, major development issues such as the Route 23/30 bypass always raised the specter of an Amish exodus, an idea that many non-Amish residents found deeply troubling. The tourist economy would suffer, of course, but many letter-writers and speakers at public meetings seemed to use that as a cover for their real concerns, feeling it perhaps unseemly to speak publicly of culture and heritage and less hard-headed matters. The fear was growing that if the Amish left, Lancaster County as it had always been would go with them. The Amish bought up the majority of farms sold in the county; if they stopped doing so, only developers stood ready to take their place. And Lancaster County had for so long been identified by the presence of the Amish that it was often difficult even for lifelong residents—however much they might deny it—to separate the two. For the Amish to leave was simply unthinkable.26 This nervous undercurrent to Lancaster County’s public culture was becoming almost universal by the late 1980s. Although traffic, environmental concerns, crime, and other effects of urbanization bothered residents just as in any rapidly growing region, the most worrisome problem was that Lancaster County itself, as

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a cultural if not a geographical place, was slowly disappearing.“The sense of place is changing,” said one former resident.“If this kind of growth continues, Lancaster County will be extremely suburbanized. And the sense of place will be mostly in memory.” Farming, certainly, was the greatest factor in the county’s sense of place. LAND’s promotional video solemnly informed viewers that twenty-one acres of Lancaster County were disappearing every day—not of Lancaster County farmland, but of the county itself; the two were identical. Pennsylvania Dutch culture was part of the county’s unique character, too; former residents of Pennsylvania German descent complained that when they visited home they rarely heard the dialect or Dutch accent anymore. Much of Lancaster’s “uniqueness,” though, was little more than a jumble of images from tourist promotions. The New Era’s Ed Klimuska, for example, wrote in 1988 that “the county’s character is changing from sunbonnets and shoofly pies to corporate centers and shopping plazas, from historic towns and postcard farms to strip developments and roadway billboards.” Judged by that standard, Lancaster had been losing its character for a solid century—if, indeed, it had ever had any. Where the county’s real heritage ended and its invented self-image began was no longer possible to say. But it was clear that farmland and the Amish were absolute prerequisites to maintaining it.27 ✸ Fueled by fears that Lancaster’s heritage and sense of place were eroding, public support for preserving farmland had been growing for years. Much of that support was due to the work of Amos H. Funk, a Millersville farmer and produce retailer. As a child in Sunday school in the 1910s, he had asked his teacher what she meant by being “a good steward of God’s creation.” She replied simply that “one should not destroy or waste God’s creation.” Another teacher later expanded on that definition of stewardship, citing Deuteronomy to explain that “it is our duty to God as well as one another, to honor the land, not destroy it, and to respect the plant and animal life upon the land.” Those teachings stayed with Funk throughout his life. In the late 1930s, when he was still a young man working his father’s farm, he convinced his father to begin plowing on the contour to reduce soil erosion and to have the Soil Conservation Service prepare a conservation plan for the farm. After he bought the family farm in 1950, he became a founding member of the Lancaster County Conservation District Board, where he served until 1995, and also helped to organize the Conestoga Valley Association in the 1950s to clean up the Conestoga River. By the 1970s, he was known as an expert on soil conservation and good farming practice and was asked to preach guest sermons at his church on “the Christian use of the land.” By that time, the greatest threat to Lancaster County’s agriculture was not soil erosion but rampant housing development, and he made that the topic of a 1978 sermon. “Human beings who recognize that they are placed on this planet by a loving and merciful God,” he told the

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congregation, “cannot disregard the calling to be responsible stewards of the incredibly beautiful world in which He has made us citizens. The time to start is now.” As he commented elsewhere, humans cannot depend on God to save them from their own failures, for “up to a point, God will let undesirable things happen if we do not do our part.” With farmland preservation emerging as a serious public issue, Funk increasingly became a local spokesman for the movement. As a member of the Conservation District board, he chaired an exploratory committee that studied early efforts at farmland preservation in New York and New Jersey. “He was indefatigable,” an associate later recalled. “He would not go away. He was very well spoken, and he was an old farmer, and that’s what it took.”28 When the Lancaster County commissioners established a nine-member Agricultural Preserve Board in 1980 to devise ways of protecting farmland, Funk was elected the board’s first chairman. The board at its beginning also included one Amish member, David Fisher of New Holland, and always included one builder or developer, for farm preservation could only go so far without the support of those groups. Under the Ag Board’s program, landowners applied to sell development rights; the board then ranked applications based on priority, hired appraisers to estimate the value of development rights, and made an offer to the landowner. Farmers who sold the development rights to their land in the form of a deed restriction or conservation easement gave up the right to use their land for nonagricultural purposes. Even with initially low expectations, progress was slow. The Ag Board was hampered by a lack of funding—only $33,000 initially for administrative costs, none at all the first year for the purchase of deed restrictions. There was, moreover, no state legislation enabling a county to purchase deed restrictions or conservation easements on farmland. Despite widespread support from state agricultural organizations, local assemblymen were unable to have such legislation enacted, and the board made creative use of an existing law encouraging flood prevention. Funding never exceeded half a million dollars annually in the 1980s, and the board decided to offer only small sums for conservation easements (initially, $250 per acre for a twenty-five-year easement), hoping to attract “the most dedicated landowners.” The board had known from the beginning that it wouldn’t be practical to preserve all of the county’s farmland, and so they focused on preserving the best land, land located away from existing development and major highways and, if possible, in townships with strong agricultural zoning; disputes between farmers and nonfarmers would be minimized there, and agriculture would have the best chance of surviving economically. Still, the board had hopes of eventually preserving 300,000 acres of Lancaster County farmland—nearly 75 percent of the county’s farmland in 1983.29 Not until 1983 did the Ag Board hire a full-time administrator, Alan Musselman, a former Frederick County, Maryland, planning director who had built Maryland’s farmland preservation program in the 1970s. Musselman and Funk

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barnstormed the county in the 1980s, speaking with any group that would listen. Administratively, Musselman said, they were breaking new ground, inventing the tools of agricultural preservation as they went. Above all, they preached the need for a new land ethic, appealing to farmers whose land had been in their families for generations and to citizens who had adopted a newer brand of environmentalism. But public support grew only gradually, and the Ag Board could save only a handful of farms each year, a fraction of the acreage lost to development; by 1989, only 5,600 acres had been preserved. Farmland preservation was extremely controversial, and Musselman, especially, ruffled feathers among not only developers but also local government officials, who were angered by his efforts to help citizens rewrite zoning ordinances. In 1988, Musselman resigned, partly in frustration with the lack of support he felt he received from county commissioners and partly because the commissioners wanted someone less controversial to oversee farmland preservation. Tom Daniels, a professor of regional and community planning from Kansas State University, took over the Ag Board, and Musselman joined the new Lancaster Farmland Trust, a private, nonprofit organization with the same goals as the Ag Board but with the ability to go directly to citizens for support. The trust preserved farms by purchasing permanent conservation easements that would bind future owners as well as current ones. But the trust’s main role in farmland preservation was its status as a private agency. Plain farmers were as ever wary of accepting tax money; the controversy over selling conservation easements to the county had split one Old Order Mennonite church in the 1980s. Amish and Mennonite farmers were more willing to consider selling easements to the Lancaster Farmland Trust.30 By 1990, the two organizations had laid the groundwork for widespread popular support for farm preservation. Certainly residents were by now well aware of the issues involved. When the Planning Commission surveyed the county in preparation for its new comprehensive plan, asking residents what they thought were the county’s best qualities, the top five responses (nearly three-quarters of the total) were farmland, rural culture, scenic beauty, quality of life, and “open space/countryside”—all qualities relating to the county’s rurality. The greatest problems facing the county, similarly, were uncontrolled growth, loss of farmland, traffic congestion, “too many shopping centers,” overpopulation, loss of open space, water quality, and “developers/realtors.” (Only 5 percent of respondents, by contrast, mentioned tourism.) Almost everyone who responded to the survey wanted growth controlled and farms preserved; 40 percent wanted “no growth” in the next decade, and 45 percent wanted “slower growth.” In general, representatives from municipal governments agreed with their constituents, though they were unlikely to support calls for “no growth.” Their major objection was that the draft comprehensive plan was, as Warwick Township’s supervisors put it, “Pie in the Sky.” The Columbia Borough Council feared that it “may not be

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realistic to preserve farmland in Lancaster County” but did not argue with the goal. Musselman called the plan a “compilation of ideals,” arguing that what municipalities needed were “practical answers to growth management questions.” None seemed readily available, but the lack of clear-cut answers did not undermine support for finding them. When planners asked participants in “Growth Forums” held around the county in 1989 to identify the county’s “sacred resources,” they found “a broad cross section of special interest groups” that made it difficult to reach a consensus. Nevertheless, a “full-group consensus” was reached on one item, “Productive and Viable Prime Farmland.” And what was the main obstacle to saving farmland? “Greed,” said participants.31 Not everyone, of course, agreed that farmland preservation should be Lancaster County’s number-one goal, for progress, too, was on nearly everyone’s mind. Most businessmen, and particularly builders, emphasized the fact that the county would continue to grow, no matter what anyone did; its population would continue to rise, and new residents—whether natives or newcomers—would need homes and jobs. “Growth in Lancaster County will not stop,” insisted Scott Jackson, executive vice president of the Building and Industry Association of Lancaster County. So robust was Lancaster’s economy in the 1980s that there was (according to economists, at least) a labor shortage—which justified attracting even more new residents. Plenty of Pennsylvania communities, businessmen argued, would do anything to have the kind of job growth Lancaster had seen. A “no-growth” stance would only lead to stagnation and stifle the “Lancaster County ‘way of life,’” warned the Lancaster County Association of Realtors. “We agree,” they said in a position statement, “that Lancaster County must retain its history, its rural and agricultural foundation and its independent spirit. But it must also retain its ability to envision, to attract, to diversify, to compromise, and to deal effectively with divergent points of view.” Managed growth should be the goal. Richard Blouse, who had been president of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry for most of the 1980s, believed that local government needed to do more to plan for growth. “We literally have done nothing to manage growth over the last decade,” he said in 1988. But business leaders rarely put much energy into supporting restrictive zoning or provisions for farmland preservation. Underneath their unanswerable rhetoric about the need for jobs and prosperity was a belief, nonetheless firm for being rarely stated, that agriculture was not the way of the future. “Agriculture could not in any way provide the jobs for the upcoming generations in Lancaster County,” state representative John Barley warned his constituents at a public meeting.“The world’s got to change,” Richard Blouse said bluntly. “You can’t look back on the Amish plowing the fields and think that’s going to be 100 years from now.”32 Some developers, perhaps more conflicted about the impact of development, searched for religious justifications for their position. Ironically, some of the

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county’s largest developers were Mennonites who had, like most of their faith, been born on farms. Even the membership of the Lancaster Conference, the most liberal of the county’s Mennonite churches (and with more than 10,000 members, the largest), had been mostly farmers before World War II, but their children had increasingly chosen other kinds of work in the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1980s, this pattern was so familiar that there was a name for such people,“Muppies” (for Mennonite Urban Professionals), and a book entitled “The Muppie Manual” that gave semiserious advice to farmborn Mennonites now living in cities and suburbs. “Muppies,” observed author Emerson Lescher, “know that the first shall be last and the last shall be first, but they have also learned to make hay while the sun shines.” Some Lancaster Countians were less amused, referring to certain successful developers as the “Mennonite Mafia.” In truth, liberal Mennonites were no different in this respect from most devout Protestants, but the fact that they had so recently broken away from a more traditional faith made them conspicuous and allowed more conservative Lancaster Countians to brand them as hypocrites. In response, the new Mennonites strove to justify their actions on traditional grounds. Mennonite businessmen argued that they were simply doing God’s work in a new way, calling for the “Christian businessman” to be taken seriously as a part of the church.“I feel a deep sense of caring about Lancaster County,” said Dale High of High Industries, Inc., which built industrial parks and business centers. “We try to create the kind of community we can all be proud of.” John Thomas, who had built Willow Valley, a 300-acre complex of homes, shopping centers, retirement villages, restaurants, and conference centers south of the city, proudly told the press that hospitality and Christian values were the cornerstones of his work. His restaurant and supermarket, for example, did not sell alcohol or tobacco; he was providing tourists, businessmen, and retirees with an opportunity to visit or live in such a beautiful place as Lancaster County; he gave lavishly to charity. Mennonite church leaders argued that the beliefs of men like Thomas and High represented not a break with the past but simply a new model of stewardship. Rather than being stewards of the land and of God’s creation, as Amos Funk’s Sunday School teacher had once instructed him, the “Christian businessman” was a steward of his time, talent, and money, using those resources to make his community a better place.33 Even farmers had mixed feelings on farmland preservation. Most supported the idea, at least, of saving farmland from development, but until the 1990s fewer than a dozen a year were willing to commit to a deed restriction on their own farms. The Amish were reluctant to become too involved with government and particularly so to accept payments in exchange for deed restrictions, but nonAmish farmers were little more eager to trust their local governments to protect their interests. County commissioners campaigned with promises to help keep farming profitable but rarely followed through; the “Farmers’ Bill of Rights” that

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Bob Brenneman and Terry Kauffman called for in their 1987 campaign, as Brenneman later admitted, “slipped through the cracks.” A local farmer complained that “we’ve promoted industry. We’ve promoted services. The only thing we really haven’t promoted in Lancaster County is agriculture.” The growing consensus among local farmers in the late 1980s was that livestock farming in Lancaster had peaked, and although vegetable farming might remain profitable for some time, there was little guarantee of future profits in agriculture—certainly not on the scale available in other businesses. Farmers who had as yet no intention of selling their land nevertheless hedged their bets. They might need money for their children’s education, for their own retirement, or for family medical expenses. The agricultural market might take another turn for the worse, and they might no longer be able to stay afloat. Or, even if they were safe economically, their neighbors might sell to developers, and they might find themselves surrounded by houses occupied by exurbanites unappreciative of the farmer’s need to make a living. Stories made the rounds among farmers, Amish and non-Amish alike, about neighbors—usually from New York, at least in the telling—who complained about the smell of the manure, the lowing of the cows at 5 a.m., the rumble of the tractor’s engines all day and into the evening. A few newcomers even tried to sue over the disturbances. No matter how strong their own commitment to agriculture, most Lancaster County farmers harbored fears for the future of the Garden Spot. Larry Weaver, a New Holland area beef farmer, told the New Era that although he supported farm preservation, he would not give up the right to sell his own farm. Growth had come too close; even an Amish farmer nearby had sold his land to a developer. “Farming,” he said, “is on the way out.”34 Farmers, businessmen, government officials, and other residents all increasingly believed, happily or not, that Lancaster County’s rural character might also be “on the way out.” Even the staunchest preservationists sensed the danger that, however beloved the Pequea and Conestoga valleys might be, as population pressures grew, urban and suburban Lancaster Countians might grow more willing to sacrifice them. Rural Lancaster County had largely escaped many of the problems faced by other rural places, in particular efforts by cities to dump their garbage there. It makes sense enough for landfills and hazardous waste dumps to be located outside of heavily populated areas, particularly when the majority shouting “not in my backyard” live in those heavily populated areas, and when the targeted rural areas desperately need income of any kind. But rural Lancaster, and particularly the eastern part of the county, had always been too valuable economically and culturally for that to happen—at least until 1981, when Envirosafe Services of Pennsylvania announced plans to build a toxic waste dump in East Earl Township, amid thousands of acres of Amish farmland. Protests stalled the project, which would have converted ninety-three acres into a dump for hazardous waste from all over the East Coast. But some preservationists felt that whatever the ultimate

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outcome of this one dispute, the bell was tolling for rural Lancaster County. As the battle dragged on, Robert Herr, a local man who had to that point been an “apostle” of farm preservation, vowed to fight further preservation efforts unless townships could gain control over the placement of landfills and similar facilities. Ironically, Herr realized,“Had we allowed a number of developments in the township, rapid growth in industry, we wouldn’t have been faced with undesirable things like landfills”—there would be residents enough to fight them. If rural townships would now be targets for dumping, said Herr, “I have serious reservations that we should preserve our farmland. The question is: preserve it for what?”35 Farmland preservation was, in the end, not the simple, clear-cut issue some of its proponents made it out to be, and both sides could easily appear hypocritical. Lancaster County, wrote Ed Klimuska in 1988, has “a dual personality . . . growthis-good vs. conservation-is-good, and they are at odds like never before.” A handful of activists and developers aside, Lancaster Countians were of two minds individually as well as collectively. On the one hand, the goal of saving farms was impossible to oppose. Citizens consistently supported farm preservation, by their presence at public meetings and by voting to spend money on various preservation programs—including, by a 2-to-1 margin, a statewide bond issue to pay for easements. Business and government leaders were in favor of farm preservation, as well; even Chamber of Commerce president Richard Blouse, who was reviled by preservationists for his progrowth stance, insisted that the Chamber supported farm preservation. Activists charged that people like Blouse only paid lip service to “managed growth” and farm preservation, but that was true of most Lancaster Countians. The same residents who begged the Planning Commission to save farmland and control growth also voiced overwhelming support for a new Route 23/30 bypass. Developers could rightly accuse preservationists of hypocrisy, of trying to keep people out of the county. “We’re living in the Garden Spot of America,” John Thomas argued, and it was selfish to deny the same privilege to others. “Who am I to say I moved in here and no one else is supposed to move in here?” The urge to get in before the door closed, and then nail it shut from within, was pervasive—as was the tendency to demand that someone else do the nailing. Writer and activist Randy-Michael Testa recounts a conversation with a New Jersey man who planned to move to Lancaster County because it was “an outstanding place to raise a family. It’s charming.” When Testa asked him whether he feared that the “charm” would be lost if too many people like him moved in, he readily agreed that it would. The government, the man said emphatically, has got to do something to control growth.36 Preservationists, meanwhile, could charge hypocrisy when developers claimed to be carrying out God’s will. Some of the new retirement complexes were quite costly, and critics charged that they served only the rich. “I don’t sense much conscience among the builders in terms of the land they cover,” said Leon Good, a

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Mennonite farmer who had chosen to remain on his family’s land. The land, he maintained, is a gift from God, not a commodity to be bought and sold without thought. “I wish I would hear some of the builders struggling with it: is it right to put this farm under?” Growth, when it was “managed” at all, seemed too often to be managed for the benefit of developers, who held the greatest influence over municipal governments. No farmer, for example, sat on the County Planning Commission. Only six-tenths of one percent of the county’s annual budget in the late 1980s went for farm preservation, and the county commissioners seemed reluctant to increase spending. Broad support for growth management plans did not always translate into local action. There seemed ample ground for compromise. Yet despite—or perhaps even because of—the mixed feelings on both sides, preservationists and progressives seemed increasingly to be talking past one another and growing ever more frustrated with the lack of communication.37

“Minor men with major influence” In the spring of 1990, Amos S. Stoltzfus, an Intercourse area restaurateur and storeowner, announced plans to develop eighty-one acres of his farmland. Since the 1970s, Stoltzfus had gradually had his land rezoned, from rural to residential and from residential to commercial. In 1988, he had announced plans to build a retirement community on the land, as well as some single-family homes and commercial space. Neighbors were not happy with the plans, but most felt they could not protest a retirement community. Now, however, Stoltzfus had changed his mind: he would not build a retirement community, but rather ninety-eight single-family homes. The County Planning Commission approved the plans, though they recommended that “The Meadows” be given more of a village feel. Leacock Township residents were outraged; Stoltzfus and township supervisors grew defensive. Almost overnight, “The Meadows” became a lightning rod for all the fears and resentments over development in Lancaster County and over the survival of the Amish culture.38 Some 125 local residents, a third of them Amish, crowded into the Leacock Township supervisors’ meeting on June 19. Reporters and camera crews also attended, including a television news reporter from Philadelphia who arrived by helicopter, bringing attention the supervisors clearly resented. That resentment, and the supervisors’ apparent lack of interest in citizens’ opinions, drew the wrath of protesters. Stoltzfus’s son, J. Myron Stoltzfus, was chairman of the supervisors—a connection that drew charges of corruption from protesters. “Are we to understand that [the younger Stoltzfus] has had no participation in the change of zoning?” asked John Hostetler in a letter to the New Era. “Would the same board have approached such a change for other farmers in the neighborhood?” J. Myron Stoltzfus had, in fact, abstained from voting when his father’s land was rezoned

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and absented himself from the June 19 meeting, but the remaining supervisors appeared to share his bias. Several attendees at the June 19 meeting accused supervisor Frank Howe of having already made up his mind on the proposal. The other supervisors protested their helplessness. “The only way there is [to build no new houses] is not to have any more babies, so what are we going to do?” asked Jake Smucker. The supervisors criticized citizens for failing to attend the earlier meetings at which the property had been rezoned, saying that with that already accomplished, they had little legal means to stop the development. But protesters felt that they were being ignored and that the supervisors were denigrating the Amish by their lack of interest. A few supporters of the development, according to the New Era, came up to Howe after the meeting and thanked him for a “nice job.” One Leacock resident, perhaps aware that at least three of the supervisors had business ties to the building industry, pointed at them and whispered to a neighbor, “If this proposal goes through, guess who else is gonna get rich?”39 Others were more judicious but no less firm in their opposition. When a local woman, given the floor, quietly invited all those opposed to “The Meadows” to rise, everyone except the supervisors and those directly involved in the project stood. When LAND’s Richard Armstrong asked those in favor of the proposal to stand, no one did—not even Amos Stoltzfus himself. An elderly Amish man, Gideon Fisher, spoke eloquently about his people’s history, saying that “we helped to turn the land into what is now called the garden spot of the world, but if this development keeps up it looks as if we’re going to be driven out again. This time it will not be religious persecution, it will be the persecution of property.” Nearly three hundred residents, more than half of them Amish, had signed petitions pointing out that the land to be developed was some of “the most productive and fertile soil in the state . . . and perhaps in the world” and that “The Meadows” would likely be the opening wedge of development into the Intercourse area. “We are mindful of the necessity of housing for mankind,” the Amish petitioners said. “But there are other acreages that cannot be farmed that would be suitable for housing. The proposal is a very bad choice for the use of the land.”40 Both sides claimed that they spoke for Lancaster County, blaming outside influences for the opposition. Activist Randy-Michael Testa, a Harvard University graduate student who had spent time living with an Amish family in Lancaster County and would later write a book about his experiences, had organized a “vigil” at Kitchen Kettle Village, a tourist attraction neighboring the Stoltzfus property, in early June. With cameras rolling—Testa had invited two local television stations to the event—the protesters passed out homemade leaflets to passing cars and collected signatures from tourists on a petition. Some 150 tourists from all over the United States and Canada signed in less than an hour. When Testa spoke up vigorously at the June 19 meeting, the township supervisors resented what they considered his interference.“I think that most of this commotion has to

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do with outsiders who are stirring the local people up,” muttered one of the handful of prodevelopment people present. The New Era’s reporter, trying to be merely descriptive, noted that “Testa, of Harvard University, has been living among the Amish in Leacock Township for the past two years.” Few combinations would have irked local readers more than “Harvard” and “Amish.” Testa’s sincerity and the strength of his convictions were irrelevant; he appeared simply a meddlesome intellectual trying to tell Lancaster Countians how to run their county. But residents opposed to the development could also raise the specter of outside influence. The new houses were expected to sell for $150,000 each, which at the time was more than half again the average price of a home in Lancaster County; only outsiders, many residents assumed—that is, only city people—could afford such expensive homes. “I think Stoltzfus is being very selfish,” said an Amishman at the meeting.“You’re going to have people from New York and New Jersey. They’re just waiting to come in.”41 The supervisors held a second meeting in July, attended by more than a hundred people and news crews from five television stations. When reporters asked Stoltzfus’s lawyer if he was surprised by the turnout, he said angrily, “No, I think you people have done a great job generating it.” Amish residents complained that the supervisors were indifferent to their fears for their way of life; supervisor Frank Howe again charged that “people from outside the township are exploiting the issue and the Amish.” The supervisors postponed a vote until August— then postponed it again, this time for three months, because, said Stoltzfus’s attorney, plans for the development had been changed “to help carry through the sense of a village concept” that county planners wanted. Opponents thought they saw through these delay tactics; the vote would be held in November, the Amish wedding season, when few Amish would be able to attend. “There’s something sort of sneaky and awful about this,” Testa told the New Era. Other opponents of the development tried to find alternative solutions. The Lancaster Farmland Trust announced that it was trying to buy the land, but the cost would be more than $1 million and would likely require a national fundraising campaign. If they succeeded, said Alan Musselman, they would likely develop it as a village, with a mix of homes, shops, and farmland similar to Intercourse itself. But Musselman warned that the trust was not interested in preserving the land if the same battle would have to be fought six or seven more times in Leacock Township—something he saw as likely, since the township had no agricultural zoning and supervisors refused to discuss farmland preservation. By fall, interest in the proposal had died down, and the supervisors quietly approved the plan on November 13. The resolution left no one happy, not even Amos Stoltzfus, who had seemed surprised by the opposition to his plans. He admitted not caring what people thought, but his son Myron told reporters that the protesters’ tone, and particularly their suggestion that the development was unethical, “hurts. . . .

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Dad has always been a good community man, a good neighbor and a great father. This cuts to the core.” The protesters, he argued, were the selfish ones. “Where were these people when the developments they live in were built? Some of them are living on land that ten years ago I plowed myself. Now Dad wants to make it so someone else can experience the same thing they did, and he’s accused of being greedy and selfish.”42 ✸ The debate over “The Meadows” was only the most visible of the struggles between partisans of progress and preservation. Throughout the county in the late 1980s and early 1990s, citizens protested new development. And throughout the county, preservationists seemed no match for the inevitable march of progress. Both sides were frustrated, but development continued. Sometimes, as in Leacock Township, officials seemed impervious to public opinion from the start. Often, public protest swung the votes of township supervisors—yet still seemed impotent in the long run. In 1990, a plan by Quarryville area developer Dwight Wagner to build more than 100 single-family homes and townhouses in East Drumore township brought hundreds of residents to a supervisors’ meeting to speak out and sign a petition opposing the development. Ironically, many of the residents at the meeting lived in houses built by Wagner or by his father, on former farmland—marginal land, not as productive as in the eastern part of the county, but farmland nevertheless. Now they cried “enough,” arguing that multifamily dwellings would diminish the township’s rural character and that so many new residents would put an undue burden on roads and schools. As often happened in such disputes, proponents of the development gave projections for increases in traffic and school-age children that residents found fantastic. The County Planning Commission concurred, telling township supervisors that such dense housing was inappropriate to a rural area and should be concentrated nearer existing towns or designed with a “village” atmosphere, with homes, shops, and businesses integrated together and fronting sidewalks. His proposal raised not only the usual mutual charges of selfishness but another irony as well. High-density development would consume a minimum of open space but had a particularly urban look and feel; to continue the low-density development patterns that had eaten up East Drumore Township in the 1970s would provide a more rural feel but would make inefficient use of land resources. After hearing arguments from both sides, the supervisors rejected Wagner’s request for rezoning of the property. But there was a sense that, one way or another, the land would one day be developed; Wagner already owned it and would immediately begin plans for another project. Eventually, as so often happened, public opposition wore down; residents grew resigned to the inevitability of some form of development on the site, and Wagner used the land—which abutted a golf course he had built in the 1970s—for a

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miniature golf course and batting cages.43 The end result was perhaps a compromise, perhaps not. Wagner’s energy may have worn down the township’s preservationists, but decades of growing belief in the inevitability of urban progress had left them ill equipped for the battle. Elsewhere in Lancaster County, opponents of development were less successful, even in the short term. Residents of Martic, Pequea, and East Hempfield Townships—all bordering suburban Lancaster—formed advocacy groups in the 1980s to fight development. “I think the typical Lancaster Countian today,” said Alan Musselman in 1988,“is frustrated, very frustrated—even with growth occurring in those areas that are planned for growth.” Suburban townships were the most logical place for growth to occur, and where planners tried to channel it; but residents even there did not want it. “Why can’t we just say whoa to growth?” said an East Hempfield Township resident at a supervisors’ meeting. Development, said Alan Peterson, chairman of the Pequea Township citizens’ group, meant “More crime. More traffic. More crowded schools. More fighting.” In fact, suburban residents may have been more worried about the impact of growth, since they were usually the ones behind the developers’ eight ball. When Lancaster Countians searched for a local example of rampant, willy-nilly growth, they often pointed to the area just northwest of the city; growth in more rural areas, though rapid, had not yet reached crisis proportions, and it had slowed somewhat since the 1970s. There was simply too much money to be made by building houses, commercial buildings, and light industry around the urban fringe, and not enough countywide sentiment for preventing development there. What sentiment existed was simply that—sentiment—and preservationists were unable to formulate an economic alternative to continual development.44 What occasionally made the difference in a vote on development was the presence of the Amish, the one group who did not feel that growth was inevitable. As it had for decades, their involvement generated instant media attention, not only countywide but nationwide and even internationally as well. Amish turnout at a public meeting could be the difference between the front page and the local section of Lancaster’s newspapers and could generate thousands of dollars for farm preservation efforts. The attention made it difficult for local government officials to act in favor of development. But Amish appeal, as it always had, cut both ways. Media from outside Lancaster County universally sided with the Amish, playing up their history, their commitment to their faith and to the land, and their peaceable nature. Developers and prodevelopment township supervisors seemed, by comparison, greedy and self-serving, even though reporters rarely said so explicitly. Government officials resented that implication and the media’s intrusion into what they considered a local affair. Lancaster Countians who knew Amish people and interacted with them on a daily basis, however much they liked them, were well aware that the Amish were not perfect and had long since grown irritated at

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the implication that they were. The Amish themselves had long grown tired of being singled out for special attention and of having their words used to justify positions they might or might not support. When asked to help set up a meeting between the Amish and PennDOT to discuss the implications of a superhighway, Abraham Blank asked whether there would also be special meetings with other religious groups—Lutherans, for example, or Jews. “Why are we being singled out?” he asked. Many non-Amish Lancaster Countians resented the special attention the Amish received from the media and from preservation groups. Supporters of a new Route 23/30 who preferred a route around most of the Amish farmland nevertheless grew irritated when the desire to “preserve” the Amish prevented building any highway at all. Non-Amish farmers required by law to obey environmental regulations bristled when preservationists argued that those regulations were unfair to the Amish specifically. When David Fisher, an Amish man in Drumore Township, ran afoul of the law in 1989 by maintaining a portable toilet on his property without a permit, local officials fined him repeatedly until he finally moved his family to western Pennsylvania. “David Fisher belongs in jail,” wrote Quarryville Sun-Ledger editor Fran Maye fiercely. “Nobody’s singling out Fisher. . . . We shouldn’t feel sorry for him just because he is Amish. . . . He received due process of the law just like you and I had we been in the same situation. In fact, it’s reassuring when you see a judicial process that doesn’t play favorites. Enforce the law the same for everyone.”45 The very public battle over the ironically named Garden Spot Village in the early 1990s demonstrated both the power and the frustration of Amish appeal. Dale M. Weaver, a New Holland-area businessman, announced plans to build a retirement community, Garden Spot Village, in West Earl Township. The “village” would consist of 76 cottages, 280 “independent-living” apartments, 225 “assisted living” units, a 180-bed nursing center, and a bank and restaurant, all to be built over ten years. After local officials rejected his request for variances to the township’s zoning ordinances, asking that the project be scaled back, Weaver turned to neighboring Earl Township. Supervisors there were more receptive to his requests to rezone the farm of Eugene Eberly, the proposed site for the village, but its location in the Mill Creek Valley—on some of the county’s best farmland and in the heart of the Amish area of the county—raised the ire of residents. “It’s a crime against the soil,” said local farmer Frank Ludwig. The retirement village would need a sewage treatment plant, which would also be used by the borough of New Holland, and many residents feared that sewage lines would serve as inroads for further development into the valley. They formed a citizens’ group, the Earl Township Farmland Preservation Trust, to fight Garden Spot Village and save the township’s farmland. Local farmers backed the group, vowing to fight the rezoning proposal even though it would raise the value of their property. As the New Era wrote, “Once the integrity of a farming area is broken by development,

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other building more easily follows. Expanded construction always follows new sewer service.”46 As with “The Meadows,” the potential displacement of Old Order farmers raised public criticism of the development—but that criticism, in turn, raised the ire of developers and public officials. The Amish had come to symbolize both the good and the bad sides of rural heritage and farm preservation, and their presence polarized the community instead of uniting it behind a common goal. The tendency of progressives and preservationists to talk past one another was magnified. When township supervisors met in September 1992 to consider the rezoning proposal, more than 300 people turned out to oppose it. Perhaps a quarter of them were of Plain sects. The tone of the meeting, a reporter wrote, was “generally polite,” but opposition was firm and nearly unanimous. “I’m getting mad!” shouted Doris Gehring in frustration. “I’d rather see a farm than a retirement village. I’d rather smell manure than emissions from cars and trucks. And I’d rather hear the cows than the brakes trying to screech through.” Some residents clearly did not trust the supervisors to take their concerns seriously. “What is the outside parameter for this to be decided,” asked a New Holland man, “before or after the election?”47 Despite these charges—“a low blow,” said one official—the supervisors rejected the rezoning proposal. The vote, said one of more than 200 people in attendance, showed that “grass-roots democracy still works.” In fact, Earl Township residents were split on the issue. Many believed that a retirement village could benefit the township; 800 of them signed a petition in favor of such a project, while 1,000 signed one against building it in the Mill Creek Valley. But the issue seemed to have ended in a spirit of unity, with majorities of both sides agreeing that the village should be built—just not in the Mill Creek Valley. The lesson, wrote New Era reporter Andrea Brown, was that “Lancaster County residents . . . will fight to save prime farmland, and when they unite, they can win.”48 But the spirit of compromise was short-lived. The following March, the Earl Township supervisors suddenly reversed their ruling. Residents felt betrayed. One Amish woman, hearing the supervisors’ decision, actually raised a clenched fist. “All this work,” she said, “for nothing.” Others wanted to know why the rezoning issue had come up again at all. “What has changed?” asked another Amish woman. “Is greed behind it?” Three months later, the supervisors voted to run the needed sewage lines along a roundabout path along township roads and, in effect, open up much of the township to development. In doing so, they rejected a compromise plan that would have routed the lines on a straight path across farmland—a plan to which landowners had offered their approval. “The bottom line,” said Alan Musselman, “is that [the supervisors] not only want the Garden Spot Village project . . . but they want the whole valley for development.” People not only in Earl Township but throughout the county fumed at the

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supervisors’ decisions. “It is difficult,” wrote Leonard Ragouzeos of Millersville to the New Era, to read about and witness, week after week, the sincere concerns and desires of a great many citizens in a democratic society openly ignored by the small town, small minded men who insult their electorate with political decisions favoring the rich and the few and forever destroying the very landscape and quality of life most of us cherish. We as citizens have invested our lives and families here in what was once one of the most beautiful and agriculturally blessed regions in the nation. Acres of farmland, unique habitat, woods, streams, and wetlands in Elizabethtown, Millersville and elsewhere are stolen from the public by minor men with major influence who want more roads to bring more cars, growth and profits for businessmen to develop their portfolios and their bank accounts. Rockvale Square [an outlet mall], near Intercourse, is given permission to enlarge, engulfing fertile ground and throwing people from their homes. All done so out-of-town retailers can sell stuff to out-of-town shoppers. . . . In Earl Township three tyrannous supervisors abuse the good and plain people of a community with their unpopular and unjust zone changes so that some rich son of a chicken empire can pave over and urbanize the very earth which is the source of life for his ancestors and his neighbors. The “garden spot” has gone to hell . . . What we say is supposed to matter!49 The New Era, which as always supported farm preservation, took an equally dismal view.“An individual’s right to do what he wants with his land is not more important than the community’s right to regulate growth. . . . Lancaster County has chosen—or at least we had thought that most Lancaster Countians had preferred—to adopt a different path. We thought the idea was to preserve the county’s irreplaceable agricultural land while permitting limited growth, so that in 20 years Lancaster County doesn’t look like northern Jersey.” Jane Johnson of Earl Township called the supervisors’ actions “the most shameful misuse of elected public office imaginable.” As far as farm preservation went, “The straw that broke the camel’s back has just landed.” Mutterings were again heard that members of the Plain sects might choose to move out in the face of new development pressures. “It’s not that we want to move out. That’s the last thing we want. We’re being pushed out,” said Old Order Mennonite farmer Eugene Martin. A group of activists charged that the supervisors had committed civil rights violations, alleging illegal election activities, improper conduct of township business, and discrimination against Old Order Amish and Mennonite residents. When Ken Olin, a local veterinarian working with the Earl Farmland Preservation Trust,

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brought a challenge to the route of the proposed sewer lines, the supervisors, fearing for their safety, took security measures. To the disgust of the residents attending, they were greeted at the door to the township offices by two New Holland borough police officers with a metal detector. The supervisors alleged, without naming anyone specifically, that they had received death threats prior to the hearing. Several residents admitted being intimidated into silence; they were, wrote Yvette Waidley, being “terrorized” by township officials. It was not, in fact, the first time citizens had faced a police presence at a public meeting; “this novel form of democracy,” as the Intelligencer Journal called it, had surfaced in Brecknock Township two years earlier. Alan Musselman later reported having received death threats against his children, and even Amos Funk, whose family had farmed Lancaster County soils for generations, was called a communist and worse. Threats of violence and police reprisal in development debates were still isolated incidents, but in Earl Township, at least, the spirit of compromise was dead. Amish Appeal had ended in violent confrontations over the presence of a religious sect built on brotherly submission, and the Garden Spot was confounded by the problem of progress.50

The Perils of Preservation By the early 1990s, Lancaster County seemed to be hopelessly divided. On one side, businessmen and progressives insisted on the necessity and, indeed, the inevitability of growth. People would continue moving to Lancaster County; natives would continue to have children who would grow up and need homes and jobs. No one could stop that. “Let’s face it,” said developer Nevin Kraybill during the battle over Garden Spot Village, “the area south of New Holland is a population center and will be developed. It’s just a matter of time.” As Tom Daniels later recalled, when he arrived in Lancaster in 1989,“every acre of land seemed to be for sale.”51 Certainly everyone wanted material and economic progress; the desire for a better life and a higher standard of living, no less than religious and cultural values, had driven past generations to make Lancaster County the Garden Spot. At the same time, no one enjoyed seeing farmland disappear, and it was as difficult as ever to define Lancaster County without mentioning agriculture. The twin desires for progress and preservation were incompatible, and the problem of balancing the two—let alone unifying them—seemed as intractable as ever. And yet, after 1990, the road to farm preservation grew markedly easier. The ugly public battles of the late 1980s and early 1990s as well as a series of local disputes over farmland had galvanized public opinion, so that even the most determined developers had to pay heed. As farmers preserved land in key areas, they minimized the risks for their neighbors, who were increasingly willing to follow suit. By the early 1990s, in fact, demand for preservation had outstripped funding,

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and the waiting list to sell easements to the county was five to seven years long. But strong public support led to a rise in funding for the Ag Board and in private donations to the Lancaster Farmland Trust. By 1995, the combined efforts of public and private organizations had obtained easements on 170 Lancaster County farms totaling 15,632 acres. By 1999, the county had preserved 375 farms totaling more than 30,000 acres. The county had spent $14 million, the state $22 million. The Lancaster Farmland Trust had preserved 6,600 acres with private donations. Agricultural zoning limited nonfarm development on more than half of the county’s total land. Farmers who had thought preservation a nice idea but impractical now sold conservation easements on their own farms—including Larry Weaver, who had told the New Era in 1988 that farming was “on the way out.” Farmland preservation, after its rocky start, seemed finally to be succeeding.52 What made the difference in the 1990s? In large part, it simply took time for activists to convince residents that their county was in serious imminent danger. Alan Musselman went door-to-door in East Lampeter Township begging farmers to refuse offers from local realtors and cajoling residents to help him rewrite local zoning ordinances. Amos Funk, as Musselman recalls,“would get up at six o’clock in the morning and call the U.S. Congressmen, the whole delegation to Harrisburg, and all three county commissioners before it got to seven o’clock.” Countless citizen activists and committed farmers, Amish and non-Amish, convinced their neighbors that farm preservation was the right thing to do. At the same time, organized efforts on behalf of farm preservation became more methodical. The Ag Board learned from its mistakes; early in Tom Daniels’s tenure, the board confidently preserved a farm in a part of Little Britain township zoned residential— only to see a developer sell neighboring lots under the slogan “Preserved View.” By the mid-1990s, the board had limited itself to preserving farms within contiguous “agriculture security areas” to maintain a critical mass of farmland that would enable farm support businesses to thrive. Daniels set a goal of 60,000 acres permanently preserved in strategic locations that would serve as keystones to keep the agricultural infrastructure viable. The county’s 1993 comprehensive plan also aided the efforts of farm preservation, drawing urban growth boundaries (UGBs) around suburbs, towns, and villages designed to contain new construction for the next twenty years. The plan had the support of both local officials and developers, who realized that with UGBs in place, they could build new houses and businesses without fear of public opposition or zoning battles. The Amish and Old Order Mennonites continued to play a quiet but vital role in farm preservation; not only did they consistently refuse to sell their farms to developers, but they also bought half of all farms sold in the county, so that by 2000 Plain farmers owned 30 percent of the county’s farms. And it didn’t hurt, finally, that population growth slowed considerably in the 1990s, to 11 percent from nearly 17 percent in the 1980s.53

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By the end of the 1990s, Lancaster Countians seemed to have reached a truce on the issue of development. In a 1998 Planning Commission survey, one hundred local leaders reported that farmland preservation was the single best trend in the county over the past five years. Indeed, the county became a model for farm preservation efforts in other communities nationwide. Yet that truce came so suddenly, within the perspective of the long twentieth century, that it raises suspicions. Had Lancaster Countians finally, after all these years, reconciled the economic need for progress with the cultural need for preservation of their heritage? Not necessarily. Farmland preservation began to succeed in Lancaster County as its proponents became more pragmatic and more often argued their case on economic grounds—in short, as preservationists ceded the terms of the debate to progressives. Both the Ag Board and the Lancaster Farmland Trust in their public relations campaigns remind residents of agriculture’s staggering impact on the local economy and of Lancaster’s rank in agricultural production among all U.S. counties. The Ag Board has accepted the inevitability of continued growth in farm sizes, setting 50 acres as the minimum beyond which a preserved farm cannot be subdivided. The Lancaster Farmland Trust claims as part of its mission the need to develop “a state and federal legislative agenda, that makes preservation more attractive by ensuring that farming remains profitable for future owners of preserved farms,” and director Tom Stouffer, who took over from Alan Musselman in 1996, argues that not only tax breaks but also regular, ongoing cash payments should be allocated to farmers who preserve their land. Farmers have taken the proceeds from sales of conservation easements and put them into new equipment and farm buildings; the feeling of permanence lent by preservation has also allowed them to invest in their farms with greater confidence. So happy are they with the cash payment system, in fact, that farm groups have actively opposed plans to replace one-time cash payments with ongoing tax breaks. Developers have accepted urban growth boundaries because they provide enough land for present needs but often still build houses on two-acre lots within them; lot sizes will have to shrink if the boundaries are to hold. For now, the system works, because farmland preservation in its present form is in everyone’s economic interest. But what if economic interests change? “I think,” says June Mengel, the Ag Board’s current director, “we’ve been in a holding pattern for awhile. But when you start looking at all these people coming in . . .”54 As preservationists have grown more methodical, they have also tended more and more toward the traditional language of urban planners. “Open space” has been replaced with the idea of a “working landscape,” which Tom Daniels defines as privately held land that “forms a part of a local or regional economic base, and produces food, fiber, and minerals that provide employment directly on the land and indirectly through supply, processing, and transportation businesses” but that also, like open space, may offer “scenic vistas, wildlife habitat, aquifer recharge,

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and a buffer to developed areas and so contribute to the local quality of life.”55 This is, certainly, an improvement over open space: there are now people living and working on the land. Yet it is not clear that the combination of economic production and “scenic vistas” is any more viable than the combination of economic and “visual resources” touted by Lancaster’s planners in the 1970s. A rural community is now a possibility, at least, in this working landscape, but without some discussion of rural culture it is still quite hazy. And neither rural culture nor the cultural value of rurality have any more place in urban planning today than they did thirty years ago. And what of the nonfarming residents of Lancaster County? They remain as disconnected both from the practice of farming and from the language of planners as they were in the 1970s. As Daniels writes, “A working landscape is essentially an industrial landscape that does not mix well with nearby residential development, because farming and forestry generate noise, dust, and odors, and use chemicals that can spill over from one property to another.”56 The latter is true enough, but with farmers segregated from nonfarmers, the farmer (at least the non-Amish farmer) will continue to feel culturally isolated, and the nonfarmer will continue to have no real connection with the land. Urban growth boundaries, though they are wonderful tools for channeling development and conserving resources, may actually make this problem worse. Nonfarmers who live next door to farms have a chance, at least, of making friends with the farmer and of developing an appreciation for the work, life, and business of agriculture. They have a chance, however rarely they may take it, to become not only in the country but of it. Town and village dwellers living on quarter-acre lots lack even that opportunity; their perspective is likely to be almost entirely urban, and farming merely an abstraction—not to mention the likelihood that people interested in moving to Lancaster to live in such communities will bring a purely urban perspective with them. A recent study of farmland preservation shows the difference in perspectives between farm preservation groups, planners, and farmers on the one hand and ordinary citizens on the other. A group of researchers from Millersville University found Lancaster Countians strongly in favor of preserving farmland, indeed strongly in favor of preserving farmland far beyond what would be necessary to maintain adequate food supplies or to protect environmentally sensitive areas. Residents are, in fact, willing to pay increased taxes to support further preservation. The survey revealed a range of reasons for support of preservation, but the two highest were the environmental benefits of open space and the desire to preserve farming “as a way of life.” Preserving the culture of the Plain people ranked third, followed by the desire to maintain the “farming landscape.” The economic benefits of farming were further down the list. Three of the top four reasons residents gave for supporting farmland preservation, in short, were related to the

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cultural value—however vaguely defined—of farming.57 Would support be so strong for preserving the “industrial landscape” Tom Daniels describes? A century of Lancaster’s history says no. June Mengel, who in addition to heading the Ag Board is married to a dairy farmer, agrees. Though farmers still face economic pressures to get bigger, she says, what most nonfarmers want to preserve is “mom and pop farming.” When a farm gets too big, too impersonal, and too industrial, it loses the cultural value that most people place on it.58 Economic and cultural needs, progress and preservation, are still in conflict in Lancaster County. Progress as ever demands changes—in farming, in families, in communities, in the landscape—that may ultimately render the county, in most people’s minds, no longer quite rural in the way that rural has been defined in American culture. Amos Funk’s dream of a new land ethic, meanwhile—one based on the old idea of stewardship of the land, one that might perhaps lead to a new idea of rural progress—remains unfulfilled. “There was an initial clamor,” Alan Musselman recalls, “for making a commitment that was moral, that was philosophical, that was ethical, that was familial. It stemmed from a love for the land. It has become now a lot like the development game, a completely moneyoriented, pragmatic, business decision. And that’s sad. And I think that it will limit how far things will go toward farmland preservation.”59 Perhaps, as some believe, Lancaster County has turned the corner on farmland preservation, and likely agriculture will remain strong there for decades to come. But the Garden Spot has always been about more than agricultural production. The Garden Spot is about more, in fact, than Lancaster County itself. It is the ideal of a quintessentially rural American community, one in which tradition and progress are integrated in a functioning rural culture. Whether that ideal can yet be realized— whether a community can exist in a twenty-first-century America that is both economically viable and recognizably rural, and what such a community might look like—is a question that Lancaster Countians have yet to honestly confront. Until they do, the future of the Garden Spot remains uncertain.

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✸ EPILOGUE The Harvest

Somebody asked me whether our goat was a baby horse. I am surprised sometimes to hear gray-haired city people tell me they were never on a farm in their life, and I pity them.They missed half their life.—ELI STOLTZFUS, caretaker at the Amish Homestead

It is now nearly impossible to pick up a local newspaper in Lancaster County without quickly becoming aware of the changes taking place there. Nor does the reader need any prior knowledge or point of reference, for the nature of the change is implicit in coverage of even the most mundane local events—and when it is not self-evident, the reporter is usually happy to point it out. Not only do the practical details of zoning, agriculture, housing, and road construction crowd the local news, but the front pages almost daily announce new worries about the county’s future. Columnists and interviewees ask, “Is it too late?” The rest of the sentence—to do what?—is understood. The Hourglass Foundation, a local group working to preserve the county’s heritage, does not need to explain its name. Everyone knows. The clock is ticking, and you can’t turn it back. Even crime reporting offers fodder for musings about Lancaster’s changing character, as when the case of a young woman accused of murdering two youths caught in a love triangle spun out, to the obsession of locals, for more than a year. The accused, Lisa Michelle Lambert, was ultimately found guilty, but only after months of legal wrangling that brought into question the motives of local leaders and seemed to defy common sense and justice. Residents followed the story relentlessly—“to the point of exhaustion,” said the Sunday News, whose staff must surely have been as tired as anyone. Reporter Elizabeth Cummings, reflecting on the long ordeal, wrote that the brutal murders and the complex, messy legalities

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that followed threatened Lancaster County’s sense of itself as a place where “the rules are still simple. . . . Work hard, and you will be rewarded. Do good, and good will be done to you. Commit an evil act, and you will be punished.” The Lambert case, Cummings mused, forced Lancastrians to face “the larger world, the world where justice sometimes seems less important than law . . . a world of ambiguity,” and to realize that the divisions between that larger world and the world of Lancaster County were evaporating. It was, she said, “a reminder of what they may be bound to lose.” Maybe, maybe not. Lancaster Countians do want to believe that their home is special, that the old rules still apply there. At the same time, there is a growing public obsession with the impending death of that belief, with the sense that time is running out and that its residents are helpless to save the county from becoming Anytown, U.S.A. Cummings’s introspection says as much by its tone as by its analysis: what Lancaster County was is coming to an end, and we can only look on in “helpless fascination.”1 One would like to believe that such obsessive self-analysis would produce dividends in positive change, in renewal of community and revival of hope. But it seems instead to lead only in circles. The Hourglass Foundation struggles to find a way to preserve what is unique about the county; board member James Corrigan asks, “Is there anyone thinking about the whole impact on quality of life of growth and development?”2 But practically everyone is thinking about it. People have been thinking about it for twenty years. Some people have been worrying about it since the 1930s. Time has been running out for at least that long, probably longer, possibly since the Revolution. Despite the successes of farmland preservation, despite the rebound of agriculture, despite the slowing of growth and the channeling of new development into existing towns and villages, the clock is still ticking for the Garden Spot. The issues that have framed discussions of the Garden Spot throughout the twentieth century still shape them at the beginning of the twenty-first. The history of the idea of the Garden Spot can be seen as a tug of war between progress and preservation, a battle in which neither side is, after all, truly rural. In the 1930s, progressive education reformers insisted that rural education had to give way to school consolidation, while urban sympathizers of the Amish thought they saw a way to preserve traditional rural life in an Amish enclave. The Amish fit neatly into neither camp: they didn’t want to preserve their way of life; they wanted to continue improving it, but in their own way. The Pennsylvania German folklore movement was similarly caught between progress and preservation. The Pennsylvania German Society applauded modernization; folklorists tried to make rural life into a museum; and first-generation urbanites wanted someone, somewhere, to continue living the life they had left. Since the 1940s, farmers have been caught between the economic demands for progress—bigger farms, bigger machines—and the desire to preserve their agrarian heritage. Tourism was—and

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remains today—very much about preservation, about displaying traditional values in the form of a timeless Amish community. Farmland preservation is only the culmination of century-long trends, for whatever the words and deeds of planners and local leaders, typical supporters of farm preservation in Lancaster County want primarily to know that someone, somewhere (but preferably close by), lives like they believe the Amish do. They are very much like the audience of the New York Times reading about one-room schools in 1938, like Pennsylvania Germans who moved to the city in the 1920s and 1930s, like tourists who have visited Lancaster County since the 1940s. Little has changed; the impulse to preserve rurality and the corresponding fear of losing it have only moved closer to home. The trouble with this debate is that both progressives and preservationists tend to take a perspective outside the rural community they address. Both tacitly accept the association, now automatic in American culture, of rurality with the past. Progressives insist that you can’t turn back the clock, that rural communities will simply have to change, like it or not—that is, to urbanize, to industrialize, to “get big or get out.” Preservationists try, if not to turn back time, then to stop it at least for a while and at least in one place, to set rurality on a shelf to be looked at and appreciated for its own sake. The battle lines are rarely so clear, of course, nor the positions so simplistic; individuals as well as communities find themselves divided. But we can nevertheless see these two sides at work in Lancaster County throughout the twentieth century. Lancaster Countians have, at bottom, increasingly lost their personal connection to the land over the past century. That observation is, on one level, obvious, but everything else—the assumption that rurality is something fundamentally of the past, people behaving as tourists in their own county—stems from it. As people lost their connection to the land, they also lost their connection to their community. Consider the new Mennonite definition of stewardship. (To be fair, the Mennonites were unique only in having held out for so long; their “new” ideas had been pervasive elsewhere for half a century at least.) The old definition enjoined the faithful to be stewards of God’s creation, to husband the land—a communal resource—for the benefit of future generations. The new definition demanded wise use of personal resources—talents, money, and other forms of wealth that, though they might be seen as gifts from God, were nevertheless treated as commodities. A successful businessman should “give back to the community” after the fact, rather than (necessarily) integrating concern for community into his economic life. At worst, the “Christian businessman,” like Adam Smith, was free to see his personal wealth as the sole source of the common good. It would be easy to call this version of stewardship hypocritical, but citizens dutifully writing checks to farmland preservation groups are no different. Citizens might donate cash—the stewardship of their personal resources?—or speak out at public meetings, and they might use the power of local government to legalize

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conservation easements or pass and maintain restrictive zoning. But such actions, by individuals or by communities, are not integrated into daily life. As a result, it is not surprising that many of the same people who argue most eloquently for stewardship and preservation live in split-level, suburban-style houses on what was once prime farmland, or buy all of their food from a national chain supermarket, or earn their living from the construction industry. Nor is it surprising that the loudest opponents of Wal-Marts before their construction can usually be found shopping in those same stores within weeks of their openings. Since neither action is fully integrated into one’s life and one’s community, they bear no relevance to one another. In that light, the word preservation—even with respect to farmland preservation—begins to take on an uncomfortable meaning. Literally, a thing preserved no longer has life of its own; it cannot grow, change, adapt, develop, progress. The parallel in agriculture is the preservation of a harvest: the fruit is reaped at the fullest expression of life and health, then fixed so that it may neither grow further nor decay; it is placed in glass jars and set upon a cellar shelf to be looked at and, ultimately, eaten. Preserved, it will last forever, but it is of no value unless consumed—and, once consumed, it is gone. Preservation takes a living thing and turns it into a commodity. The way to “preserve” rurality is to turn it into a tourist attraction—as has been done in Lancaster County. What does it mean, then, to “preserve” farmland? A fully functioning, integrated rural community does not need preserving. The Amish, one must remember, most often “preserve” their farmland by their old-style stewardship, not by selling conservation easements. The problem of preservation is more than semantic. Most lifelong residents of Lancaster County seem to know, deep down, that rurality, the Garden Spot, cannot as such be preserved. In 1998, New York Times architectural critic Herbert Muschamp wrote an essay in praise of Lancaster County. “You can’t drive more than a mile through Lancaster County’s rolling farmland,” he mooned, “without thinking you’ve already entered one of the world’s great sacred spaces, a landscape consecrated over the centuries to a peaceful way of life.” The Lancaster Sunday News reprinted the feature; readers rolled their eyes and waited for the inevitable comment. It came a week later. “So now this is not just a nice place to live,” the editors sneered. “It’s a sacred landscape. Pickle this county like chow chow, preserve it like a jar of peaches. The city folks want to drop by and marvel at all that peacefulness. . . . We certainly don’t disagree that there’s something sacred about the beauty of this Garden Spot. [But] once an organism stops growing, it starts to die. Is that what some mean by preservation? If so, preserve us from it.”3 Consider, too, the recent efforts to save farmland by using techniques of historic preservation. To have all of eastern Lancaster County declared a national historic site, as has been attempted, would be a great symbolic victory for preser-

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vationists. But preserving a farm is not like preserving a house. A historic house— imagine Mount Vernon or Monticello—can be preserved unoccupied. What is historically interesting about a house is the house itself, the design, the construction, the decoration and furnishings; such material objects speak silent volumes about the people who once occupied them. One could learn far more about Thomas Jefferson by dining with him than merely by touring his house, but the house itself is nonetheless worth preserving—and entirely preservable. A house, once built, is threatened only by gradual decay or by deliberate destruction, both of which are easily prevented. It is possible to maintain a house in its original condition simply by dusting, waxing the floors, painting now and again, perhaps hiring the occasional carpenter to replace rotted clapboards or worn shingles. Preservation requires only a caretaker, not a resident. Not so with a farm. A farm exists as a delicate balance between natural process and human direction. It continues to exist only so long as both nature and farmer continue to work together. The land left to itself will “revert” to nature, to its preagricultural condition. A cornfield will revert to wild grasses within a season, though perhaps with some second-hand corn mixed in, born of kernels from ears the harvester missed. A few more years, and—if the cornfield is in Penn’s Woods —the hardwood forest will creep back in. The first German settlers chose this land because they knew that sturdy hardwoods grew from rich soil. If that soil is no longer cultivated, the saplings and brambles will edge out across the fields; the saplings will grow into tall trees, and within a few decades the landscape will be unrecognizable. A farm, to remain a farm, requires a farmer. But if a farmer is required, not just any farmer will do, for different methods of agriculture produce different landscapes. The landscape of Lancaster’s farmland has already changed dramatically. Half a century ago, a typical farm might have had an orchard, several kinds of livestock, a vegetable garden, tobacco, cereal crops. Now the landscape is primarily cornfields and pastures and cattle, though one still sees some vegetables and a bit of tobacco. Plots have grown larger with the machines that cultivate them and have changed in shape from rectangles to contoured strips to guard against soil erosion. If the county’s farms are to be preserved, so must the farmers. But the only way a farmer can continue farming is by making money. If he consistently loses money, as many farmers do, he must eventually change or get out of farming. If he changes his methods of agriculture—by doubling in size, purchasing bigger machines, or decreasing the diversity of his production—then the appearance of the farm, its produce, and ultimately the values associated with it must also change. If he gets out of farming, he will be replaced by someone who will pursue the new methods of agriculture or replace the farm with a shopping mall. Either way, as the farmer goes, so goes the farm. Open space can be preserved quite easily, simply by not building anything on it. Farmland can be preserved simply by refusing to allow it to be used for any

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other purpose. Economic incentives, including the very act of preserving a farm, can help keep farmers in business. But if what is desired is not merely the continued production of food and fiber but a thriving rural community, the challenge of farm preservation is not simply in preventing farmland from being turned into residential subdivisions and industrial parks. To continue to have the kind of farms Americans most want preserved—small farms, worked by family labor, concerned with quality and existing as part of the community—will require a sea change in attitudes on the part of farmers and nonfarmers, ruralites and urbanites, producers and consumers alike. The challenge is in keeping farming—a particular kind of farming—not only economically but culturally viable. And that is far, far more difficult. ✸ It is only fair of me, after criticizing nearly every available position in the debate over the future of Lancaster County, to offer a few tentative steps toward a solution so that I, too, may be criticized. I don’t pretend to have the answers—my point, on the contrary, is that we have barely begun to ask the right questions. But the decline of rural America is a cultural problem, and it requires a cultural solution. Culture is made up of the little things in life, and I would argue that we are going to have to do the little things to maintain and rebuild rural communities for the twenty-first century. Political measures, planning and farmland preservation and assistance of various kinds for farmers, are all necessary and can be good things if handled properly. Quality agricultural land is a scarce resource, and it should be conserved, by public means if necessary, for the good of future generations. (It should not be surprising that I prefer the term conserved in this context.) Farm policy, at both the state and federal level, may be coming around to support small-scale and alternative agriculture, or at least to pay it lip service; this too may be a good thing, especially to the extent that the development of sustainable agriculture is tied to the building of sustainable communities. These measures are absolutely necessary in the short term, as stopgaps, until we can work out the cultural solutions to our cultural problems. But those measures alone, without cultural changes to support them, can never add up to a real solution. If we want to continue to have rural places and rural communities in the twenty-first century, we must bring people into closer contact, economic as well as personal, with rural places and people. What is needed are positive solutions, not negative ones—not, in other words, merely don’t waste energy or build more houses or pave over farmland, but do something positive that you can integrate into the rest of your life. Specifically and as a start, we need to bring nonfarmers into closer contact with farms and farmers. The challenge here, of course, is how to do that without encouraging the sort of sprawl that has eaten up Lancaster County and so many other rural places on metropolitan fringes. But physical

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proximity is only a small part of what I am talking about, and perhaps not even a necessary part. Farmers’ markets in towns and cities are a first step: urbanites and suburbanites who think they want to save farms should start by buying as much of their food as possible from local sources. You cannot be for farmland preservation in Pennsylvania while buying most of your food from California. Yes, local food may cost a bit more, but not as much as tax increases to pay for conservation easements, and it has direct personal benefits of its own. Buying local also means buying in season, another sacrifice that is its own reward: nobody really enjoys hard tomatoes anyway, and eating local produce in season may even spark a renewal of local cuisine. This simple act will help keep local farms in business; more specifically, it will keep the sort of farms in business that people most want preserved—even more so if that local food is, say, organic produce or free range chicken. At the same time, it will bring city residents into both personal and practical contact with rural producers, which will, with a little patience, help each group better understand the other. For farmers who don’t want to market their own produce directly, we should support local processing. Local governments can help by creating “agribusiness incubators,” a fancy term for publicly supported start-up businesses that will act as go-betweens for local farmers and consumers. But consumers will have to support them by buying their products, and farmers will have to support them by selling to local processors or doing the processing themselves. Again, this isn’t just about building a local economy; it’s about building community. If we buy local farm products as a brief spiritual vacation from the usual trips to the grocery store or as ends in themselves, without integrating the idea of local economy and community into the rest of our lives, then we won’t have accomplished much. We will merely be tourists. But if we buy those products thoughtfully, as a way of connecting ourselves to our communities and to the land, we will have taken the first step on the road to “saving” rural America. At the same time, we ought to be considering what the agriculture of the twenty-first century should look like. Let me repeat that, lest anyone miss my emphasis: there has been plenty of speculation since at least the 1970s about what twenty-first-century agriculture would be; I am interested in what it should be, because it will be what we make it. I am not in favor, as many planners seem to be, of effectively segregating densely populated cities from full-time professional farmers. For one thing, it is next to impossible for the average high school or college graduate who did not grow up on a farm to simply take up large-scale farming, and it offends me to think that agriculture should be a closed guild. Such an idea seems completely un-American, a term I hesitate to use but that seems absolutely proper here; surely any closed economic system will lead to economic and cultural stagnation. People raised in cities and suburbs who truly want to farm should have the opportunity to start small. There are many who have made

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that move, and many of them have become quite successful, particularly those growing for local markets. I can imagine a diverse rural landscape that includes home gardeners (for that too is agriculture), five-acre microfarms growing niche crops for local markets, ten- to twenty-acre farms partially supported by an onfarm business or off-farm income, and full-time farms of fifty acres or more producing staples and other crops for local consumption and export. More people personally involved in agriculture means more people with a stake in rural places as rural places; it means more people interested in building strong, vibrant rural communities. Those rural communities, I hope, will remain in closer contact with urban communities. The breakdown of urban community and the means of rebuilding it are topics for another book. But it is a fact, and an important one to remember, that most Americans do not actually want to be farmers, do not want to live in a farming community. And that’s fine. Cities are good, too. I would like to see people who are essentially, culturally urban decide to live in a town or city and make their town or city everything it can be. But I would like to see those people keep in contact with the rural communities outside their cities, so that each group can benefit from what the other has learned. On an immediate scale, farmland preservation groups and urbanites interested in downtown redevelopment are on the same side and should work together; livable cities mean fewer people building houses on farmland. Again, we should focus on making towns and cities more attractive to potential residents—a positive solution—rather than merely on making rural areas less attractive. More generally, cities need the country, and the country needs cities, not just economically as producers and consumers of food and fiber, but culturally and intellectually and morally. Let each be what it is and learn from the other. That will not be possible if we segregate city and country, whether on a large scale (Manhattan from Iowa) or an everyday one—or if we blend them together into suburbia. Finally, with respect to Lancaster County, we can consider seriously what lessons we can learn from the Amish. I do not hold the Amish up as paragons of virtue, nor as examples of any rural ideal. Even if I felt that to be appropriate, it would serve no useful purpose. Like the great majority of human beings, Amish men and women have their good points and their bad points, both individually and as a group. Their model, while instructive, would not serve all of us. But they remain proof that it is possible to build an alternative way of life, to be rural in a modern and urbanizing world. While I was doing research in Lancaster, I spent a good deal of time in the basement of the Lancaster Public Library, reading microfilmed newspapers and dusty cookbooks, and occasionally I found myself sitting across the aisle from an Amish man who spent his morning reading various newspapers. He looked old enough to be retired, though still vigorous, and he had with him an Igloo lunch cooler. He had, I assumed, come to the city for the day,

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most likely borrowing a ride from an “English” neighbor. What interested me was the thoroughness with which he read the past week’s news: from all appearances, he knew more of what was going on in the world than the vast majority of Lancaster Countians, who might only skim the headlines over breakfast. Yet nothing he found in that news had convinced him that there was a better way of life than his own. I have wished, on occasion, that I could introduce that man to the many people I have met who believe the Amish to be backward, ignorant, simple, uneducated. He, as much as anyone I have met in Lancaster County, proved to me the possibility of not only finding but choosing a rural alternative—regardless of whether we make the same choice he has made. And that is the key to “saving” Lancaster County, to “saving” rural America, to “saving” the Garden Spot—wherever we find it and whatever we make of it. We must choose to do it, not once in a grand rural conversion experience, not once a year on election day, but every day. It is no longer possible, if indeed it ever was, simply to be rural, unaware of the alternative. None of us faces such blissful ignorance in the twenty-first century. If we are to be rural it must be by continuous, conscious choice. We must choose it by what we eat and what we buy, but also by how we behave toward one another. Because in the end, Americans do not want to preserve rural places because of their value as economic resources or as open space—important considerations though those are. They value rural places because of what they represent spiritually, and what they represent spiritually remains open to all of us, no matter where we live.

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✸ APPENDIX Farms and Population of Lancaster County, 1900–2000

Several demographic trends that I have described in chapters 2 and 4 through 6 are more easily evident from U.S. Census figures. Table A.1 shows three ways of looking at the rural and urban population of Lancaster County since 1950. The first is to consider the city of Lancaster and its suburbs (the “urban fringe”) together as the urban population center of the county; in census terms, this constitutes the “urbanized area” of Lancaster city. Since 1950, the suburbs have grown dramatically—actually, dramatically is an understatement—as a proportion of the county’s total population, while the city has lost population in absolute terms and, correspondingly, dwindled to a nearly insignificant fraction of the county. The second measure of urban and rural population is the relative decline of boroughs (small towns) with respect to townships, which suggests a declining portion of the population living in areas with a central core. To a certain extent, this conclusion only repeats the first, since all of Lancaster’s suburbs (the urban fringe) are in townships; subtracting the suburban population from the aggregate figures for population leaves a much smaller growth in township population in the remaining “rural” part of the county. But the suburbs have grown not only in population but also in area, absorbing many previously rural areas. The result is a bit of a paradox, as I suggested in chapter 5. While the metropolitan center of the county now holds a far greater portion of the county’s population than it did in 1950, Lancaster Countians are, in another sense, more dispersed than they were a half-century ago. The third measure of rural and urban population is an aggregate of the first two. “Urban areas,” here, include the city of Lancaster, its urban fringe, and the boroughs. (Lacking data for unincorporated villages, I was unable to consider these as separate “urban” entities, even setting aside the question of whether they should be considered as such.) Urban areas, in other words, include population centers and their immediate vicinities. “Rural areas” are everything else. Since

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1950, the county’s urban population, considered this way, has grown from half to two-thirds of the total. Table A.2 shows trends in the number and size of farms in Lancaster County since 1900. Based on these figures, the century can be roughly divided into three parts: prior to 1925, 1925 to 1974, and 1974 to the present. Prior to the 1920s, farms were continually subdivided among multiple children and a strong market for agricultural commodities kept many small farmers in business. The number of farms in the county grew steadily during this period while their average size decreased; total land in till remained steady at about 550,000 acres, 90 percent of the county’s total land. By 1925, average farm size had reached an all-time low of 45.5 acres, not enough to sustain most families, and a rapid decline in agricultural prices began a process of “weeding out” that would last for decades. During the next half-century, both the number of farms and the total farmland in use declined steadily with only brief and minor upturns. The first upturn was during the early years of the Depression, when urban unemployment made farming look more promising. The second was during World War II, when both the needs of American soldiers and foreign demand bolstered agricultural production nationwide. By 1974, there were only 40 percent as many farms in Lancaster County as there had been in 1925. (Farm population, though not shown on this table, declined in similar fashion, a trend made even more obvious by the overall growth in the county’s population.) Farms still covered, however, more than 75 percent of the land in till in 1925. The loss of farms was due as much to farm consolidation as to loss of farmland. The average size of Lancaster County farms grew during the same period, from 45 acres to 87 acres. The proportion of very large farms (by local, if not by national, standards) of more than 180 acres grew from barely 1 in 50 to nearly 1 in 10. After 1974, the agricultural boom led farmers to bring some 17,000 acres of land back into production. Economic downturn and development pressures reversed that trend in the 1980s; by 1992, there was less farmland in use in Lancaster County than ever before. The 1990s saw a minor upturn in both number of farms and their aggregate acreage. Farm consolidation, interestingly, seems to have all but stopped after 1974; since then, farmers wishing to grow their operations have increasingly turned to more intensive modes of production. Although there are several reasons why this shift occurred, I believe it is primarily due to the fact that the rising Amish population caught up to the declining number of “English” who wanted to farm. The Amish, who lack most of the equipment that allowed other farmers to expand their operations and still have large families among which to divide farms, have thus played a vital role not only in keeping Lancaster’s farmland in use but also in keeping typical farm sizes relatively small.

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table a1. Three ways of measuring rural and urban population in Lancaster County, 1950–1990 Location

Data

1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

County

population

234,717

278,359

320,079

362,346

422,822

City

population % of county

63,774 27.2

61,055 21.9

57,690 18.0

54,725 15.1

55,551 13.1

Urban fringe

population % of county

12,506 5.3

32,800 11.8

59,407 18.6

102,263 28.2

138,032 32.6

Urbanized area (city + fringe)

population % of county

76,280 32.5

93,855 33.7

117,097 36.6

156,988 43.3

193,583 45.8

Boroughs

population % of county

55,358 23.5

64,026 23.0

76,908 24.0

80,312 22.2

88,385 20.9

Townships

population % of county

115,585 49.2

153,278 55.1

185,481 57.9

227,309 62.7

278,886 66.0

Urban areas

population % of county

131,638 56.1

157,881 56.7

194,055 60.6

237,300 65.5

281,968 66.7

Rural areas

population % of county

103,079 43.9

120,478 43.3

126,074 39.4

125,046 34.5

140,854 33.3

Source: U.S. Census, decennial returns, 1950–1990.

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table a2. Farms, farm size, and total farmland in Lancaster County, 1900–1997

Year

Number of farms

Total acreage

% area of county

1900 1910 1920 1925 1930 1935 1940 1945 1950 1959 1964 1969 1974 1978 1982 1987 1992 1997

9,437 10,835 11,307 11,457 9,705 8,863 8,446 8,823 7,952 7,053 6,247 5,323 4,588 4,915 4,991 4,775 4,490 4,556

552,761 550,499 554,776 520,764 517,373 519,282 507,217 509,424 495,500 482,579 467,321 426,100 399,785 425,561 417,296 403,964 388,368 391,836

91.7 91.3 92.1 86.5 85.5 85.9 83.9 84.2 81.9 79.8 77.3 70.4 66.1 70.4 69.2 67.0 64.4 65.0

Mean % of farms % of farms acreage over 100 acres over 180 acres 58.6 50.8 49.1 45.5 53.3 58.6 60.1 57.7 62.3 68.4 74.8 80.0 87.1 86.6 83.6 84.6 86.5 86.0

20.0 16.6 14.5 13.1 16.0 18.1 18.9 19.1 19.1 22.0 25.2 27.7 29.9 28.5 26.7 26.2 26.5 24.7

*Farms over 175 acres. The U.S. Census Bureau changed its categories in 1935. Source: U.S. Census, decennial returns, 1900–1920; U.S. Census of Agriculture, 1925–1997.

2.4* 1.8* 1.8* 1.4* 2.0* 2.3 3.2 2.6 3.3 4.5 5.5 6.9 8.8 9.3 8.6 9.4 9.6 9.6

✸ NOTES

Abbreviations Frey Collection: William J. Frey Collection of Pennsylvania Germania (MS 39), Franklin and Marshall College Archives and Special Collections Library Intelligencer Journal: Lancaster (Pa.) Intelligencer Journal Lancaster Ephemera Collection: Lancaster County Ephemera Collection (MS 40), Franklin and Marshall College Archives and Special Collections Library LCPC: Lancaster County Planning Commission New Era: Lancaster New Era Sunday News: Lancaster (Pa.) Sunday News Tourist Brochures Collection: Tourist Brochures of Lancaster County Collection (MG-95), Lancaster County Historical Society

Introduction

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12 13

The epigraph is from Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 248. See Kenneth Wilkinson, The Community in Rural America (New York: Greenwood, 1991), and James H. Copp, ed., Our Changing Rural Society: Perspectives and Trends (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1964). Gary Comstock, ed., Is There a Moral Obligation to Save the Family Farm? (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1987), xxv. Because political liberals have largely taken over the term “progressive” in the twentieth century and because the term “progress” so automatically connotes positive change, the distinction I draw here between progressives and preservationists may be uncomfortable to some readers. The division does not, however, mirror more familiar political divisions. My use of these terms is similar to the ideas developed by T. J. Jackson Lears in No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981). Lears describes the “complacent faith in progress” that dominated American culture at the turn of the twentieth century and the wave of antimodernism that rose up, albeit somewhat ambivalently, against it.

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Agrarian reformers have also taken this creed of progress to task, such as the “Twelve Southerners” who wrote I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1930). John Crowe Ransom, in particular, wrote eloquently against what he called the “Gospel of Progress” in favor of a return to an agrarian society based on tradition.

Chapter 1

11 12 13

14

15

The epigraph to this chapter is from James Michener, Centennial (New York: Random House, 1974), 247. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 19–23, 76, 87. Ibid. The existence of a single poet Hesiod is somewhat in doubt, although not as much as that of Homer. Classicists doubt particularly that the poet was in fact a farmer, although I find Stephanie Nelson’s argument that Hesiod must have farmed quite convincing. See God and the Land: The Metaphysics of Farming in Hesiod and Vergil (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 37. In any case, the key point is that the poem is composed from the perspective of a farmer. Another perspective on Hesiod as farmer is given by Victor Hanson in The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization (New York: Free Press, 1995). Nelson, God and the Land, 36, 48, 63, 134, 153–54; quotation from Hesiod’s Works and Days, translated by David Grene, in God and the Land, 18 (line 354). My interpretation of Hesiod, and my use of it here, is not based entirely on Nelson’s argument but also on my own reading of The Works and Days. Broadly speaking, I would argue that Hesiod’s vision was agrarian—arguing (perhaps implicitly) for a way of life based on agriculture and endeavoring to improve that way of life through practical wisdom—rather than pastoral, as Vergil’s was. The pastoral is primarily a literary model, centering on the peaceful shepherd and his flock; agrarianism, of which Hesiod was a forefather, belongs more to the social, moral, and political realms. The pastoral is contemplative; the agrarian is active. The term pastoral, after all, derives from the same root as pasture and connotes calm grazing and a watchful but peaceful shepherd. Though he discussed grazing animals, Hesiod described the diverse work of a farmer, tilling the soil, cultivating, grafting fruit and nut trees: this is labor rather than mere caretaking. It is easy to see why Vergil’s vision would make the more popular literary motif; perhaps no culture entirely eschews escapism. Biblical descriptions of shepherds and farmers certainly play a role as well. Jesus was the Good Shepherd, tending peaceably his flock; God accepted the offering of peaceful Abel, the shepherd, but not that of his brother Cain, the laboring and potentially violent farmer. Peace and repose, however, make a poor basis for social theory, and the history of thought about the country can perhaps be seen as an ongoing struggle between the pastoral and agrarian strains of thought. A similar argument is made by Victor Davis Hanson in the preface to Fields without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Idea (New York: Free Press, 1996).“Hesiod’s poem of agriculture,” he writes, “is not merely a didactic treatise on agricultural technique,

NOTES TO PAGES 16–19

16 17 18

19

10

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nor, like Vergil’s, a paean to farming, but a case study in the agrarian profile, and hence an alternative paradigm of values of society itself ” (x). Nelson, God and the Land, 90. Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1–12. Marx, Machine in the Garden, 105. See also Peter N. Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier, 1629–1700 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1992); T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 8–15. Letter to John Jay, 23 August 1785, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd, vol. 8 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953), 426; letter to James Madison, 20 December 1787, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Boyd, vol. 12 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1955), 442. Jacob E. Cooke, Tench Coxe and the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 104–5. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 15–28, 37; Henry C. Carey, The Harmony of Interests, Agricultural, Manufacturing, and Commercial (1851; repr., New York: Kelley, 1967), 202, 209–11. When historians in the mid-twentieth century began to examine seriously the beliefs of Americans about rurality and progress, they argued almost unanimously that those twin ideals, though tenaciously held by previous generations of Americans, were hopelessly in conflict. Henry Nash Smith, whose 1950 book Virgin Land was the first serious effort to assemble American beliefs about rurality into a coherent whole, saw them as essentially static. Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Smith argued, saw the West as “the Garden of the World,” a vast region for American farmers to settle, cultivate, and develop. The West therefore provided a “safety valve” for American cities, a way of siphoning off excess labor and keeping wages high and society stable. The trouble, Smith saw, was that Americans believed in both the primacy of agriculture and the desirability of progress. Farmers should continue to farm, but they should also tame the wilderness and civilize it. The plow was, in America as it had been in England, a symbol both of tradition and of progress—ends, Smith argued, that were in constant contradiction in the West. The American belief in agriculture as a civilizing force led necessarily to surpluses, to the establishment of towns and cities, and ultimately to industrialization. Although nineteenth-century Americans clung tenaciously to the “myth of the garden,” it became less and less relevant to the reality of American life. Leo Marx, writing a decade later, refined Smith’s explanation of the conflict in American ideology between rurality and progress or, as he put it, between the machine and the garden. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans, Marx argued, wanted both the virtues of an agricultural society and the benefits of technological progress. Intellectuals saw the contradiction between the two ideals and thought they had found a way out. The garden—that is, the cultivated, civilized farm—was no

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16 17 18

NOTES TO PAGES 20–23

Edenic paradise but rather a middle ground between the wilderness and the metropolis. Uncultivated wilderness was dangerous, morally as well as physically; it sapped the desire to work and eroded the virtues necessary to civil and civilized life. The industrialized city, however, was too civilized; it created divisions between lazy rich and uncultured poor, and its factories smothered the human elements of civilization. America, as a middle ground between two equally dangerous extremes, represented the ideal of a well-balanced and virtuous society. But this idea of the garden, Marx explained, only avoided the contradictions between rurality and progress. Because America began—to the European mind, at least—as an uncultivated wilderness and because new western territory was always waiting to be cultivated, turning America into this ideal middle ground required progress. But if technological progress turned prairies into farms, it also turned New England villages into industrial cities. As the wilderness eroded and cities industrialized, the middle ground shifted further and further toward the extreme of industrial, urban civilization. A third historian of the same era, Richard Hofstadter, noted what I argue here: that the agrarian myth was, in the early part of the nineteenth century, “a depiction of reality as well as the assertion of an ideal.” America, at least outside the Deep South, was then a nation of small farmers and a nation that was growing, expanding, and moving forward technologically. The contradiction lay in the future. See Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Myth and Symbol (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950), and Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York: Knopf, 1955), 19, 24, 30. Although Hofstadter believed that the contradiction was eventually unavoidable, I (as will become clear) do not necessarily agree. Like Raymond Williams, I am inclined to draw a distinction between the idea of the city and the idea of industry (Williams argues that the confusion between them began in the nineteenth century; see The Country and the City [New York: Oxford University Press, 1973], 153); and I believe that historians underestimate the potential, in the early nineteenth century, for the United States to develop into a society like the one Henry Carey envisioned. The 1779 quotation is from a letter from John Abraham DeNormandie of New York to Joseph Galloway in London, 29 March 1779, quoted in Lottie M. Bausman, “The Garden of Pennsylvania,” Papers of the Lancaster County Historical Society 19, no. 9 (1915): 311–14. H. M. J. Klein, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania: A History, vol. 2 (New York: Lewis Historical, 1924), 354–475; William T. Parsons, The Pennsylvania Dutch: A Persistent Minority (Boston: Twayne, 1976), 39. Klein, Lancaster County, vol. 2, 82–128. James T. Lemon, The Best Poor Man’s Country: A Geographical Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1972), xiii. Ibid.; American Husbandry, vol. 1 (London: n.p., 1775), 168–69; Leo A. Bressler, “Agriculture among the Germans in Pennsylvania during the Eighteenth Century,” Pennsylvania History 22 (1955): 103–4, 106–9; Leonard W. Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959-), 4:120, 479–86; 5:158–60; Benjamin Rush, “An Account of the Manners of the German Inhabitants of Pennsylvania,” in Proceedings of the Pennsylvania German Society, vol. 19 (Lancaster: Pennsylvania German Society, 1910), 52.

NOTES TO PAGES 23–34

19

227

The sources on Pennsylvania German barns are numerous, to say the least, but see Bressler, “Agriculture among the Germans”; Joseph W. Glass, The Pennsylvania Culture Region: A View from the Barn (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research, 1986); and Robert F. Ensminger, The Pennsylvania Barn: Its Origin, Evolution, and Distribution in North America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 20 Frederick K. Miller, “The Farmer at Work in Colonial Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania History 3 (April 1936): 115–23; Aaron Spencer Fogelman, Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717–1775 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 67–99. 21 Daniel B. Good,“The Localization of Tobacco Production in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania History 49 (July 1982): 193; S. W. Fletcher, “The Subsistence Farming Period in Pennsylvania Agriculture, 1640–1840,” Pennsylvania History 14 (July 1947): 194–95; Isaac M. Groff, History of the Lancaster Stock Yards, 1895–1970 (n.p., n.d.), 4, 12. 22 Good, “The Localization of Tobacco Production,” 190–97. 23 Steven M. Nolt, A History of the Amish (Intercourse, Pa.: Good Books, 1992), 7–11; Donald B. Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 3–4. 24 Nolt, History of the Amish, 11–12; Kraybill, Riddle of Amish Culture, 4–5. 25 Kraybill, Riddle of Amish Culture, 5. St. Paul’s commandment is in Romans 12:2: “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” 26 Kraybill, Riddle of Amish Culture, 6–7; Nolt, History of the Amish, 23–41. 27 Kraybill, Riddle of Amish Culture, 7–8, 10. 28 John A. Hostetler, Amish Society, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), 70–77; Kraybill, Riddle of Amish Culture, 11–12. 29 See Hostetler, Amish Society, 58–62. 30 Kraybill, Riddle of Amish Culture, 111–18; Hostetler, Amish Society, 62–65. 31 Ibid. 32 Sandra L. Cronk,“Gelassenheit: The Rites of Redemptive Process in Old Order Amish and Old Order Mennonite Communities,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 55 (January 1981): 5–9. 33 Kraybill, Riddle of Amish Culture, 24–45. 34 Hostetler, Amish Society, 266. The Beachy Amish in Lancaster are more commonly called Weavertown Amish. 35 Scott Stephen, Why Do They Dress That Way? (Intercourse, Pa.: Good Books, 1986). Stephen’s book is intended for tourists, but tourist literature is generally most thorough and accurate on the subject of clothing. On beards and hair, the verses referred to are Leviticus 19:27 and I Corinthians 11:5–6, 13–15. The apparent contradiction of allowing bright colors but not patterns in clothing confuses many people; this is simply another example of having to draw the line somewhere, and it suggests that just because one is committed to simplicity does not mean that one cannot enjoy life! 36 Hostetler, Amish Society, 66–67. 37 Mary Neth, Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 39–41, 54, 158, 187–88. Similar conclusions are reached by Hal S. Barron and

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Marilyn Irvin Holt in their studies of northern and midwestern farming communities. Barron, like Neth, sees the family farm in the nineteenth-century North as both a successful economic activity and a means of family and social organization. When economic and technological changes loomed at the turn of the twentieth century (the “second great transformation” of the countryside, the first having been original settlement by whites), rural people adopted them selectively, attempting to work them into existing social and economic structures. This was especially true of ruralites’ attitudes toward consumer culture. Holt’s study of the domestic economy movement suggests that farm women greeted “expert” advice on homemaking with similar ambivalence. All three historians agree that practices such as “neighboring” had importance to rural communities far beyond their function as a safety net in hard times. See Barron, Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), and Holt, Linoleum, Better Babies, and the Modern Farm Woman, 1890–1930 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995). 38 Solanco Heritage: History of Southern Lancaster County, 1729–1991 (Devon, Pa.: Solanco Heritage Project, 1990), 38; H. Winslow Fegley, Farming, Always Farming (Birdsboro, Pa.: Pennsylvania German Society, 1987), 163 (text by Alan G. Keyser and Frederick S. Weiser). A comparative view of neighborliness is presented by Victor Hanson in The Other Greeks. Hanson’s study of Greek farmers during the Golden Age of Athens suggests similarities between their outlook and that of nineteenth-century American farmers. In the ancient world as in the modern, he argues,“‘Neighborliness’ . . . to the small farmer has no air of collectivization where all share land ownership and labor for a common harvest. . . . In the real agrarian world, neighborliness refers to grudging respect and polite distance” (138–39). 39 See Dona Brown, Inventing New England (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 153–67; David Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). 40 Brown, Inventing New England, 8. On other New Englanders’ strategies of survival and adaptation in the late nineteenth century, see Hal S. Barron, Those Who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth-Century New England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 41 Neth, Preserving the Family Farm, 147–83.

Chapter 2 11 12 13 14 15

Percy Jewett Burrell, Pageant of Gratitude: For Two Hundred Years of Blessing upon Lancaster County (Lancaster: Intelligencer Printing Company, 1929), 15, 17. Ibid., 10, 68–72. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 68. Don S. Kirschner, City and Country: Rural Responses to Urbanization in the 1920s (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1970), 57–62. On the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, see Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

NOTES TO PAGES 40–41

16

17

18 19 10

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Dan Drucker,“History of Lancaster’s Central Market,” Susquehanna 8, no. 11 (November 1983): 23; Solanco Heritage: History of Southern Lancaster County, 1729–1991 (Devon, Pa.: Solanco Heritage Project, 1990). Kirschner, City and Country, 74, 247–56; Carol M. Reynolds and Jane M. Ausel, “Civic Organizations and Social Groups,” in Solanco Heritage, 190; Mary Neth, Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 213, 244–45. On farm families’ efforts to fit new technologies and techniques into established cultural patterns, see Hal S. Barron, Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), and Marilyn Irvin Holt, Linoleum, Better Babies, and the Modern Farm Woman, 1890–1930 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995). “Rather than embrace the more modern or sophisticated lifestyles being promoted by the land-grant universities and Madison Avenue,” Barron writes, “country people picked among the new products in ways that were consistent with their own values and priorities.” But the balancing act was not, in the long run, successful. “Rural encounters with consumer culture in the 1920s simultaneously helped to unify and homogenize northern agrarian society while adding to its more general ambivalence about modern life” (see 240–41). Peter J. Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), xvi-xvii, 3, 17. Donald G. Harper, My Farm of Edgewood, 2d ed. (New York: Scribner’s, 1894), 258, 256. Schmitt, Back to Nature, 75. On antimodernism, see T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981). William L. Bowers, The Country Life Movement in America, 1900–1920 (Port Washington, N.Y.: National University Publications, 1974), 3–4; Neth, Preserving the Family Farm, 5, 97, 111. The Country Life Movement was distinguished from back-to-the-land movements and Arcadian fantasies by its apparent hardheadedness and its rejection of the notion that country life was necessarily preferable to city life. At the same time, reformers almost universally claimed to have the good of the country at heart; but their condescension showed through in the assumption that ruralites needed help— and, specifically, their help. As Liberty Hyde Bailey, a leading proponent of the Country Life Movement, wrote in 1911, “The past century belonged to the city; the present century should belong also to agriculture and the open country.” Reformers like Bailey wanted to “effectualize” rural society, “to stimulate new activity in a more or less stationary phase of civilization.” Industrialization was, in this view, inevitable, and farmers’ problems stemmed not from industrialization itself but from their refusal to accept it. Their beliefs were similar to those of A. Whitney Griswold, who wrote in 1948 that the “industrial revolution enabled a smaller farm population to produce more and better food for a larger total population, releasing workers from agriculture for relatively more productive employment in industry. Many moved with the trend; too many resisted it.” See Bailey, The Country-Life Movement in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 2–4; Griswold, Farming and Democracy (Harcourt, Brace, 1948), 8. On reformers’ assumptions about rural society, see also Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1998),

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343–45. Progressives, Rodgers argues, saw the European countryside, with its hamlets and villages, as preferable to the more scattered American pattern of settlement. “The spatial design of the European countryside spoke to the eye of bonds and obligations. The American pattern spoke the visual language of individualism . . . each farmer the ruler of his private domain.” But, of course, “the eye exaggerated”; this view ignored the social bonds that existed between seemingly isolated American farmsteads (343). 12 David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 231–35 (quotation from 232–33). 13 Sunday News, 26 May 1929, 2; Journal of the Lancaster County Historical Society 38 (1936): 93; 50 (1948): vii; 53 (1951): 162; 65 (1963): 63, 212; 66 (1964): 208. 14 Kemp, quoted in H. M. J. Klein, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania: A History, vol. 2 (New York: Lewis Historical, 1924), 658–59. 15 Quoted in H. Winslow Fegley, Farming, Always Farming (Birdsboro, Pa.: Pennsylvania German Society, 1987), 152. 16 Homer Tope Rosenberger, The Pennsylvania Germans, 1891–1965 (Lancaster: Pennsylvania German Society, 1966), 54, 70–72; Phoebe Earle Gibbons, “Pennsylvania Dutch” and Other Essays, 3d ed. (1872; repr., Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1882), 34, 49. 17 Pennsylvania Dutchman, 1, no. 1 (January 1873): 1–4, and 1, no. 3 (March 1873): 75–78, 95; Rosenberger, Pennsylvania Germans, 62–68. 18 Proceedings of the Pennsylvania German Society 1 (1891): v-vi, 10, 16; Rosenberger, Pennsylvania Germans, 73–90. 19 David M. Dumeyer, “Anti-German Sentiment in Lancaster County, 1915–1919” (M.A. thesis, Millersville University, 1981); Rosenberger, Pennsylvania Germans, 146–50. 20 Steven M. Nolt, A History of the Amish (Intercourse, Pa.: Good Books, 1992), 225–28. 21 Quoted in Rosenberger, Pennsylvania Germans, 153–56. 22 Helen Reimensnyder Martin, Tillie, a Mennonite Maid: A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch (New York: Century, 1904), 336; Martin, Sabina: A Story of the Amish (New York: Century, 1905), 8, 231. See also David Zercher,“Homespun American Saints: The Discovery and Domestication of the Old Order Amish” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1997), 34, 63. Zercher argues that Pennsylvania Germans, in an effort to enhance their own cultural position vis-à-vis Anglo-American society, pursued “a two-pronged strategy that both defended the Amish as members of the Pennsylvania German family and deprecated the Amish as departures from the more assimilated Pennsylvania German mainstream.” He does not, however, draw a distinction between Pennsylvania Germans who pursued the first “prong” and those who preferred the second. On Martin’s personal views—she was a self-proclaimed feminist, socialist, and atheist, shocking views indeed in turn-of-the-century Lancaster—see John Ward Wilson Loose, “Meet a Dozen of Lancaster’s Most Distinguished Daughters,” Journal of the Lancaster County Historical Society 102, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 48–50. 23 W. U. Hensel, “The Picturesque Pennsylvania Germans,” remarks before the Pennsylvania Historical Society, quoted in the New Era, 9 April 1910. 24 Bart Ferree, William Uhler Hensel: An Appreciation by Bart Ferree, Director of the Pennsylvania Society Prepared for the Annual Meeting, April 20, 1915 (New York: Pennsylvania Society, 1915).

NOTES TO PAGES 49–53

25 26

27

28

29 30 31

32

33

34 35 36 37

38

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New Era, 10 November 1937, 12. Wayne E. Fuller, The Old Country School: The Story of Rural Education in the Middle West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 35–44; Barron, Mixed Harvest, 45–71. On education reform in Pennsylvania specifically, see 100 Years of Free Public Schools in Pennsylvania, 1834–1934 (Harrisburg: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of Public Instruction, 1934), and Paul K. Adams, “Lancaster’s Educational Reformer: James P. Wickersham, the Early Years,” Journal of the Lancaster County Historical Society 97, no. 4 (1995): 152–69. See Fuller, Old Country School, 106–13, 163 (quotation on 113); Holt, Linoleum, Better Babies, and the Modern Farm Woman, 168; and Barron, Mixed Harvest, 69–70. On the differences between common and graded schools and the attitudes of reformers, see James Leloudis, Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). By the early twentieth century, Leloudis argues, “Schooling had taken on a decidedly modern purpose. It represented not so much an initiation into the local ways of family, community, and neighborhood as a port of entry into the much larger world beyond” (176). Fuller, Old Country School, 231–37, 239; Barron, Mixed Harvest, 45; Julius Bernhard Arp, Rural Education and the Consolidated School (Yonkers-on-Hudson, N.Y.: World Book, 1926), vii, 21. New York Times, 10 October 1937, IV, 9. New York Times, 26 March 1937, 11, and 10 October 1937, IV, 9. Intelligencer Journal, 26 March 1937, 30, and 30 October 1937, 7; New Era, 29 October 1937. On the Amish philosophy of educating their children, see Gertrude Enders Huntingdon, “Persistence and Change in Amish Education,” in The Amish Struggle with Modernity, ed. Donald B. Kraybill and Marc Olshan (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994), 78. New York Times, 10 October 1937, IV, 9, and 26 March 1937, 11; Intelligencer Journal, 30 September 1937, 13. One Lancaster Countian who grew up in the Smoketown area and recalls the aftermath of this battle has told me, confidentially, that a few non-Amish neighbors pushed the Amish to take their fight into the courts. Thomas J. Meyers, “Education and Schooling,” in The Amish and the State, ed. Donald B. Kraybill (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 90; petition “To Our Men of Authority,” November 1938, photocopied manuscript in the Aaron Belier Papers, Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society. New York Times, 2 October 1937, 23, and 4 October 1937, 14; Intelligencer Journal, 30 September 1937, 13; New Era, 30 September 1937, 1. New York Times, 10 October 1937, IV, 9; Intelligencer Journal, 5 October 1937, 1. New York Times, 30 October 1937, 21. Intelligencer Journal, 10 November 1937, 1, 9; New Era, 10 November 1937, 1, 12. Exact details of the meeting are difficult to determine, since the two newspapers provided thoroughly different versions of its events. (The differences in interpretation will be discussed later.) The vote, for example, was reported in one newspaper as 215 to 10. Ironically, the desire of most Amish residents to avoid a confrontation seems to have allowed Landberg to rile up the crowd unopposed. Time, 29 November 1937, 37.

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42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58

59 60 61 62

NOTES TO PAGES 54–61

New York Times, 30 November 1937, 10; 28 June 1938, 22; 3 March 1938, 5; 2 December 1937, 2; 28 June 1938, 22; 29 January 1938, 13; and 20 November 1938, 3. New York Times, 21 September 1938, 26, and 29 November 1938, 25; Meyers,“Education and Schooling,” 90. Petition “To Our Men of Authority,” November 1938; draft of a petition, September 1937; and letter to Gov. Arthur H. James, 7 April 1939 (unsigned), photocopied manuscripts in the Aaron Belier Papers, Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society. New Era, 4 October 1937, 6. New Era, 29 September 1937, 1, 21. New Era, 30 November 1938, 8, and 10 November 1937, 1, 12. Intelligencer Journal, 29 November 1938, 6. Photocopied excerpt from the Ephrata Review (undated) in the Aaron Belier Papers, Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society. “Minimum Standards for the First Eight Grades in the Amish Parochial and Private Schools,” approved 10 August 1956 by the Wayne-Holmes-Tuscarawas Counties Amish Committee on Education, photocopied manuscript in the Aaron Belier Papers, Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society. It is interesting to note that cuttingedge educational reforms today include efforts to bring community into the classroom, an idea featured prominently in these standards. Ibid. New York Times, 7 November 1937, XII, 9. New York Times, 15 August 1937, II, 2, and 7 November 1937, XII, 9. New York Times, 29 November 1938, 25. New York Times, 4 December 1938, IV, 2. New York Times, 30 November 1938, 22. Ibid. Fuller, Old Country School, 60; Fred E. H. Schroeder, “The Little Red Schoolhouse,” in Icons of America, ed. Ray B. Browne and Marshall Fishwick (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1978), 139–60. Or, as Barron puts it, “the ‘little red schoolhouse’ was a bulwark of personalism in an increasingly faceless society.” Barron, Mixed Harvest, 71. H. W. Kreibel, Seeing Lancaster County from a Trolley Window (Lancaster: Conestoga Traction, 1910), 2. Ibid., 9. W. U. Hensel, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the Garden Spot of the United States, the Picturesque and Historical East End (Lancaster: Conestoga Traction, 1908), 1, 15. A similar focus can be found in Hensel’s “Tour through the Northeast Section of Lancaster County,” Proceedings of the Lancaster County Historical Society 8 (1904): 256–66. Hotel Brunswick brochure (1928), in the Tourist Brochures Collection. “A Short Tour through America’s Garden Spot” (Lancaster: Lancaster Chamber of Commerce, n.d.), in the Tourist Brochures Collection. Nolt, History of the Amish, 215–16; Lancaster County Postcards: Windows to Our Past (Lancaster: Lancaster Postcard Club, 1998). On Amish activity off the farm, see Aaron S. Glick, The Fortunate Years: An Amish Life (Intercourse, Pa.: Good Books, 1994).

NOTES TO PAGES 61–69

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63

The Amish adopted technology selectively and with occasional compromises; see my discussions in chapters 1 and 4 as well as Donald B. Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 165–67. 64 Raymond Tufft Fuller, “Domain of Abundance,” Travel 66 (November 1935): 14–17, 50. 65 Ibid. 66 David Luthy, “The Origin and Growth of Amish Tourism,” in The Amish Struggle with Modernity, ed. Kraybill and Olshan, 115. 67 This ignores, of course, the plight of farmers in the “Dust Bowl” of the Midwest. But Lancaster County farmers, like most farmers on the eastern seaboard, faced no such troubles in the 1930s; their problems stemmed only from the economic effects of the Depression itself. On the popularity of the Civilian Conservation Corps, see John A. Salmond, The Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933–1942: A New Deal Case Study (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1967), v, 102–20. On Roosevelt’s “back to the land” philosophy and how it influenced his policies, see also Paul K. Conklin, The New Deal (New York: Crowell, 1967), and Tim Lehman, Public Values, Private Lands: Farmland Preservation Policy, 1933–1985 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 68 Bernice Steinfeldt, The Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (Lancaster: Steinfeldt, 1937), quotation from 8. 69 Ibid., 9, 18, 10, 20, 26, 18–19, and 11. 70 Ibid., inside back cover. 71 Ibid., 3, 21, 26. 72 Ammon Monroe Aumand, Jr., Little Known Facts about the Amish and the Mennonites (Harrisburg, Pa.: Aurand, 1938), 11. 73 Ibid., 7. 74 Ibid., 30. 75 Ibid., 27, 30, 12, and 30.

Chapter 3 11 12 13

14

Flora Rheta Schreiber, “The World of the Unworldly,” American Mercury 74, no. 342 (June 1952): 55. Alfred L. Shoemaker, ed., 1958 Tourist Guide through the Dutch Country (Bethel: Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center, 1958). This particular bit of Pennsylvania German culture has since become so widespread that it probably requires no explanation. The tradition, for those unfamiliar with it, says that the groundhog will emerge from hibernation on the second day of February (Candlemas Day). If he sees his shadow, he will return to his burrow for six more weeks of winter; if he does not see his shadow, he remains above ground, and spring will arrive. Groundhog Day is still celebrated by a few lodges in Pennsylvania, including one in Lancaster County and another in the central part of the state that attracts national media attention each year. Detailed descriptions of some early Versammlinge can be found in Homer Tope Rosenberger, The Pennsylvania Germans, 1891–1965 (Lancaster: Pennsylvania German Society, 1966), 194–99.

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NOTES TO PAGES 70–75

The photographs are published in H. Winslow Fegley, Farming, Always Farming (Birdsboro, Pa.: Pennsylvania German Society, 1987), text by Scott T. Swank. The quotation is from 25, and the photograph of the movers appears on 167. Cornelius Weygandt, The Red Hills: A Record of Good Days Outdoors and In, with Things Pennsylvania Dutch (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1929), 8–9. Cornelius Weygandt, The Dutch Country: Folks and Treasures in the Red Hills of Pennsylvania (New York: Appleton-Century, 1939), 4–5. It is interesting to note that this book was published by the same company that had once published Helen Reimensnyder Martin’s mockeries of the Pennsylvania Dutch. Ann Hark, Hex Marks the Spot: In the Pennsylvania Dutch Country (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1938), 216. Ibid., 301. Loren C. Owings, Quest for Walden: A Study of the “Country Book” in American Popular Literature, with an Annotated Bibliography, 1863–1995 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1997), quotations from 13 and 49; Helen Nearing and Scott Nearing, The Maple Sugar Book (1950; repr., New York: Schocken, 1970) and Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World (1950; repr., New York: Schocken, 1954); Ralph Borsodi, Flight from the City: An Experiment in Creative Living on the Land (1933; repr., New York: Harper and Row, 1972) and This Ugly Civilization (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929). For a broad overview of such books, see David E. Shi, The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Proceedings of the Pennsylvania German Folklore Society 1 (1936): 5, 15. Simon J. Bronner, American Folklore Studies: An Intellectual History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986), xi, 98; Warren Susman, ed., Culture and Commitment, 1929–1945 (New York: Braziller, 1973), 20–23; Robert Cantwell, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 29–35, 63. On Colonial Williamsburg, see Andrea Kim Foster,“They’re Turning the Town All Upside Down: The Community Identity of Williamsburg, Virginia, before and after the Reconstruction” (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 1993). Foster argues that residents of Williamsburg rarely considered their town’s role in the Revolution before the reconstruction project began; their primary historical marker was instead the Civil War. “Folk-Lore Is Preserved in a Festival: Pennsylvania Takes Steps to Revive Arts of an Earlier Day,” Literary Digest 122, no. 5 (August 1936): 21–22; Rosenberger, Pennsylvania Germans, 298–99. Flyer in the Lancaster Ephemera Collection. Program from Pennsylvania Dutch Day at Hershey Park, 24–26 August 1950 (n.p., n.d.). Pennsylvania Dutchman, 1, no. 1 (5 May 1949): 4. Ibid., 3–4; interview with Don Yoder, 10 June 1999. Yoder makes a distinction between folklore and folklife, arguing that while the former is merely oral culture, the latter includes the broad sweep of traditional culture, including workways and foodways. The Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Society was really about folklife rather than folklore (hence the eventual change of name to the Pennsylvania Folklife Society) and helped

NOTES TO PAGES 75–80

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lead the shift in emphasis among folklorists. See Yoder, “Folklife Studies in American Scholarship,” in American Folklife, ed. Yoder (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976), 3–18. 18 Pennsylvania Dutchman, 1, no. 1 (5 May 1949): 1. 19 In Pennsylvania Dutch, “potpie” (botboi) is a dish of meat, vegetables, and dumplings that resemble broad, flat noodles. The dumplings are made from a dough much like pie pastry, so the dish is like pie cooked in a pot—hence, potpie and potpie dumplings. The disk resembles southern American chicken and dumplings or “chicken and pastry.” 20 Pennsylvania Dutchman, 3, no. 22 (15 April 1952): 8. 21 Pennsylvania Dutchman, 6, no. 4 (Spring 1955): 35–36, and 6, no. 1 (June 1954): 8–9. 22 Interview with Don Yoder, 10 June 1999. 23 Alfred L. Shoemaker, My Off Is All! (Lancaster: Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center, 1953), 9, Hex, No! (Lancaster: Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center, 1953), 1958 Tourist Guide through the Pennsylvania Dutch Country, 9, The Pennsylvania Dutch Country (Lancaster: Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center, 1954), 21. 24 Shoemaker, Pennsylvania Dutch Country, 5. 25 Shoemaker, My Off Is All!, 9. 26 Interview with Don Yoder, 10 June 1999. 27 Transcript of undated radio interview (probably late June 1950) in the Frey Collection. Courtesy of Special Collections, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pa. The banter among the professors is too slick not to have been rehearsed; they clearly had done several similar promotions and had taken some care in arranging them. 28 New Era, 6 July 1950. 29 New Era, 30 June 1950; interview with Don Yoder, 10 June 1999. 30 Program from the 1955 Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Festival, in the Frey Collection; Rosenberger, Pennsylvania Germans, 299–300. 31 Programs from the 1955 and 1959 Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Festivals, in the Frey Collection. 32 Pennsylvania Dutchman, 1, no. 1 (5 May 1949): 3. 33 Washington Sunday Star, 5 June 1960; Kathleen Walker,“How to Build a Tourist Industry,” Américas 8, no. 1 (January 1956): 20; Rosenberger, Pennsylvania Germans, 302–3. Understanding the reactions of local Pennsylvania Germans to the early Folk Festivals is difficult because of the changing nature of the festival. The men and women who demonstrated traditional crafts tended to be already advanced in years at the time, and few if any still survive, but certainly if they had not relished the opportunity to display their crafts, they would not have done so. For those who merely attended, memories of later festivals from the 1960s and 1970s, when education had been subsumed almost entirely by the fun of the fair, have created a generally unfavorable opinion of the festival. The tension between education and entertainment in Lancaster’s tourist industry produced discussions that likely mirrored discussions of the changing Folk Festival; see chapter 5 for more on this subject. David Whisnant provides an interesting parallel to the Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Festival’s struggle between authenticity and popularity in his description of the White Top Folk Festival, at which Appalachian folk music was packaged in “carefully shaped images of rusticity” to appeal to “the nostalgic longings of a public caught in the midst

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of the rapid social transformations of the late 1920s.” At the same time, he writes, academics tried to combat these erroneous popular images and combine authenticity with popularity. The result was “not . . . the presentation of a preexisting reality but . . . a manipulation of it—indeed at some levels the creation of a ‘reality’ tautologically certified as authentic by the self-assured promoters who presented it.” Whisnant also notes that although the festival would restore musicians’ “cultural self-confidence,” the festival often had the opposite effect, of making them “painfully aware of the gap between themselves and urban/modernity.” See Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 185, 206–7, 232, 247. 34 Pennsylvania-Dutch Guide Book (Lancaster: Pennsylvania Dutch Tourist Bureau, 1959), 31, 93; Yonnie Invites You to Pennsylvania Dutch Week Ends at the Hotel Brunswick (brochure, 1951), in the Lancaster Ephemera Collection; Rosenberger, Pennsylvania Germans, 270–72. 35 Hotel Brunswick brochure, 1928, in the Tourist Brochures Collection. 36 Steven M. Nolt, A History of the Amish (Intercourse, Pa.: Good Books, 1992), 278; Grace T. Steinmetz, “All about the Amish,” Family Circle, July 1950, 25. 37 Ira Stoner Franck, A Jaunt into the Dutch Country, Part I: Accent on the Amish (n.p., 1952), 13, 12, 19, 23, 3–4, 27. This pamphlet was essentially a transcription of the tours he offered through the Hotel Brunswick. 38 Sunday News, 22 August 1954, 17. 39 200th Anniversary, 1754–1954, Intercourse, Pennsylvania: Historical Souvenir Book and Tourist Guide (Intercourse, Pa.: Intercourse Civic Association, 1954); Sunday News, 29 August 1954, 1, 29; Intelligencer Journal, 28 August 1954, 20; Intelligencer Journal, 27 August 1954, 42; New Era, 30 August 1954, 3; Donald B. Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 228. 40 Joseph Stein and Will Glickman, with lyrics by Arnold B. Horwitt and music by Albert Hague, Plain and Fancy (New York: Chappell, 1955). 41 “The Amish and Music,” New York Times, 23 January 1955, II, 1, 3. 42 Plain and Fancy, 12, 74, 5. 43 Plain and Fancy, 12, 80, 20–21. 44 New Era, 28 January 1955, 3; New York Times, 28 January 1955, 14; Charles Burkhart, “The Amish Theme in Recent Theatricals,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 31 (April 1957): 140–42. 45 New York Times, 23 January 1955, 3. 46 Nolt, History of the Amish, 279; brochure from the Amish Farm and House, 1959, in the Tourist Brochures Collection; New Era, 11 July 1955. 47 New Era, 11 July 1955; brochure from the Amish Farm and House, 1959, in the Tourist Brochures Collection. See also Mindy Brandt and Thomas E. Gallagher,“Tourism and the Old Order Amish,” Pennsylvania Folklife 43, no. 2 (1993–1994), 71–75. Brandt and Gallagher describe a tour of the Amish Farm and House in the early 1990s (the attraction they describe is not named, but its identity is clear from their description) and write that the portrayal of Amish life offered by tour guides has changed little in forty years; the emphasis is on the Amish as unchanging. Although guides seem to be aware of recent changes in Amish life, they argue, the tours are designed to tell tourists what they want to hear. See also my discussion of authenticity later in this chapter.

NOTES TO PAGES 86–93

48

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Shoemaker, ed., 1958 Tourist Guide through the Dutch Country; brochure, Come to Amish Dutchland in Picturesque Lancaster County, PA (1962), brochure in the Tourist Brochures Collection; brochure from Dutch Wonderland, n.d., in the Tourist Brochures Collection; 4 Mapped Tours of Amishland and Lancaster City & County (Lancaster: PhotoArts Press, 1959). 49 Brochure of the Visitors and Convention Bureau [late 1950s], in the Tourist Brochures Collection; Shoemaker, ed., 1958 Tourist Guide through the Dutch Country. 50 Brochure from the Plain & Fancy Farm and Dining Room, n.d., in the Tourist Brochures Collection. 51 David Luthy, “The Origin and Growth of Amish Tourism,” in The Amish Struggle with Modernity, ed. Donald B. Kraybill and Marc Olshan (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994), 120. 52 Menu from the Hotel Brunswick, 1954, in the Frey Collection. 53 On bundling among the Amish, see John A. Hostetler, Amish Society, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), 150. Hostetler notes that although premarital sex is condemned by the Amish moral code, it is considered no worse than other faults; if the sin is confessed and marriage legitimizes the birth, it is forgiven and forgotten. For a typical portrayal of bundling in tourist booklets, see Ammon Monroe Aumand, Jr., Little Known Facts about the Amish and the Mennonites (Harrisburg, Pa.: Aurand, 1938). 54 See, for example, Vincent Tortora, The Amish Folk of the Pennsylvania Dutch Country (Bethel: Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center, 1958), 19–24, or Bernice Steinfeldt, The Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (Lancaster: Steinfeldt, 1937), 13–15. On reactions to premarital sex, see James Gilbert, Another Chance: Postwar America, 1945–1968 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 67–68. 55 Carolyn Keene, The Witch Tree Symbol (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1955). 56 Scott Francis Brenner, Pennsylvania Dutch: The Plain and the Fancy (Harrisburg, Pa.: Stackpole, 1957), 59. 57 John A. Hostetler, Amish Life (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald, 1952), quotation on 1; Hostetler, Amish Society, 50; Luthy, “The Origin and Growth of Amish Tourism.” 58 Brochure from the Amish Farm and House in the Tourist Brochures Collection. 59 See, for example, Tortora, Amish Folk. 60 Hostetler, Amish Life, 10–11. 61 Brenner, Pennsylvania Dutch, 2. 62 Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine. 63 Plain and Fancy, 12. 64 On reactions to juvenile delinquency, see James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 65 This argument is inspired by Dean MacCannell’s understanding of tourism as successively “Staged Authenticity.” Tourist settings, MacCannell argues, “are often not merely copies or replicas of real-life situations, but copies that are presented as disclosing more about the real thing than the real thing itself discloses. Of course this cannot be the case.” MacCannell also argues, and I agree to a great extent, that tourists

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are often more serious than operators and promoters believe and that they are prevented by the nature of tourist settings from making serious inquiries about other cultures. This opposes the work of earlier intellectuals such as Daniel Boorstin, who saw tourism and tourists as purely superficial. However, while MacCannell’s typology of six stages of tourist experience is useful in understanding Amish tourism up to the 1950s, it does not explain certain later manifestations of it (chapters 4 and 5). See MacCannell, “Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings,” American Journal of Sociology 79, no. 3 (1973): 589–603. Another model that partially explains the variations of Amish tourism is Erik Cohen’s “Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences.” Cohen argues that there is no single model of “The Tourist,” but rather different kinds of people who desire different kinds of tourist experiences. Amish tourism in the 1950s partially fits what Cohen calls the “Recreational Mode,” in which the tourist’s experiences are interesting but not “personally significant”; Cohen separates out “experimental” and “experiential” tourism in which the tourist attempts to adopt attributes of the other culture. See Cohen, “A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences,” Sociology 13 (May 1979): 179–201. In the case of the Amish, however, even tourists (the overwhelming majority) who did not “go Amish” nevertheless were drawn in part by religious curiosity that gives their trip overtones of a pilgrimage. 66 Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine, 48–51, 81; Leah Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 77–124. 67 Shoemaker, ed., 1958 Tourist Guide through the Dutch Country, 9. 68 Advertisement for Zinn’s Modern Diner in Shoemaker, ed., 1958 Tourist Guide through the Dutch Country, 86; advertisement for Baum’s Bologna in the Pennsylvania Dutch Guide-Book (Lancaster: Pennsylvania Dutch Tourist Bureau, 1959), 64; on Amish dolls, see Nolt, History of the Amish, 215–16. 69 Kiehl Newswanger and Christian Newswanger, Amishland (New York: Hastings House, 1954), 9 and 65. A gift shop in Intercourse still specializes in prints of Newswanger drawings of the Amish. 70 Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading National Geographic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 117, 277–79; Richard Gehman, “Plainest of Pennsylvania’s Plain People: Amish Folk,” National Geographic 74, no. 2 (August 1965): 227, 242, 246. 71 The noble savage was defined in this way most influentially by Hoxie Neale Fairchild in The Noble Savage: A Study in Romantic Naturalism (1928; repr., New York: Russell and Russell, 1961); see 2, 10, 15–17. The popular version of the Amish also resembles portrayals of Irish peasants in turn-of-the-century Irish literature. Rejecting the stereotype of an ignorant, lazy peasantry, Irish nationalists held them up as “unmaterialistic, naturally wise, and spiritual,” in sum “the embodiment of virtue,” a symbol of the Irish people, arriving at their virtue naturally rather than through the adoption of (English) civilization. W. B. Yeats relied on this image of a timeless, virtuous peasantry in his poetry, praising their versatility, ability to work, simplicity, and devotion to family and community. See Deborah Fleming, “A Man Who Does Not Exist”: The Irish Peasant in the Work of W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 54.

NOTES TO PAGES 98–108

72

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Keene, Witch Tree Symbol, 156. On Colonial Williamsburg, see Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997).

Chapter 4

11 12

13 14

15

16

17

18 19

10 11 12 13

14

The epigraphs to this chapter are from Ezra Taft Benson, Freedom to Farm (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960), 109, and the Southern Cultivator 4 (December 1846): 186. “Spring on the Farm in Pennsylvania,” Life, 24 May 1943, 69–77 (quotation from 77). “The Farm Problem, Part I,” Life, 30 November 1959, 22–32; “The Farm Problem, Part II,” Life, 7 December 1959, 136–44; “The Farm Problem, Part III,” Life, 14 December 1959, 101–11. Intelligencer Journal, 28 August 1954, 10. Benson, Freedom to Farm, 109; O. E. Baker, quoted in Stevenson Whitcomb Fletcher, Pennsylvania Agriculture and Country Life, 1840–1940 (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1955), 37; Addison H. Groff, “Boys of ’76,” op-ed, Sunday News, 24 June 1950. Stevenson Whitcomb Fletcher, Pennsylvania Agriculture and Country Life, 1640–1840 (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1950), 137, 172, 377; Homer Tope Rosenberger, The Pennsylvania Germans, 1891–1965 (Lancaster: Pennsylvania German Society, 1966), 329. Levi B. Huber, “Two Hundred Years of Farming in Lancaster County,” Papers of the Lancaster County Historical Society 35 (1931): 97–110; Cornelius Weygandt, The Dutch Country: Folks and Treasures in the Red Hills of Pennsylvania (New York: AppletonCentury, 1939), 5. Walter M. Kollmorgen, Culture of a Contemporary Rural Community: The Old Order Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Rural Life Studies no. 4 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1942), 21, 4, 88–89. Cornelius Weygandt, The Red Hills: A Record of Good Days Outdoors and In, with Things Pennsylvania Dutch (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1929), 12. Elmer C. Stauffer, “In the Pennsylvania Dutch Country,” National Geographic 80 (July 1941): 37, 60, 64; Rosenberger, Pennsylvania Germans, 332; Amos Long, Jr., The Pennsylvania German Family Farm, Publications of the Pennsylvania German Society 6 (Breinigsville: Pennsylvania German Society, 1972); Weygandt, The Red Hills, 14; Russel Wieder Gilbert, A Picture of the Pennsylvania Germans, 3d ed. (Gettysburg: Pennsylvania Historical Association, 1958), 43. “Spring on the Farm in Pennsylvania,” 69–77. The photographs are by Alfred Eisenstadt. Willard W. Cochrane, The Development of American Agriculture: A Historical Analysis, 2d ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 337. Kollmorgen, Culture of a Contemporary Rural Community, 47. Donald B. Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 169–70; Gilbert C. Fite, American Farmers: The New Minority (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 70. Fite, American Farmers, 71–72, 110–13.

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T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 35–36. 16 Fite, American Farmers, 54–61; on the Agricultural Adjustment Act and its consequences, see also Cochrane, Development of American Agriculture, 140–43, 317, 338. On populism, see Robert C. McCath, Jr., American Populism: A Social History, 1877–1898 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993). 17 Fite, American Farmers, 107, 115; Cochrane, Development of American Agriculture, 133–43, 439. Earl Butz is quoted in Jim Hightower, Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times: A Report of the Agribusiness Accountability Project on the Failure of America’s Land Grant College Complex (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1973), 5. 18 On the changes produced by the growth of agribusiness, see especially Ingolf Vogeler, The Myth of the Family Farm: Agribusiness Dominance of U.S. Agriculture (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1981), and Fite, American Farmers. 19 Fite, American Farmers, 103–8. 20 Ibid., 132; Hightower, Hard Tomatoes, 150–51. 21 Statistics from LCPC, Sketch Plan, Volume I, Background (Lancaster: LCPC, 1970), 51; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Agriculture, 1950, vol. 1, pt. 2 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952), 436–504; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Agriculture, 1964, vol. 1, pt. 9 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1967), 260–386. Similar impressions are given by the oral histories quoted in Solanco Heritage: History of Southern Lancaster County 1729–1991 (Devon, Pa.: Solanco Heritage Project, 1990), 35–38, in particular the comments on soil conservation and landscape and on the decline of self-sufficiency in farming. 22 Homer K. Luttringer, The Innovators (Lancaster: Ford New Holland, 1990), 9–33, 54–63, 71, 85, xxii-xxiii, and Aaron S. Glick, The Fortunate Years: An Amish Life (Intercourse, Pa.: Good Books, 1994), 58. For the explanation of why Amish and Mennonite farmers needed the wheat straw where others did not I am indebted to Ivan Glick, a Lampeter farmer and writer. 23 Kraybill, Riddle of Amish Culture, 151–82. 24 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Agriculture, 1950, and 1964. The increase in dairy and poultry production, as well as its impact on the county, will be discussed further in chapters 5 and 6. 25 Dan Drucker,“History of Lancaster’s Central Market,” Susquehanna 8, no. 11 (November 1983): 19–25. 26 Weygandt, The Red Hills, 17–21; M. Luther Heisey, “The Famed Markets of Lancaster,” Journal of the Lancaster County Historical Society 53 (1949): 1. 27 Bernice Steinfeldt, The Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (Lancaster: Steinfeldt, 1937), 18–19. 28 Stauffer, “In the Pennsylvania Dutch Country,” 73–74. 29 Frederic Klees, “The Pennsylvania Dutch: They Are a Remarkable People with an Enviable Way of Life,” Holiday 2, no. 6 (June 1947): 78. 30 John Oliver Gorce, “Artists Look at Pennsylvania,” National Geographic 94, no. 1 (July 1948): 39. 31 Sunday News, 18 June 1950, 20. 32 Archie Robertson, “Fill Yourself Up, Clean Your Plate,” American Heritage 15, no. 3 (April 1964): 58; Klees, “The Pennsylvania Dutch,” 79.

NOTES TO PAGES 116–122

33 34

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Raymond Tufft Fuller, “Domain of Abundance,” Travel 66 (November 1935): 14–17, 50. David Luthy, “The Origin and Growth of Amish Tourism,” in The Amish Struggle with Modernity, ed. Donald B. Kraybill and Marc Olshan (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994), 120–21. 35 In addition to those cited elsewhere in this chapter, see, for example, “A Dutch Treat!” American Home 66, no. 1 (Winter 1963): 54, 66, 68; Louella G. Shouer, “From Pennsylvania Dutch Ovens,” Ladies’ Home Journal, December 1945, 164–65, 170–71; and “Pennsylvania Dutch,” Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, 24 June 1951, 10–13. 36 Brochure from the Hotel Brunswick, 1952, in the Lancaster Ephemera Collection; advertisement in American Home 66, no. 1 (Winter 1963): 1. On the American interest in foreign foods after World War II, see Richard Pillsbury, No Foreign Food: The American Diet in Time and Place (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1998). 37 Susan J. Ellis, “Traditional Food on the Commercial Market: The History of Pennsylvania Scrapple,” Pennsylvania Folklife 22, no. 3 (Spring 1973): 13; poem quoted in Joseph Hildreth, Private Enterprise Made Scrapple Country Garden Spot of America (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1948), unpaged. 38 Joseph Hildreth, Philadelphia Scrapple, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1945), unpaged; Paul B. Beers, The Pennsylvania Sampler (Harrisburg: Stackpole, 1970), 36; Ellis, “Traditional Food on the Commercial Market,” 18; Bland Johaneson, “Victualry among the Pennsylvania Germans,” paper read before the Society of Pennsylvania German Gastronomes (n.p., 1928), 5–6. 39 Bill Wolf, “Eat Hearty, It’s Plenty,” Saturday Evening Post, 14 August 1948, 14; Archie Robertson, American Heritage Cookbook and Illustrated History of American Eating and Drinking (New York: American Heritage, 1964), 161. 40 Jane Nickerson, “Vegetables—Plain and Fancy,” New York Times Magazine, 11 November 1956, 52; Johaneson, “Victualry among the Pennsylvania Germans,” 6. 41 F. Gregory Hartswick, in the Pennsylvania Dutch Cook Book of Fine Old Recipes (1936; repr., Reading, Pa.: Culinary Arts, 1960), 6–7. 42 José Wilson, American Cooking: The Eastern Heartland (Alexandria, Va.: Time-Life, 1971), 37; Ann Hark and Preston H. Barba, Pennsylvania German Cookery: A Regional Cookbook (Allentown, Pa.: Schlechter’s, 1950), xiv; Johaneson, “Victualry among the Pennsylvania Germans,” 3. Johaneson, describing the same restaurant as Hartswick (see previous discussion), mentioned the custom of the owner “to invade the neat oak dining-hall and berate the guests whose unworthy appetites offend her. It is anything but conducive to comfortable digestion of a snack of chickens, ham and Würste, fried and mashed potatoes, creamed onions, escalloped fish, fried eggplant, steamed corn, fried eggs, dried lima-beans, peas, cauliflower, tomatoes, scullions [sic], brandied peaches, cucumbers, candied quince, souse, asparagus, and Schmierkäse, to be surprised by this lady, steamed red and violent, brandishing an earthen jug of waffle batter which has met with too slight demand.” Her husband, sadly, had passed on, “arteriosclerosis having exacted its toll of him in his seventyninth year.” 43 Wolf, “Eat Hearty, It’s Plenty,” 31; Helen Papashvily, “Cooking with God’s Plenty,” Saturday Evening Post, 11–18 August 1962, 64. 44 Edna Eby Heller, “Pennsylvania Dutch Cooking Today and Yesterday,” Pennsylvania Folklife 17, no. 4 (Summer 1968): 38; Wolf, “Eat Hearty, It’s Plenty,” 30–31; Papashvily,

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“Cooking with God’s Plenty,” 64; Craig Claiborne, “Shoo-fly and Scrapple,” New York Times Magazine, 29 June 1958, 30–31. 45 Don Eddy, “Dutch Treat,” American Magazine 151, no. 1 (January 1951): 111. 46 Papashvily, “Cooking with God’s Plenty,” 64; Heller, “Pennsylvania Dutch Cooking Today and Yesterday,” 38. 47 Hark and Barba, Pennsylvania German Cookery, 67–68. 48 Myrna Johnston, “Pennsylvania Dutch Dinner with a Package Start,” Better Homes and Gardens, February 1959, 72–73, 106, 110, 114; Dona Brown, Inventing New England (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 144–61. On the subject of biscuit mix and Pennsylvania Dutch potpie, it is worth noting that of all the many recipes for potpie dough that have been published (see chapter 3), not one, to my knowledge, produces anything resembling biscuits. 49 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 3. 50 Jean Wood Fuller,“Wisdom Is Defense,” address before the state meeting of Women in Civil Defense, Richmond Hotel, Atlanta, Ga., 10 November 1954, 4; By, for, and about Women in Civil Defense: Grandma’s Pantry Belongs in Your Kitchen (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1958); May, Homeward Bound, 103–13; James Gilbert, Another Chance: Postwar America, 1945–1968 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 171, 175; Amy Bentley, Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 116–22. Interestingly, according to Bentley, government campaigns to encourage victory gardening focused on men, even though the vegetable garden on a farm had traditionally been the province of women. 51 See Gilbert, Another Chance, 117–18, 175–77; May, Homeward Bound, 178; and Peter G. Filene, Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modern America, 2d ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 170–71. 52 On hobbies and do-it-yourselfers in the 1950s, see Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 54–73. Marling argues that men’s hobbies, in particular, tended increasingly “toward the useless, the unprofitable, and the nostalgic” and that even the do-ityourself movement was pushed primarily by large institutions such as tool companies trying to make money off of American’s increasing leisure time (58). Steven M. Gelber makes a slightly different point, arguing that since their legitimization in the late nineteenth century, hobbies have served to reinforce the values of industrial capitalism. Crafts and do-it-yourself work “domesticated the ideology of industrial capitalism by providing a way to safely bring the practice of . . . production . . . into the household” (295). Gelber ignores, however, the possibility that premarket household production rather than domesticated industrial capitalism could be a model for the more useful hobbies. He does not examine gardening or home canning and only briefly considers the structural differences between do-it-yourself home work and model railroading or handicrafts. While I agree that even the relatively productive hobbies I discuss here were played out in ways consistent with consumer capitalism, Gelber fails to take seriously the noncapitalist motives of hobbyists. Gelber, Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

NOTES TO PAGES 129–131

53

54

55

56

57

243

Drucker, “History of Lancaster’s Central Market,” 21; Paula E. Jackson, “History of the Southern Market Building,” internal report for the LCPC [early 1980s]; New Era, 8 January 1972, 6; 17 October 1963, 1, 2; 3 May 1962, 1. Quoted in Joseph Interrante, “The Road to Autopia: The Automobile and the Spatial Transformation of American Culture,” Michigan Quarterly Review 19/20 (Fall 1980/ Winter 1981): 504. A survey of city and suburban business directories from the 1920s to the 1980s shows that the neighborhood grocery, bakery, butcher, and confectionery peaked in the 1930s and 1940s, shortly after the closure of the curbside farm markets. From the 1950s onward, the number of grocers and other food retailers steadily decreased, and local names of owners were gradually replaced by chain supermarkets (Thriftway, IGA, Acme, A&P, and so on) and, by the 1970s, convenience stores (mostly regional chains such as PennSupreme and Turkey Hill). In the city, the old neighborhood grocers did not disappear until the 1980s, but the supermarkets took hold earlier in the suburbs: by 1970, half of the grocers listed were part of chains. Supermarkets would naturally have grown faster in the suburbs than in either the city or the country because they had both sufficient population to support larger stores and sufficient land on which to build them. Nevertheless, the change was apparent everywhere. Even small-town grocers such as Ferguson and Hassler’s in Quarryville and Darrenkamp’s in Willow Street had swelled in size by the 1970s, taking over the functions of local butchers, bakers, and farm stands. See Polk’s Lancaster City Directory (Boston: Polk, 1919–1990) and Polk’s Lancaster Suburban Directory (Boston: Polk, 1965–1990) for these years. (Interestingly, in the 1980s a new wave of neighborhood grocers appeared in Lancaster city, established by Latino immigrants. This trend still continues and likely will until the Latino population, now concentrated primarily in the southern part of the city, becomes more fully integrated into the county.) Women’s Association of Donegal Presbyterian Church, Donegal Cookbook (Lancaster: Forry and Hacker, 1971); Ladies Auxiliary of Rawlinsville Fire Company, Just Cooking (Kansas City: North American Press, 1976); Manheim Township Women’s Club, Cook’s Delight: A Favorite Book of Recipes (Kansas City: Circulation Service, 1968); Welcome Wagon Club, Cooking Favorites of Ephrata Area (Chicago: Women’s Clubs Publishing, 1976); Akron Women’s Club, Culinary Delights from Our Members’ Kitchens (Adamstown, Pa.: Ensinger, 1971–1972); Ruth Wiggin and Loana Shibles, eds., All Maine Cooking: A Collection of Treasured Recipes from the Pine Tree State (1967; repr., Camden, Maine: Down East, 1991). In the interest of fairness, I would like to point out that I own several local cookbooks from both central Pennsylvania and Maine and I cook from them frequently. If one is willing to search out the diamonds in the rockpile, so to speak, these cookbooks do contain some wonderful recipes for dessert items. Longtime Lancaster County resident Barbara Jean White Overly wrote in 1990 of the demise of traditional foodways in southern Lancaster County: “The farmers’ wives no longer care to spend the time making everything from scratch now that the same mills that press apples for cider will also simmer them into apple butter and turn a load of tomatoes into ketchup or chili sauce. You don’t learn to cook from a book. You learn by hanging around the kitchen table to watch the bread kneaded, the pastry rolled, picking over the fruit you have gathered for the jam and jelly making, then hovering

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over the stove and taking a saucer of the cooked jelly to a cool window to see if it has started to set.” In the same passage, however, she fondly recalls sitting on the back porch of her parents’ home in the 1930s or 1940s, “drinking Dr. Pepper sodas at 10, 2, and 4 o’clock because that’s the way they were advertised.” See Solanco Heritage, 45–46.

Chapter 5

11 12

13

14

15 16

17 18 19 10

The epigraph to this chapter is from the LCPC, Directions: A Comprehensive Plan for Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (Lancaster: LCPC, 1975), 15. U.S. Census, 1950, 1960, and 1970. U.S. Census, 1950 and 1960; Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 231–45 (quotation from 244). On the development of suburbs in the early twentieth century, see also Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic, 1987). James Stuchell, The Past, Present, and Future Population of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (Lancaster: LCPC, 1962), 4, 68; LCPC, Economy: A Report on the Historical Development, Present Characteristics, and Future Projections for the Economy of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (Lancaster: LCPC, 1964), 60; interview with John R. Ahlfeld, 13 October 1998. Interestingly, in-migration was as great in some rural townships in the southern part of the county as in the suburbs around Lancaster; see LCPC, Sketch Plan, Volume I, Background (Lancaster: LCPC, 1970), 46. Stuchell, The Past, Present, and Future Population of Lancaster County, ii-iii; LCPC, Sketch Plan, Volume I, Background, 51; U.S. Census of Agriculture, 1969 and 1974. On similar changes to other communities, see Arthur J. Vidrich and Joseph Bensman, Small Town in Mass Society: Class, Power, and Religion in a Rural Community, rev. ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), and John L. Shover, First Majority—Last Minority: The Transforming of Rural Life in America (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976). Shover includes a chapter on Bedford County, Pennsylvania, which declined after World War II and by its relative proximity provides an instructive contrast with Lancaster. Intelligencer Journal, 24 August 1961, 1; 25 August 1961, 1; 26 August 1961, 20; and 29 August 1961, 26; New Era, 25 August 1961, 1–2; 26 August 1961, 1, 2; and 14 May 1955, 1. New Era, 18 August 1962, 1, ran a lengthy article explaining the growth of local tourism and the reasons for it; the language and the sort of basic information it contains suggest that readers were only then becoming aware of the scale of Amish tourism. Another New Era article from the previous summer (18 July 1961, 1) suggests the same thing. Sunday News, 12 May 1963, 1, 2; New Era, 23 May 1962, 1, 36. Sunday News, 2 August 1998; New Era, 16 January 1963, 1, 2; Intelligencer Journal, 17 January 1963, 18; New Era, 17 January 1963, 18. Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Comprehensive City Plan (Lancaster: for the City Planning Commission, 1929), 25; LCPC Newsletter, 26 February 1968, 1. LCPC, Sketch Plan, Volume I, 51–52; LCPC, Sketch Plan, Volume II, Goals and Objectives (Lancaster: LCPC, 1971), 2.

NOTES TO PAGES 144–152

11

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LCPC, Lancaster’s Heritage: An Historical Preservation Study for Lancaster County (Lancaster: LCPC, 1972), 1–3. 12 Quoted in the LCPC, Park and Open Space Guidelines (Lancaster: LCPC, 1967), 1. 13 Ibid., 10. 14 LCPC, Lancaster’s Heritage, 1–4. 15 LCPC, Park and Open Space Guidelines, 23. 16 Ibid., 24; LCPC, Sketch Plan, Volume I, 163, 161, 153. The LCPC’s discussions of the value of open space were fairly typical among planning documents in the 1960s. Open space was, in fact, usually defined as an urban idea, and most planning was of course directed at urban or urbanizing areas. Explanations of open space defined its purposes in various ways, but purposes tended to fall into five categories: productive open space, which might include farmland, mines, floodplains, or sewage treatment facilities; recreational space; space for ecological protection or to be left as wilderness; ornamental open space designed for aesthetic purposes; and open space reserved for future urban development. Universal in such taxonomies were the treatment of open space as a resource, whether economic, ecological, or visual; the assumption that its purpose was to serve the needs of an urban society; and the lack, obviously, of anyone living in that open space. See, for example, U.S. Department of the Interior, Office of Land Management, Where Not to Build: A Guide for Open Space Planning, Technical Bulletin 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968), 17–20; and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Open Space for Urban America (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965), iii, 1. 17 LCPC, Sketch Plan, Volume I, 57, 65; LCPC, Sketch Plan, Volume II, 2, 5; LCPC, Directions, 80; New Era, 16 January 1972, 1. 18 LCPC, Lancaster’s Heritage, 1. 19 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 120–21, 124–25. 20 John Berger, About Looking (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1980), 51–53. 21 LCPC Reporter, no. 5 (July 1973), 2, and no. 11 (November 1974), 2; New Era, 1 April 1975, 10, and 2 April 1975, 46; Intelligencer Journal, 2 April 1975, 32. 22 Interview with John Ahlfeld, 13 October 1998. 23 Minutes of the LCPC, 14 April 1975, 5; LCPC, Directions, 16, 39; New Era, 3 April 1975, 56. 24 New Era, 3 April 1975, 3. 25 New Era, 4 April 1975, 16. 26 Ibid. 27 New Era, 5 April 1975, 6. 28 LCPC, Directions, 9. 29 Glenn V. Fuguitt, David L. Brown, and Calvin L. Beale, Rural and Small Town America (New York: Sage, 1989), 15–17, 80, 94; Peter A. Morrison, with Judith P. Wheeler, “Rural Renaissance in America? The Revival of Population Growth in Remote Areas,” Population Bulletin 31, no. 3 (1976): 10–11. The terms urban, rural, metropolitan, and nonmetropolitan in this context bear some explanation. These terms, when used to refer to purely demographic change, are as defined by the Census Bureau. A place—that is, a locality for the purposes of collecting census data, such as a township or a borough— is defined as “urban” if it contains more than 2,500 residents or is located within an

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“urbanized area,” the heavily populated area around a city of at least 50,000 people. A place is “rural” if it is not urban. A place, further, may or may not be located within a Metropolitan Standardized Area (MSA), which is currently defined as a county containing a city with more than 50,000 inhabitants plus any adjacent counties that are tied to the central county through commuting and are metropolitan in character, that is, that are not primarily agricultural. These definitions have changed frequently in the twentieth century, making comparison over time difficult. In addition, new MSAs are continually being defined, as once-small cities and rural counties grow in size. An increase in urban or metropolitan population may, therefore, be caused by migration to urban or metropolitan areas, or by the urbanization of rural and nonmetropolitan areas. 30 Morrison, “Rural Renaissance in America?” 11–12, 20, 22. On perceptions of small town and rural life that helped fuel the rural renaissance, see David M. Hummon, Commonplaces: Community Ideology and Identity in American Culture (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990). Hummon found that disproportionate numbers of residents of cities, suburbs, and small towns all believed, on balance, that small towns provided the best life for their residents. This argument is based on extensive interviews in three California communities in the 1970s. 31 Fuguitt, Brown, and Beale, Rural and Small Town America, 29. 32 See, for example, Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: Knopf, 1991), and Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 289–305. 33 Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America (New York: Random House, 1970), 3–4, 7–9. 34 Ibid., 316. 35 David E. Shi, The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 255–58; Timothy Miller, The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1999). 36 John Vivian, The Manual of Practical Homesteading (Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale, 1975); Roy Underhill, The Woodwright’s Shop: A Practical Guide to Traditional Woodcraft (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 150, 5–6; Carol Stoner, ed., Stocking Up (Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale, 1973). 37 Julie Haywood and Ken Spooner, Goodbye City, Hello Country (Grand Junction, Colo.: Highland, 1985); Robert McGill, Moving to the Country (Reeds Spring, Mo.: White Oak, 1987), quotation from 19. 38 Peter N. Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: The Tragedy and Promise of America in the 1970s (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), 235–51; Shi, The Simple Life, 265–72; Laurence S. Rockefeller, “The Case for a Simpler Life-Style,” Reader’s Digest, February 1976, 62. 39 Tom Braden, “On Starting to Say ‘Stop,’” Los Angeles Times Syndicate, 1975, quoted in Amish Roots: A Treasury of History, Wisdom, and Lore, ed. John A. Hostetler (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 262–63. 40 Archibald MacLeish, “Rediscovering the Simple Life,” McCall’s, April 1972, 79–88. 41 Lord Snowden, “The Plight of the Amish,” McCall’s, April 1972, 88, 124–26. 42 Gideon L. Fisher, Farm Life and Its Changes (Gordonville, Pa.: Pequea, 1978), 361–65. 43 Brochures from the Amish Homestead and the People’s Place in the Tourist Brochures Collection.

NOTES TO PAGES 158–168

247

44 Brochures from Kreider’s Tourist Farm Home and Verdant View Farm in the Tourist Brochures Collection; description of the Rocky Acre Farm Bed and Breakfast from the farm’s website, http://www.castyournet.com/rockyacre (4 November 1999). The Pennsylvania Dutch Convention and Visitors Bureau website provides a list of dozens of working farms that now lodge guests (http://www.padutchcountry.com/workfarm .htm, 4 November 1999). 45 Mindy Brandt and Thomas E. Gallagher, “Tourism and the Old Order Amish,” Pennsylvania Folklife 43, no. 2 (1993–1994): 71–75 (quotation on 75); Merle Good,“Exploitation and Storytelling,” New York Times, 20 December 1974, 37. 46 On the subject of images and understanding, see Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977). Sontag argues that, although images can inspire desire, they cannot create understanding. “Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks” (23). Meaning is attached to images after their production and can be reapplied again and again as necessary. “We make of photography a means by which, precisely, anything can be said, any purpose served” (174–75). 47 Gary R. Hovinen, “A Tourist Cycle in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania,” Canadian Geographer 15, no. 3 (1981), 283–84. The tie between tourism and gas prices is my own; Hovinen, writing in 1981, was unaware that tourism would soon take off again. In the long view, the sharp decline in tourist income in the late 1970s and early 1980s was an anomaly, not a trend. 48 U.S. Census, 1970 and 1980. 49 Jack Brubaker, “More Amish Choosing Jobs away from Farm,” New Era, 7 April 1975, 1, 2; see also Donald B. Kraybill and Steven M. Nolt, Amish Enterprise: From Plows to Profits (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). 50 Brubaker, “More Amish Choosing Jobs away from Farm,” 2; New Era, 10 April 1975, 22. 51 Ann Geracimos, “Will Success Spoil Amishland?” New York Times, 11 October 1970, X, 1, 16; New York Times, 1 November 1970, X, 5; 22 November 1970, X, 16; and 8 November 1970, X, 8. 52 LCPC, Housing Tomorrow’s Citizens: A Report on the Past Growth and Future Projections of Housing in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (Lancaster: LCPC, 1963); U.S. Census, 1980. 53 These figures assume the “suburban” population to be that of the “urban fringe” as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau; that is, the population of the Lancaster urbanized area minus that of Lancaster city. I believe the term “suburban” to be more useful here, because it is both more intuitive and more consistent in meaning; the “urbanized area” has changed over time and may thus imply a false precision. 54 Cornelius Weygandt, The Dutch Country: Folks and Treasures in the Red Hills of Pennsylvania (New York: Appleton-Century, 1939), 8. 55 The Tanglewood Manor golf course in East Drumore Township is carved out of farmland, as is the housing development associated with it. The phenomenon was not unique to East Drumore, but the pace of growth there made it particularly striking. 56 John Herbers, The New Heartland: America’s Flight beyond the Suburbs and How It Is Changing Our Future (New York: Times Books, 1986), 3–4, 10, 16–17, 98. As early as 1958, Vidrich and Bensman noted that “the intrusion of the mass media [into small

248

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NOTES TO PAGES 168–182

town life] is so overwhelming that little scope is left for the expression of local cultural and artistic forms.” See Vidrich and Bensman, Small Town in Mass Society, 85. See also Ray E. Pahl’s argument that mere “mobility through the countryside can be seen as an urban pattern,” since “the essence of the city, to a true urbanite, is choice.” Pahl, “The Rural-Urban Continuum,” in Readings in Urban Sociology, ed. Pahl (London: Pergamon, 1968), 271–73. Millen Brand, Fields of Peace: A Pennsylvania German Album (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970), 62, 74, 87, 148. James A. Warner, The Quiet Land (New York: Grossman, 1970), vii; see also Warner and Donald M. Denlinger, The Gentle People (Soudersburg, Pa.: Mill Bridge Museum, 1969).

Chapter 6 11 12 13

14 15

16 17

18 19 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Lancaster County Outlet Shopping Guide [early 1980s], in the Tourist Brochures Collection. New Era, 8 March 1989, 14. Intelligencer Journal, 3 March 1984, 1, 2, and 7 April 1984, 1; Sunday News, 6 May 1984, A-4. On the decline of tourism in Lancaster County in the late 1970s, see Gary R. Hovinen, “A Tourist Cycle in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania,” Canadian Geographer 15, no. 3 (1981): 283–84. Sunday News, 6 May 1984, A-1, A-4; Intelligencer Journal, 7 April 1984, 5; New Era, 30 June 1984, 4. Sunday News, 6 May 1984, A-4; John A. Hostetler, “Marketing the Amish Soul,” Gospel Herald, 26 June 1984, 452–53; Merle Good, “Reflections on the Witness Controversy,” Gospel Herald, 5 March 1985, 163; New Era, 30 June 1984, 1, 4. Good, “Reflections on the Witness Controversy,” 161, 163; New York Times, 7 June 1984, I, 20. New Era, 30 June 1984, 1, 4; Good, “Reflections on the Witness Controversy,” 161–63; P. Gregory Springer, “Bearing ‘Witness’: A Review of the Movie,” Gospel Herald, 5 March 1985, 164–65. New Era, 13 February 1985, 10; New York Times, 7 June 1984, I, 20; New Era, 3 July 1984, 10. Intelligencer Journal, 31 July 1948, 1; New Era, 11 October 1963, 1, 2; Sunday News, 24 July 1977, 1. New Era, 6 May 1977, 1, 2, and 7 May 1977, 8; Sunday News, 24 July 1977, 1, 3, and 31 July 1977, 14; Intelligencer Journal, 30 June 1978, 38. Intelligencer Journal, 30 August 1984, 1; New Era, 30 August 1984, 10. New Era, 3 September 1987, 1, 4. New Era, 24 September 1987, 1, 2; Intelligencer Journal, 24 September 1987, 1, 2, 9. New Era, 24 September 1987, 1, 2, 14; Intelligencer Journal, 25 September 1987, 10, and 24 September 1987, 2; New Era, 30 September 1987, 14. New Era, 28 September 1987, 14; 1 October 1987, 12; 29 September 1987, 12; and 3 October 1987. New Era, 2 December 1987, 1, 6, and 3 December 1987, 1, 2. New Era, 2 March 1989, A-1, A-6, A-18, and 6 March 1989, A-14. New Era, 24 September 1987, 2; 2 October 1987, 10; and 29 September 1987, 12.

NOTES TO PAGES 183–191

19 20 21 22

23

24 25 26

27 28 29

30

31

32

249

Interview with Fred Daum, 7 June 1999. Ibid.; A Place Called Lancaster, videotape produced by LAND (1987, 1988). New Era, 15 March 1991, A-1; interview with Fred Daum, 7 June 1999. “Lancaster County: The (Ex?) Garden Spot of America,” New Era series reprint (Lancaster: Lancaster Newspapers, 1988), 6, 8–10, 23; “Challenges Facing a Growing Lancaster,” reprint of special series, New Era, March 1986 (unpaged); New Era, 2 April 1994, B-14. Gary Comstock, ed., Is There a Moral Obligation to Save the Family Farm? (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1987), xvii; see also Peggy F. Barlett, American Dreams, Rural Realities: Family Farms in Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), and Lorraine Garkovich, Janet L. Bokemeier, and Barbara Foote, Harvest of Hope: Family Farming/Farming Families (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995). Gallup polls similarly showed a continuing American fondness for the country and for the idea of the family farm, but they also showed a marked lack of interest in the problems facing small farmers in the 1980s. Polls taken in 1985 and 1986 found that between 2 and 4 percent of Americans considered “the plight of farmers” to be one of the most important issues facing the country. (The polls did allow for multiple responses.) See George Gallup, Jr., The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1985 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1986), 235, and Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1986 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1987), 48. “Lancaster County: The (Ex?) Garden Spot of America,” 4–5. Statistics from “Lancaster County: The (Ex?) Garden Spot of America,” 20. Ibid., 37–38; New Era, 28 April 1995, A-14; see also Randy-Michael Testa, After the Fire: The Destruction of the Lancaster County Amish (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992), 144–45, and Donald B. Kraybill and Steven M. Nolt, Amish Enterprise: From Plows to Profits (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). A Place Called Lancaster County (Lancaster: Lancaster Alliance for New Directions, 1987), videocassette; “Lancaster County: The (Ex?) Garden Spot of America,” 3, 13–14. Amos H. Funk, My Life and Love for the Land (Morgantown, Pa.: Masthof, 1998), 37–39, 41, 44–45, 57–59; interview with Alan Musselman, 26 February 2001. Interview with Alan Musselman, 26 February 2001; Funk, My Life and Love for the Land, 68–80; Agricultural Preserve Board website, http://www.co.lancaster.pa.us/ Agpresrv.htm (4 November 1999); U.S. Census of Agriculture, 1982. Agricultural Preserve Board website, http://www.co.lancaster.pa.us/Agpresrv.htm (4 November 1999); “Lancaster County: The (Ex?) Garden Spot of America,” 17; Lancaster Farmland Trust website, www.savelancasterfarms.org (17 May 1999); New Era, 31 May 1995, B-1; Sunday News, 11 July 1993, A-6; Thomas L. Daniels, “Form Follows Function,” Planning, January 2000, 15. New Era, 8 April 1987, 1; “Summary of Responses to New Era Survey” (Lancaster: LCPC, n.d.), 1–2; “Lancaster County’s New Comprehensive Plan: Comments, Recommendations, and Policy Statements” (Lancaster: LCPC, 1989), unpaged; “The Development of a New Comprehensive Plan for Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Background Report #2: Summary of Growth Forum, August 1989” (Lancaster: LCPC, 1989), 2–5. “Lancaster County: The (Ex?) Garden Spot of America,” 21–25; “Managed Growth: Lancaster’s Challenge” (position statement of the Lancaster County Association of

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34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52

53 54

NOTES TO PAGES 192–205

Realtors, n.d.), 6, 7, reprinted in “Lancaster County’s New Comprehensive Plan”; New Era, 8 April 1987, 4. “Lancaster County: The (Ex?) Garden Spot of America,” 26–30; Emerson Lescher, The Muppie Manual: The Mennonite Urban Professional’s Guide for Humility and Success; or, How to Be Gentle in the City (Intercourse, Pa.: Good Books, 1985); see also RandyMichael Testa, In the Valley of the Shadow: An Elegy to Lancaster County (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1996), 32–35. “Lancaster County: The (Ex?) Garden Spot of America,” 17, 31–36; Testa, After the Fire, 110, 122. New Era, 11 February 1985, 1, 5; 13 February 1985, 10; and 20 August 1993, A-1, A-4. “Lancaster County: The (Ex?) Garden Spot of America,” 14, 17, 23, 30; “Summary of Responses to New Era Survey,” 2; Testa, After the Fire, 147. “Lancaster County: The (Ex?) Garden Spot of America,” 27, 36–37. New Era, 23 April 1990, B-1; Testa, After the Fire, 138–39. Letter from John Hostetler in the New Era, 2 May 1990, 10; Testa, After the Fire, 154–57, 162, 166; New Era, 20 June 1990, 1, 5; Philadelphia Inquirer, 21 June 1990, 14. Testa, After the Fire, 152, 154–57; London Sunday Independent, 24 June 1990, 26, quoted in Testa, After the Fire, 160. Testa, After the Fire, 147–50; New Era, 20 June 1990, 1, 5. New Era, 11 July 1990, 1, 5; Testa, After the Fire, 165; Intelligencer Journal, 11 July 1990, 1; New Era, 8 August 1990, B-1; 13 November 1990, B-1; and 7 August 1990, B-1; Philadelphia Inquirer, 21 June 1990, 14. The details cited are from my own recollection of the supervisor’s meeting in October 1990; I have confirmed the date and details with others who were present. “Lancaster County: The (Ex?) Garden Spot of America,” 16. Testa, After the Fire, 98–99; 120–37; Quarryville Sun-Ledger, 1 November 1989, 10. New Era, 29 June 1991, B-14, B-6; 18 August 1992, B-5; 3 September 1992, A-1, A-5, A-4; and 8 September 1992, A-10. New Era, 10 September 1992, A-1, A-4; Intelligencer Journal, 10 September 1992, A-1, A-8. New Era, 10 November 1992, A-1, A-5; 11 November 1992, A-12; and 13 November 1992, B-1. New Era, 26 March 1993, A-1, A-4; 27 March 1993, A-10; and 8 June 1993, A-1; Testa, In the Valley of the Shadow, 52; New Era, 30 March 1993, A-15. New Era, 9 June 1993, A-10; Sunday News, 8 November 1992, A-1, and 18 August 1993, B3; Intelligencer Journal, 28 September 1993, B-2; 29 September 1993, A-10; 4 October 1993, A-7; and 8 October 1993, A-7; interview with Alan Musselman, 26 February 2001. Sunday News, 11 July 1993, A-6; Daniels, “Form Follows Function,” 15. Agricultural Preserve Board website, http://www.co.lancaster.pa.us/Agpresrv.htm (4 November 1999); “Lancaster County: The (Ex?) Garden Spot of America,” 17; Lancaster Farmland Trust website, http://www.savelancasterfarms.org (17 May 1999); New Era, 31 May 1995, B-1; Sunday News, 11 July 1993, A-6; Daniels, “Form Follows Function,” 15. Interview with Alan Musselman, 26 February 2001; interview with June Mengel, 30 June 2000; Daniels, “Form Follows Function,” 15–17. Lancaster Farmland Trust website, http://www.savelancasterfarms.org/aboutus.htm (4 November 1999); interview with June Mengel, 30 June 2000; interview with Tom

NOTES TO PAGES 206–212

55 56 57

58 59

251

Stouffer, 30 June 2000; Tom Daniels, “Integrated Working Landscape Protection: The Case of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania,” Society and Natural Resources 13 (2000), 261–71; interview with Alan Musselman, 26 February 2001. Daniels, “Integrated Working Landscape Protection,” 261. Ibid., 261–62. Mike Gumpper, Gary Hovinen, and Charles Geiger, An Interdisciplinary Approach to Benefit-Cost Analysis of Public Farmland Preservation Programs, study published by the Center for Rural Pennsylvania (2000), 68–75. Cited with permission of the Center for Rural Pennsylvania. Interview with June Mengel, 30 June 2000. Interview with Alan Musselman, 26 February 2001.

Epilogue

11 12 13

The epigraph to this chapter is from Eli Stoltzfus, The Serenity and Value of Amish Country Living (Strasburg, Pa.: by the author, 1969). Elizabeth Cummings, “Prisoners of Lambert,” Sunday News, 6 September 1998, A-1, A-5. Sunday News, 6 September 1998, A-1. Sunday News, 2 August 1998, P-2.

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✸ INDEX

agrarianism, 16–19, 16n. 5 Agricultural Adjustment Act, 108 agriculture commercialization of, 22, 109, 111 consolidation in, 102, 109, 133, 140, 161 dairy farming, 26, 112, 185 developments in, 19, 23, 36, 41, 107–12, 133 economic problems in, 102, 108–10, 185 economic role of, 18–19 environmental problems of, 186–87 in Lancaster County, 19–20, 22–26, 62–63, 103, 110–12, 143, 185–87, 192–93 and self-sufficiency, 22, 24, 109, 110 tobacco, 26, 112 use of chemicals in, 32, 107–8, 110, 111, 112 use of tractors in, 32, 107, 111 Agriculture Preserve Board, 189–90, 204, 205 Ahlfeld, John, 148 Amish, 3, 4, 8, 11, 12, 26–35, 47 agriculture of, 8, 25, 26, 32, 104–5, 111–12 Beachy, 28, 31 books on for tourists, 86, 87–90, 95 bundling, 87–88 community of, 30–33 and conscription, 46 and education, 38, 48–59 farming as way of life for, 55–56 and farm preservation, 190, 192, 204 Gelassenheit, 30 growth of, 187 and hex signs, 88

New Order, 28, 31 Meidung, 28, 29–30 off-farm jobs, 32, 162 opposition to development, 196, 199–200, 201 opposition to Route 23/30 bypass, 179–80 Ordnung, 29–31 organization of, 28, 31 and plainness, 31–32 and progress, 33, 91–92 relations with non-Amish Lancaster Countians, 4–5, 8, 13, 38, 55–56, 57–58, 61 religion, 8, 20, 25, 27–33, 54–55, 88–90 seen as backward, 47–48, 65 seen as embodiment of rural virtues, 55–56, 64, 92, 98 seen as innocent, 68, 93–98 seen as peaceful, 71, 168–69 seen as quintessentially rural, 36, 55, 57, 66, 90, 91, 216 seen as relics of the past, 58–59, 62–63, 66, 68, 97, 99, 159, 216 seen as stable community, 104–5 seen as wise, 156–57 separation of from the world, 31–33, 47, 88, 92, 168–69, 175 and technology, 8, 12, 29, 32, 48, 61–62, 105, 111–12, 156–57, 159 threats to survival of, 162, 178–84, 187 and tourism, 8, 13, 59–66, 79, 92–93, 141–42 and Witness, 174–76

254

Amish, Old Order. See Amish Amish Farm and House, 84–86, 92, 93 Amish Homestead, 157, 209 Anabaptists, 27–28 Appalachia, 35, 80n. 33, 91, 93 Armstrong, Richard, 182, 196 Aumand, Ammon Monroe, Jr., 65–66 baby boom, 125, 138, 164 back-to-the-land movements, 63, 72, 73, 125 barn raisings, 30, 34, 61, 89 bed-and-breakfasts, 158 Benson, Ezra Taft, 101, 103, 109, 110 Better Homes and Gardens, 124 Blouse, Richard, 194 Borsodi, Ralph, 72 Braden, Tom, 156–57 Brand, Millen, 168 Brenneman, Bob, 193 Brethren, 20, 26–27, 34 Burrell, Percy Jewett, 41–42 Carey, Henry, 18–19 Central Market, 113, 114. See also farmers’ markets Civilian Conservation Corps, 64 Clark, Earl, 141 Cold War, 125–26 Colonial Williamsburg, 73, 85, 98 Columbia, 14 Commodity Credit Corporation, 108 cookbooks, community, 129–32 Country Acres, 165–66 country cooking. See Pennsylvania Germans, cooking Country Life Commission, 41, 41n. 11, 50, 143, 145 Daly, Tom, 118 Daniels, Tom, 190, 203–7 Daum, Fred, 182–83 Depression, 41, 52, 63, 64, 69, 72, 73, 102, 108, 125, 138. See also New Deal do-it-yourself, 127–28 Donegal Township, 20 Drumore Township, 20, 200

INDEX

Dutch Haven, 86, 116 Dutch Wonderland, 86, 141–42 Earl Township, 200–202 Earl Township Farmland Preservation Trust, 200, 202 East Drumore Township, 161, 198 East Earl Township, 193 East Hempfield Township, 199 East Lampeter Township, 52–55, 58, 204 Eden, Garden of, 14, 15, 66 education reform, 38, 41, 48–51 England, medieval, 16 Ephrata, 14 Ephrata Market, 114 exurbanites, 8, 151–56, 167–68, 193 family farm idealization of, 7, 101–2, 103, 105–7, 110, 132, 158, 185 seen as place of consumption, 127–28, 132–33 farmers disappearing from popular culture, 115–16, 133, 135 and farmland preservation, 192–93 popular images of, 7. See also farming as way of life and rural reformers, 34, 41 seen as backward, 40–41 seen as model citizens, 6–7, 15, 17, 37–38, 41, 103, 140 See also agriculture; Amish; farming as way of life; Pennsylvania Germans farmers’ markets, 12–13, 39, 112–16, 129 farming as way of life, 15–18 and abundance, 120–22, 132–33 changes in, 39–41, 110–11 and family, 122–24, 149 and frugality, 120, 149–50 and harmony, 106, 123–24, 132 and independence, 72, 149–50 and security, 70–71 and self-sufficiency, 105, 106, 110, 122, 149 and serenity, 70–71 spiritual benefits of, 72, 106, 123–24, 149

INDEX

255

See also neighborliness; Pennsylvania Germans Farm Journal, 102 farmland, loss of, 8–9, 140, 161–63, 181, 185–86 farmland preservation, 188–95, 199–206, 211–14 current opinions on, 206–7 developers and, 191–92 farmers and, 192–93 successes of, 203–5 Federal Civil Defense Administration, 126 Fegley, H. Winslow, 69–70 FIND Lancaster County, 182 Fisher, Gideon, 157, 196 Fletcher, Stevenson Whitcomb, 103–4 food preservation, 107, 121–22, 126, 155 foodways, changes in, 128–32. See also Pennsylvania Germans, cooking and supermarkets, 129n. 53 Franck, Ira S., 81–82 Frey, J. William, 74–75, 77, 78, 86 folk festivals, 73–74, 92. See also Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Festival folklore, 73, 210 Pennsylvania Dutch. See Pennsylvania Germans, folklore/folklife Franklin and Marshall College, 13, 37, 74, 75, 79. See also Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center Fuller, Jean Wood, 126 Fuller, Raymond Tufft, 62–63 Funk, Amos H., 188–89, 203, 204, 207

hex signs, 77, 86, 88 highways, 185 Route 23, 177–79 Route 23/30 bypass, controversy over, 178–84 Route 30, 80, 141, 177, 180 historic preservation, 212 hobbies, 127–28, 128n. 52 Hostetler, John, 89–90, 174–75, 181, 195 Hotel Brunswick and Pennsylvania Dutch cooking, 81, 87, 117 tours of the Amish country, 81–82, 86 Yonnie, advertisement for, 94–95, 160 Hourglass Foundation, 209, 210 housing development, 13, 139–40, 161, 163–66, 172, 195–99

Garden Spot Village, 200–203 Geracimos, Ann, 162–63 golf courses, 145 Good, Merle, 157–58, 159, 175–76 Gropper, William, 114 Groundhog Day, 69, 69n. 3 growth, opposition to, 149, 172, 190–91, 196, 198–99

Lancaster, city of, 13, 20, 26, 43, 139, 165 Lancaster Alliance for New Directions (LAND), 182–84, 196 Lancaster Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 181, 184, 194 Lancaster County identification of with Amish, 99–100, 187–88 migration to, 139 seen as productive agricultural region, 19–20, 22, 62–63, 103 seen as quintessentially rural place, 4, 19–20, 23–26, 62–63, 103, 115, 163–64, 183

Hark, Ann, 71–72 Heller, Edna Eby, 76, 78, 116–17 Hensel, William Uhler, 48, 60 Hesiod, 15–16, 16n. 5, 19, 33

Intercourse, 158 bicentennial, 82 Jefferson, Thomas, 6, 17 Kemp, Thomas W., 43 Kitchen Kettle Village, 164, 196 Klimuska, Ed, 188, 194 Kollmorgen, Walter M., 104–5 Korson, George, 73 Kreider’s Tourist Farm Home, 158 Ku Klux Klan, 39, 40 Kutztown Folk Festival. See Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Festival

256

Lancaster County (Continued) sense of as unique place, 187–88, 210 settlement of, 14, 19–22, 37 way of life in, 149–50, 181, 210 Lancaster County Board of Commissioners, 142, 192–93 Lancaster County Historical Society, 46 Lancaster County Planning Commission, 137, 142–46, 148–49, 151, 179, 195, 205 Lancaster Daily Intelligencer, 42–43 Lancaster Farmland Trust, 190, 197, 204, 205 Lancaster Intelligencer Journal, 56, 142, 148, 178, 179, 180 Lancaster New Era, 46, 55–56, 142, 148, 149–50, 171–72, 178, 180, 186, 188, 194, 200–201 Lancaster Sunday News, 103, 209–10, 212 landscape, 133, 135, 145–48, 150, 167, 169. See also open space Leacock Township, 195 Life, 101–2, 106, 125–26, 133 Lititz, 14 Little Britain Township, 204 Little Red School Gift and Gourmet Shop, 67, 86 Manheim, 20 Martic Township, 199 Martin, Helen Reimensnyder, 47–48, 65 Meadows, the, 195–98, 201 Mengel, June, 205, 207 Mennonites, 20, 27, 28, 29, 31, 47, 62, 78 and development, 191–92 and farming, 25, 26, 34 Old Order, 3, 8, 11, 12, 51, 141, 204 religion, 20, 21, 25, 28, 211–12 See also Amish migration from city. See exurbanites Miller’s Dutch Restaurant, 87, 116 Millersville University, 206 Musselman, Alan, 189–90, 197, 201, 203, 204, 207 National Geographic, 96–97, 105 Nearing, Helen and Scott, 72, 154

INDEX

neighborliness, 33–34, 34n. 37, 150 New Deal, 52, 64, 108 New Holland, 11, 12, 177, 182, 200, 203 New Holland Machine Company, 111, 183 New Providence, 39 Newswanger, Kiehl and Christian, 95 New York Times, 58–59, 84, 120, 122, 162, 167, 174, 211, 212 noble savage, 95–97 Nolt, Edwin, 111 nostalgia, 58–59, 62–63, 71, 78, 93 Octorara Creek, 20 open space, 144–46, 146n. 16, 147, 205 Organic Gardening, 155 outlet malls, 171, 184, 202 Pageant of Gratitude, 37, 41–43, 44 pastoral, 15, 16n. 5 Peanuts, 94, 97 Pennsylfaanische Deitsch, 25, 38, 43–45, 46, 47, 50, 67, 76–77 literature in, 45, 69 misrepresentations of, 47, 77–78 as oral dialect, 43–44 origins of, 43 preservation of, 44–45, 69, 74 Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT), 178–81 Pennsylvania Dutch. See Pennsylvania Germans Pennsylvania Dutch Convention and Visitors Bureau, 86, 141–42, 181, 184 Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Festival, 78–80, 85, 98, 140, 142 local reactions to, 80, 80n. 33 Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center, 74–79, 86, 116, 140 tourist guide, 67–68, 86 See also Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Festival See also Pennsylvania Dutchman Pennsylvania Dutch Harvest Frolic, 86, 140–41 Pennsylvania Dutchman (pub. Edward Rauch), 45, 46, 69, 74

INDEX

Pennsylvania Dutchman (pub. Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center), 74–77, 78, 79, 116–17, 158 Pennsylvania Dutch Tourist Bureau. See Pennsylvania Dutch Convention and Visitors Bureau Pennsylvania Folklife. See Pennsylvania Dutchman (pub. Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center) Pennsylvania Folklife Society. See Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center Pennsylvania German Folklore Society, 72 Pennsylvania Germans, 8, 22, 24, 34, 43–48 and abundance, 63, 120–22 agriculture of, 22–25, 104 arts and crafts, 70, 74 assimilation of, 36, 44, 50 barns, 23, 63, 186 cooking, 76, 77, 78, 79, 86–87, 103, 116–25 culture, 25 dialect. See Pennsylfaanische Deitsch and education, 38, 43, 44, 49–50 folklore/folklife, 72–74 and frugality, 13, 120 identification of with Amish, 48n. 22, 99 importance of family to, 122–24 persecution of, 46 seen as backward, 38, 43–44, 46, 47–48 seen as idealized farmers, 22–23, 43, 44, 70–71, 81, 90, 103–7, 121–24 self-promotion of, 38, 39, 45–46, 68, 69–74, 80, 104 superstition, 77, 86. See also hex signs See also Amish; Mennonites; farming as way of life Pennsylvania German Society, 45–46, 80, 210 People’s Place, 158 Pequea Township, 199 photography, 93, 147, 159n. 46 Plain and Fancy, 82–84, 160 Plain people. See Amish; Brethren; Mennonites planning, city and regional, 142–46, 148–49, 306 lack of public interest in, 148–51 See also Lancaster County Planning Com-

257

mission population growth, 138, 184 in rural areas, 151–53, 160–61 postcards, 62, 159–60 postwar culture, 92, 96–98, 125–28 preservation, 9–10, 72 of farmland. See farmland preservation historic. See historic preservation philosophical problems with, 210–14 progress, 9, 9n. 3, 16–19, 19n. 13, 35, 69 Public Works Administration, 52 Quakers, 20–21, 54 Quarryville, 14, 138, 161, 198 Quarryville Sun-Ledger, 200 racism, 153 Rauch, Edward H., 45, 46, 69, 74 Reader’s Digest, 156 Reich, Charles, 153–54 Rodale Press, 155 rural development, patterns of, 164–66 rurality association of with the past, 100 idealization of, 39, 40–41 popular definitions of, 8 sociological definitions of, 5, 152n. 29, 161 rural renaissance, 151–56 Saturday Evening Post, 121 scrapple, 118–20 sense of place, 143–44, 147 simplicity, voluntary, 156 Shoemaker, Alfred L., 74–78, 80, 86 Shoemaker, Robert, 141–42 slavery, 21–22, 25 Smoketown, 53, 55, 57 Southern Market, 113, 129. See also farmers’ markets Steinfeldt, Bernice, 64–65, 66, 113 Steinfeldt, Isaac, 61, 62, 64 stewardship, 189, 192, 194–95, 207, 211–12 Stoltzfus, Amos S., 195–98 Stoltzfus, J. Myron, 195–98 Stouffer, Tom, 205 Strasburg, 14

258

INDEX

suburbs culture of, 125–28, 164 growth of, 139–40, 153, 160, 164–65 microsuburbs, 165–66

U.S. Department of Agriculture, 103, 104 urban growth boundaries, 204, 205 urbanization, 35 of Lancaster County, 138, 167–68

Testa, Randy-Michael, 194, 196–97 Thomas, John, 192, 194 tourism and the Amish, 8, 13, 59–66, 79–80, 81–82, 84–90, 115, 157, 211 attractions. See under specific names attractions, appearance of, 141–42, 146 and authenticity, 8–9, 92–93, 93n. 65, 96, 98, 141–42, 157–60 and automobiles, 60, 146, 147 conflict between tourists and residents, 5, 68–69, 141 criticism of, 141–42, 146, 163, 174, 176 and farmers’ markets, 39, 114–15 and food, 115–16 growth as industry, 81–82, 84–86, 98–99, 116, 140–42, 160, 184 guidebooks for, 67–68 and landscape, 59–61 magazine articles on, 62–63 origins of in Lancaster County, 9, 59–66 as pilgrimage, 92, 98–99 residents as tourists, 148, 167 by trolley, 59–60 Travel, 62–63

Verdant View Farm, 158 Vergil, 15–16, 16n. 5, 19, 33 Vermont, image of as rural place, 4, 124 Versammlinge, 69, 78 Visitors and Convention Bureau. See Pennsylvania Dutch Convention and Visitors Bureau

Underhill, Roy, 154–55

Wagner, Dwight, 198 Weaver, Dale M., 200 Weaver Chicken, 129, 183 Weir, Peter, 174–75 West Earl Township, 200 Weygandt, Cornelius, 70–72, 78, 105, 165 white flight, 153 Williams, Raymond, 147 Willow Valley, 192 Witness, 173–77, 185 working landscape, 205–6 World War I, nativism in, 42, 46–47 yeoman farmer. See farmers Yoder, Don, 74–78 Zinn’s Diner, 94, 96 zoning, 151, 161 Zwingli, Ulrich, 27