Amish Country and 1632

Following up on my recent post about the Frontier Culture Museum, I ran across this related post I started last winter. Given how succesful I felt the museum visit was, I think my instinct that visiting Amish Country could be fascinating and useful for 1632 fans was spot on.

Grantville, WV probably doesn’t have much (if any) information on the Amish, their schools, or really any specifics of their lives. But for us, here in the real world, we can research them and use them as models for how we can set things up. There doesn’t need to be anything in-universe tying them to the Amish, but we can still use those frameworks as examples of how things might work out. Given that they have their origins going back to the early-to-mid 1700s, they should be very easy to adapt to the 1632 universe.

A Brief History of the Amish (USA and USE)

My husband and I recently drove through Amish Country – Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They are well-known in the USA for living essentially the same lifestyle most people had before modern “conveniences” like electricity and plumbing were introduced. They do this for religious reasons, but the rules have essentially softened over the years for the simple reason that government mandates have forced them to do things like use electricity in their dairy barns and business realities have led to having telephones, although not in their homes.

The Mennonites emerged as a distince part of the Anabaptist movement in the last 1600s with the Amish splitting off from them in 1693. Both groups ended up emigrating to Pennsylvania in the future USA starting in the early-to-mid 1700s, attracted by the promise of religious freedom. All of this means that the Amish and Mennonites as we know them today will never exist in the 1632verse, but that the reasons they moved to the USA are very much the same reasons they moved to the USE in 1632.

It’s no secret that the 1632verse is working hard to make sure the Anabaptists in their world don’ face the same persecution they did in our world, even if they aren’t aware of the link between Anabaptists and the Amish. I like to think Grantville and the USE are making pretty good progress. That means the Amish and Mennonites, as we know them in the 21st century. (Note: The Amish and Mennonites are splintered into different groups like most religions, but for the sake of simplicity, I’ll mostly just use “Amish” in this post.)

That made me wonder: Would the Amish enjoy reading this series? What would they think of an alternate history where their ancestors faced relatively minimal persecution?

Education: One Room School Houses

As I read the blurbs for various “meet the Amish” activities and simply looked at road signs, it hit me (again) how very much we could learn from them and apply to our universe. Their one-room schoolhouses are probably a more comfortable fit, with a few tweaks, for many down-time communities than a modern American school. Their small schoolhouses allow children to learn the basics of reading, writing, and arithmatic while also being able to work on the farm and learn job skills. Their small schools also ensure students are trilingual (English, German, and Pennsylvania Dutch).

In particular, the Amish schoolhouses focus on memorization and collaborating. Even with improved printing methods and cheaper, more readily available printed materials, an ability to memorize key facts will be very useful in the 1632verse. They also generally end education at eighth grade or around age 14. That would seque nicely into apprenticeships. Presumably other schools would develop specifically to teach the small number of students with an eight grade education and a desire/need to attend university.

One note: This entirely ignores the Amish attitudes toward the purpose of education. Those attitudes are rooted in the experiences they had and aren’t really relevant for the 1632verse. Basically, I would mostly ignore them for purposes of researching ways to expand and update education down-time. Other authors might choose to incorporate more of those attitudes. Realistically, there will be quite a bit of variety outside of West Virginia County, especially initially, in how education moves forward.

Horses and Buggies

We passed a harness shop in Lancaster. Does Grantville have one? Not in April 2000, but they would certainly need someone to make, maintain, and repair harnesses and other tack. (There is a tack shop.) There are other supporting trades such as blacksmiths to shoe horses. Down-timers will undoubtedly move into Grantville post-RoF and fill these needs, but they aren’t talked about much.

What about the buggies in Grantville? Where do they get them? What do they look like I have always imagined carriages – the fancy kind rich people use in movies – and wagons – like farmers use – as the primary means of transport. I’m fairly sure Conestoga wagons were copied by downtimers, but they aren’t designed for daily family use and are unlikely to be around in large numbers. The Amish buggies are fairly trim and extremely plain. (A common term they use for themselves is the plain folk.) While I didn’t go poking around at one, they seem to be about two people wide with two or three rows of seats. It’s a metal box with a window in the back, perhaps small side windows, and doors for the front passengers with larger windows and a full front window. Nicely sheltered from the weather but able to see outside. One had a flat trailer behind it with a little girl enjoying an unexpectedly pleasant day.

Plain and simple. That’s an Amish buggy. In 2000, the Amish were still using open-top buggies, not the covered ones I saw on our recent trip. Nonetheless, I think a down-time buggy maker would end up making something similar to the covered-top style of Amish buggy. The business potential in making those as the down-time equivalent of a taxi or bus, in addition to any personal use, could be enormous. Lots of businesses could use them for deliveries as well.

Kitchens and Home Appliances

The Amish have famously declined to add electricity and other modern conveniences to their homes. Post-2000, they have apparently begun using solar-powered items, which has revolutionized their lives, especially for women, but that’s quite recent for them. It would be easy to find women who still have and know how to use irons heated on the stove, wringer washers, and all manner of other gadgets the modern world bypassed decades ago, if one were to visit an Amish or Mennonite community.

As noted above, government regulations and business realities have caused them to accept modern conveniences in the barns and farms. They haven’t been forced to accept them in their homes in the same way. Interestingly, they have done things like having a phone outside their homes, but close to a window so that people could bring the handset inside while following the rules and keeping the phone outside. No one has ever said they are stupid!

The Amish will have things like clothing irons and lots of cooking appliances that we can look to for inspiration for how to do things down-time and for new businesses that might start up. They also convert KitchenAid stand mixers hand-crank. I can definitely see a market for that.

The butter churner that fits over a canning jar is another one. Canning and canning jars themselves will definitely be very popular, once the issue of rings is worked out. There are ways around this in universe, but it simply hasn’t been explored in any meaningful way and canning itself is seperate from the creating a uniform size of jar that can be used to hold a variety of cooking implements including a butter churner, egg beater, whisk, and all kinds of other small gadgets. Some gadgets might have more applications in a commercial location like a restaurant or bakery, but the small butter churner feels like something for home use.

Conclusion

There is a lot of inspiration we can take from the Amish, Mennonites, and other plain folk. If you are near one of their many communities (including one in Florida!) and have the opportunity to visit, you should try to. Then comment and let us know what you learn!