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A Never-ending Adventure
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17034 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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8 / 1990 |
3,177 Words |
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Richard K. McMaster
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GREAT POSSESSIONS
An Amish Farmer's Journal
David Kline
San Francisco; North Point Press, 1990
235 pp., $16.95
The Amish tradition is an alternative to the values of modern society, rather than an effort to preserve the past for its own sake. As David Kline writes in Great Possessions: An Amish Farmer's Journal, "The Amish are not necessarily against modern technology. We have simply chosen not to be controlled by it." Kline speaks with authority as an Old Order Amishman who farms the same land that his father and grandfather did before him with traditional methods handed down from generation to generation. He essays reflect on every page the liberation and the sheer joy that he finds in this way of life.
The Amish learned to be good farmers from harsh experience in Europe. Persecuted Swiss Anabaptists fled to remote upland farms high in the Alps or sought refuge in war-devastated and depopulated regions like Alsace, abandoning their homes in the richer valleys of Bern and Zurich. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, Jakob Ammann urged these refugee congregations to be sticter in church discipline and more consciously separate from their neighbors. The Anabaptists who agreed with Ammann about the need for discipline became known as the Ammannsch or Amish people. The Amish were concentrated in Alsace and Switzerland. The congregations that disagreed with him were the majority of Swiss Anabaptists and the Anabaptist refugees who settled on the Rhine in the German Palatinate. They eventually became known as Mennonites.
Reclaiming marginal lands high in the mountains and abandoned farmland required new methods and new technologies. Amish farmers worked hard and often pioneered in adapting farming methods to their poor soil and windswept fields. By the closing years of the eighteenth century they had won the respect of French government officials for their agricultural success and their sincere humility. Alsatian Amish farmers received further recognition in France with gold medals and certificates and an agricultural journal to publicize their methods.
Amish immigrants carried these skills with them to North America. The first Amish families came to Pennsylvania in the 1730s. They seem to have chosen land on the frontier by preference so as to have farms free and clear of rents or mortgages as soon as possible. Some Amish did choose the fertile, expensive farmland in the Pennsylvania German heartland of Lancaster County, sometimes working the land as tenants until they could afford a farm of their own.
The search for good land where Amish families could settle close to one another has made migration a constant in Amish history as pioneers followed the moving frontier to establish new Amish settlements. One such pioneer was Jones Stutsman, who bought land in Holmes County, Ohio, in 1809. Other Amish settlers followed him and cleared the lands along Killbuck Creek, where David Kline and his neighbors farm today.
The Jeffersonian ideal of the independent yeoman dictated land policy in the days when the first Amish came to eastern Ohio. Thomas Jefferson himself had framed the Northwest Ordinance that determined the future of the
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