26/01/2025
Hello everyone. We have a good article from our historians today about the Amish here in Ethridge. I did try to come up with something to say but they did a far better jab than I could. See their page here below as they tell more about the history of Lawrence than I’ll ever know.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/15fqVSsG4J/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Lawrence County has been a literal Amish paradise for 81 years this month.
On January 21, 1944, according to an article in the Nashville ‘Banner,’ the families of Joe E. Yoder and Jacob Gingerich began moving into leased buildings on a 200-acre farm at Three Oaks, north of Lawrenceburg. Their goal was to conduct a yearlong experiment to see if the area would suit their agricultural and lifestyle needs.
The families had their belongings shipped by rail from their homes in Lumberton, Mississippi, with plans to bring another family from Mississippi and “at least a dozen more families” from Holmes County, Ohio. Dan Yoder’s family arrived shortly after the first two families.
As the move took place in the last months of World War II, the ‘Banner’ article placed great emphasis on the Amish men’s status as conscientious objectors. The Amish and Mennonite faiths have a long history of objecting to military service. At the time he moved to Lawrence County, Yoder had two brothers in “camps for conscientious objectors.” These camps were a unique way to allow conscientious objectors to perform “work of national importance” without wearing a uniform. Men who lived at these camps performed a number of important duties, from working at psychiatric hospitals to participating as “guinea pigs” in studies, to fighting forest fires.
Yoder was quick to assure the ‘Banner’ that the Amish were not communists. “We colonize for fellowship,” he said, “and every man is his own agent. We do not operate a cooperative store. We try to raise every item of food eaten in our homes, but we buy meats, citrus fruits, and other foods when we run short. We expect to live a normal American life. We patronize doctors, dentists, and stores in the towns near us, and our life except for religious belief and objection to war is no different to that of any other American.”
At the time, little was said about the Amish traveling by horse and buggy, because, despite the increasing presence of automobiles on local roads, many native Lawrence Countians still used horses and mules to travel and plow in 1944.
The road to Lawrence County was long and winding for these pioneering Amish families. Originally from Wayne County, Ohio, they had moved to Mississippi due to the compulsory school attendance laws in Ohio, which required every child to attend school until the age of eighteen. The Old Order Swartzentruber Amish operated their own schools, but they believed that children should only attend school through the eighth grade.
However, as Bobby Alford points out in his article ‘The Amish in Lawrence County,’ these three Amish families soon grew dissatisfied with the “hot, steamy Delta lowland” in Mississippi and sought a place where they could operate their schools without interference as well as practice the type of diversified agriculture with which they were accustomed. They sent an enquiry to the Tennessee Commissioner of Agriculture, who directed them to look at Lawrence County, where a great deal of timber had recently been cleared and farmland was relatively cheap.
After the initial families came, and the first Amish school was founded in the county without issue, Emmanuel Gingerich and his family followed that fall. In 1947, ten Amish families from Indiana came and settled to the south and west of Ethridge. When they finally decided to purchase farms in Lawrence County, the Amish paid cash, as they would “make no debts.” Lawrence County has the largest population of Old Order Amish people in the South today, and the Amish churches here still operate their parochial schools through the eighth grade.
Amish religious beliefs vary slightly from congregation to congregation, but their overriding impulse is to maintain separation from the world and live as simply as possible. Their nineteenth-century-patterned clothing is made in sober, dark colors with no buttons or zippers. They travel and farm with horses and maintain farms which are largely self-sufficient and consist of plain, clean homes and outbuildings with no electricity. They will not work on Sunday, and do not permit the ownership or creation of any graven image of themselves or their property, including photographs. They will construct no edifice for public worship, and instead gather in each others’ homes each Sunday for church services conducted in their native dialect of German.
Although they largely kept to themselves at first, a period of prolonged drought in the 1980s caused many local Amish craftsmen to open their doors to tourists to supplement their harvests. Today, tourism is a major source of income to the Amish, who, in addition to selling seasonal produce from their gardens, operate small businesses that range from furniture construction to candlemaking to leatherworking.
