Many people do not know the North Country’s Amish history. Visitors and residents have all seen the horses and buggies along the road or we may have bought a basket or a jar of honey from a roadside stand, but our knowledge ends there. It seems baffling to some why a culture that rejects modern conveniences would locate in an area known to have such harsh weather.

In fact, the local Amish populations have only been located in the North Country for the past 30 years. Originally from the Midwest and Pennsylvania, “They were drawn here primarily by the availability of relatively cheap farmland. Farming is considered the ideal occupation for the Amish because it allows families to be part of the natural world, where life is governed by the seasons,” explained Dr. Karen Johnson-Weiner, chair of the Department of Anthropology.

Dr. Johnson-Weiner has become a national expert on Amish communities, their way of life and why they choose to live the way they do. “Ultimately, I hope to help people understand that the Amish are not relics, pioneer re-enactors or people caught in a time warp. They are, in fact, 21st-century people, daily confronting modernity, evaluating its impact on their lives and making choices about how they will live in the world,” she said.

With a background in linguistic anthropology and experience as an English as a second language teacher, Johnson-Weiner became interested when she discovered that the area Amish spoke Pennsylvania German in the community and home but were taught in English at school. Her research on the teaching of English in the schools led to her book Train Up a Child: Old Order Amish and Mennonite Schools.

“This book grew out of my early interest in English as a second language in Amish schools and in how and why the Amish preserved Pennsylvania German, especially given that the general pattern among immigrant groups was to shift to English by the third generation.”

There is no governing body that unites all the Amish church districts; each is independent and makes their own “Ordnung” or the discipline of a community. “There are about 1,600 different Amish church districts, and each has faced different circumstances, challenges, legislation, social conditions and weather. Because no two communities have faced the same set of circumstances, no two Amish communities have exactly the same Ordnung. As a result there are about 1,600 different ways of being Amish,” Johnson-Weiner explained.

Two groups settled here in the late 1970s, but their roots are from different areas. Though they arrived at the same time, each way of life is different. The Swartzentruber Amish are slightly more conservative or traditional with their Ordnung. “The two groups have different dress standards – for example different caps for women, different haircuts for men. Norfolk Amish might wear contact lenses, while the Swartzentruber Ordnung requires wire frames for glasses,” Johnson-Weiner described.

In a time when real estate dictates quality of life, the Potsdam area is where more families can afford farms, including newlyweds, which ensures that their community will remain intact. In other areas, where not enough land is available for farming, members of the community will go to work in factories or retail. The goal of our local groups is to sustain their way of life without having to go outside the community for work, making the North Country one of their choices for how to live in today’s world.