For Amish, the Grass Is Greener in Wisconsin

By Kari Lydersen
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, April 19, 2004


FENNIMORE, Wis. --Black horse-drawn buggies have long been a feature of the landscape where Amish farmers have settled in the rural Midwest, but among the hills of southwestern Wisconsin the buggies are going gray -- reflecting a migration of Amish from Pennsylvania.

Whole communities from Lancaster, Williamsport and other parts of Pennsylvania have been relocating to Wisconsin, where land is two to three times as cheap and the influences of modern society are less pressing. About 300 Amish have moved onto farms around Fennimore, Cashton, Cuba City and Platteville in the past four years, according to local estimates.

Even while making the long-distance move, they remain true to their culture's rejection of modern ways: They load their buggies and the rest of their belongings onto semi-trailers that are driven by non-Amish drivers.

"You can tell the different groups," said Iva Helmuth, who belongs to an Amish community from Iowa that migrated to Wisconsin six years ago. She and her husband, Dan, run a store selling Amish furniture, food and housewares in Livingston, Wis. "Our women wear colored dresses and our men wear denim shirts and stocking caps. Their women wear black capes and aprons, and their men wear all black. They have pies at church; we don't. Before they started coming, we had only seen them in pictures."

Donald B. Kraybill, a sociology professor at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania and author of "The Riddle of Amish Culture," said Wisconsin now ranks fourth in Amish population, with about 12,000, after Ohio (54,000), Pennsylvania (50,000) and Indiana (36,000).

"In Eastern Pennsylvania, there's a lot of urbanization, so the more traditional members sometimes migrate to rural places like Wisconsin," Kraybill said. "They want to be more secluded so the young people aren't exposed to temptations, and they can preserve farming as a way of life."

"It was getting so crowded there," said a 30-year-old Amish woman who moved four years ago from Lancaster, Pa., with her husband and six children to the outskirts of Cuba City. Like most of the Amish interviewed for this article, she asked not to be identified by name. Now she and her family raise goats so they can sell cheese and meat to customers that include non-Amish residents and the increasing numbers of Mexican immigrants in the area.

A woman who moved from Williamsport to a farm a few miles from Cuba City five years ago was selling brown eggs, pickled cantaloupe and beets while her husband used a horse-drawn plow to till the land for alfalfa planting.

"People here hadn't heard of pickled cantaloupe, so we tried selling it and they really like it," she said.

Most Amish said their reception from the local population has been friendly enough.

"I understand if people don't like our buggies or our children walking to school along the highway, but that's just the way we get around," said the 30-year-old woman. "Overall, people have been very nice."

Clyde Bunte, who runs an antique store on the main drag of Cuba City, says the influx of Amish from Pennsylvania has been good for the area. He sells baked goods such as walnut rhubarb pie from a local Amish woman.

"They're good neighbors. As far as I'm concerned, they're a plus," he said.

Linda Parrish, manager of the economic development office in Fennimore, said land prices average $2,000 an acre compared with $7,000 to $10,000 on the East Coast. Her husband, a real estate agent, has sold many farms to the Amish.

"He felt like he was helping some of the older [non-Amish] farmers retire and get more for their land, and helping the Amish fulfill their dream of finding open spaces," she said.

But not everyone is happy.

At the Silent Woman pub in downtown Fennimore, John Briel said the Amish "are the worst thing that have ever happened to this area." Briel owns a farm-implements store that has been in his family for three generations. Because the Amish do not buy mechanized farm equipment, he said, his business is struggling.

"Five years ago, I had 138 good farmer customers," he said. "Now I only have 20, because all the rest are Amish, and if they're Amish, they aren't my customers."

He said the Amish are persuading local farmers to sell their land by offering two or three times what they paid for it.

"They've arrived like a swarm of locusts," added bartender Greg Schopf.

Briel, Schopf and others at the pub also voiced some often-heard complaints about the Amish: that their horses defecate on and damage the streets, that they do not pay taxes and that their children do not go to local schools.

Their complaints are a mix of fact and myth. Under a Supreme Court decision from 1972, the Amish are exempt from local compulsory school attendance laws. Generally, they halt their education after eighth grade. But Amish do pay taxes.

"The biggest myth is that they don't pay taxes because they hold church in their homes," said Richard Dawley, author of the book "Amish in Wisconsin." "They pay every tax that you and I pay. I think rumors like that are generated by hatemongers who don't want more Amish here."

Dawley gives presentations to local groups and town officials to build tolerance for the Amish. He was motivated by an incident in 1995 in which a resident of the nearby town of Elroy fired shots at an Amish buggy team and raped an Amish teenage girl near Cashton after an Amish buggy had forced him to drive into a ditch.

The Amish do hold church in their homes. They are generally organized into congregations of 10 to 35 families that rotate services from home to home. Although they usually do not use any electricity or own motor vehicles, each group decides on its own rules, and some are more liberal than others.

"They aren't Luddites," Kraybill said. "They'll make decisions about accepting some forms of technology and rejecting others."

As a chill set in one recent night, bucolic serenity reigned in the barn of a man who moved from Pennsylvania to a farm outside Fennimore five years ago. Rosy-cheeked children in traditional clothes gathered around a kerosene lantern while horses chomped loudly on hay. He pointed to a wall were the leather harnesses he makes and sells were hanging, and to where differently shaded wood marked where he had put an addition on his barn. His family, he said, has more land in Wisconsin.

"We can't complain," he said.