When I lived in Baltimore I would go north to visit my brother in Pennsylvania. On the way I often saw Amish and their buggies. The only time I would normally see a lot of buggies "parked" in one place, it was at a certain farm where I assumed a church meeting was being held. It would have made some neat pictures but I had always heard that the Amish did not like having their pictures taken, so I never did. But that was over 20 years ago.

Murraysmom -- I've heard that as well but this was just their buggies and horses and I've never seen so many in one place at one time. I have taken some pictures of them going past our house.

They certainly are picturesque, but I've felt a bit uncomfortable with the whole Amish culture after hearing how many of them do not take care of their animals very well.

They travel for business, too. We used to have a Amish Furniture Shop in our suburb of Chicago. We bought our bedroom set, a desk, and our entertainment unit there, still happy with them all 25 years later. Anyway, one day an Amish fellow was standing outside the store while I was there. The shopkeeper walked out with me, and asked the fellow if he could help him. He said, he makes some furniture sold in the store, and since he had gone (by train) to Chicago for some business anyway, he took the train up to visit the store, to see where his goods are sold.

My brother and his wife are Amish "taxi drivers". My brother also hauls furniture for an Amish furniture maker, and my brother says he (the Amishman) is a millionaire. Not kidding, he IS a millionaire.

Just a Nope on the Amish however there are other 'plain' dressing people who do not use their animals as the Amish do. In traveling when you see individuals or a group they are often visiting. There are some Amish that do use all of the modern stuff.

Were they Amish or Mennonites?

function here the common terms used are House and Church but you can break it down to Old Order and New Order. Within each group there are a lot of subgroups of Amish. Please do not get me started on Hutterites.

I hate using Wiki but it is easiest. My doctor who just retired at the first of the month was a Mennonite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subgroups_of_Amish

I live in Amish/Mennonite territory. Over the years it was not unusual to see small groups of them waiting along the highway to be picked up by a Greyhound bus. They were often headed to Kentucky.

We have old order here in NNY, the male elders rule completely, their horses, children and women are treated as property and do not believe in education, they have their own one room schoolhouses, and children only attend through 8th grade. It is not a culture to admire.

function -- they are Amish

Martha, we just call them Amish or Mennonite. Most north of us is old world or Amish Mennonite. I see them in different vacation areas. One time when my family went to the now gone Sea World in Ohio there was a group of old world Amish. It was like 1000 degrees that day and this lady had a few month old baby girl dressed from head to toe in the heavy black material. Black stockings and all. The baby was just laying limp in moms arms sweating. You could see the baby was in distress. I felt like ripping the baby from her, get her out of the sun and getting those hot cloths off of her.

There is a fairly good sized community of very primitive Amish about 50 miles from here in Tennessee. They grow a lot of vegetables and fruit for sale and appear to have a thriving business selling at their own market. One local business buys from them to supplement their own farmer’s market goods.

A few years ago the local people had a barn and part of their house damaged by a tornado. A couple of days after the storm a couple of trucks and a van showed up with about 20 Amish men to help the family with cleanup and repairs to their house and barn. They were overwhelmed with gratitude for their kindness but of course they had been doing business with them for many years. Someone had arranged transport of the men and their tools.

Some years back a local photographer (cannot recall his name) gained the trust of this same community of Amish. He made some stunning and touching photographs of the people, many of their children and the families. I can’t recall for sure but I believe he gave a portion of the proceeds back to their community. I don’t know what happened to him or if he just stopped doing this.

My husband has an Amish business partner in PA. Their family is somewhat conservative. I feel I know this family better than a casual observer. The father figure is very respectful of his wife and it is obvious how much he adores his children and the children adore him. The wife handles all the billing and invoices for his side of the business and her cursive handwriting would make my second grade teacher proud.

Yes the education stops at 8th grade but I would not say this Amish family doesn’t believe in learning. This Amish man has traveled to many different states and has even worked hard enough to own a second farm in another New England state. The Amish never back out of a bill or a loan. Banks are always eager to lend them money because of this. A hospital bill for thousands of dollars will be paid in full even if it takes years. Often times the community will gather together to raise funds for this purpose as well.

Yes I have heard of the puppy mill farms in Lancaster PA but again that is not representative of every Amish family.

I know very little about the Amish and similar "cultures", but imagine their sects could be likened to that of Mormonism or any other religion that is divided by fundamentalism and a more modern outlook. That said, the older I get the more of a distaste I have for any religion that remains steeped in patriarchy, demonstrating regressive agendas with the repression/oppression of females.

But hey, I do like vacations.

I've toured some of the Amish areas near us, and they are quite "modern" in that have electricity and do travel quite a bit.

Old order Amish in my area do not permit their photos ("images" in their parlance) to be taken, and they do not take vacations to SeaWorld. I am acquainted with an Amish neighbor who is surprisingly candid with me, and I have asked a few questions about the old order. Specifically they do not have electricity, landline phones, running water or diesel powered farm equipment, and don't have lanterns on their buggies, resulting in fatalities fairly often. They won't wear clothing with zippers, so everything must button or be pinned (with straight pins!), and only wear black in public, at home they are more relaxed, the women wear white skirts and shirts, the men wear dark solid colored shirts and pants. They do take the bus to visit their relatives in other areas of the Northeast. Compared to most Amish, their rumspringa is tame, and doesn't involve tons of partying or exposure to "English" culture, it's nothing like the reality show a few years back, more of a few months doing a little drinking with few responsibilities. Unlike some of the more modern orders, whose members sometimes go to college (there are even Amish doctors), old order specifically prohibits further education for anyone beyond 8th grade. They are good neighbors, however, they don't vote or participate in the community much beyond helping an immediate neighbor (and other Amish near and far). While the simplicity, or seeming simplicity, of their lives is attractive, their culture is just too repressive for me to say much positive about it.

Lakeaffect , belive it or not they were at seaworld.

I live in an area where there are a lot of Mennonite families. Old-order, farming with horses, getting together to build barns, etc. It's common to see many horse and buggies in front of their church of course. Grocery stores and Walmart have large sheds on the parking lot for their horses and buggy while they're shopping.

Funny, I know how most of you feel about the way thoroughbred and standardbred horses are treated, and my late aunt and uncle raised, bred and raced standardbreds. She was always adamant that she'd never sell any of their horses to a Mennonite/Amish.

The hunters in western PA don't care for the Amish. They raped their own land of the deer, so they come in heards and rape non Amish areas of their deer. Men, women, and children come in groves with anyone old enough to hunt (12 and over ). The children not old enough to hunt put on a drive. They kill every deer they can. Then move on. They did this were my brother in law lives. It took years for the deer population to rebound.

In this area far removed from Pennsylvania they still have dog mills. That is what happens the horses when they no longer are able to work. A trip to one of the market towns during the winter and a look at the horses convinced me to never purposely purchase anything they produce. In this area they grow many of the veggies that are sold at farmers markets. Each week, was Wednesdays, there was a large auction of "lots" of whatever fruit or vegetables that are available that week. By Friday they are in the stores as locally grown.

One thing I am finding of interest is that many of the tomatoes are being grown hydroponically. This requires mechanization to grow successfully. As a result they are hiring outsiders to do the actual production.

Function -- there is a difference. We have Amish here (those buggies you see), 30 miles east of us we have Mennonite -- they have cars and modern farm equipment and electricity in their houses but no radios in their cars or air conditioning and then in another direction 25 miles form us we have old order Mennonite -- and they are like the Amish -- no electric, horse and buggy. I'm not sure exactly how they differ in their beliefs but they are totally different and they don't intermingle.

I once visited the Lancaster PA area. While at a roadside series of stores on the edge of a farm, I remember being appalled by what I saw of how brutally several Amish people were handling their animals.

There's a double standard in the US. Some extreme fundamentalist groups are tolerated (even visited and patronized) and others aren't.

Yup, Lancaster is/was considered the Puppy Mill Capital of the world.. so sad!

i think there is so much more information out there, that hopefully puppy mills will be a thing of the past or at the very least, greatly reduced. i know all the malls around us do not have a pet stores selling puppies anymore, YAY!! small victories to end this horrific money making industry!

what is crazy to me is : if u need the horses to get you from place to place and plow your field, why oh why would u abuse them?????? they should be treated like royalty!

my sister adopted a Golden Retriever from a rescue group. They go out to Lancaster and ask to take the older puppies that are very hard to sell, mostly males. they don't pay the breeder. they just ask to take them. the litter that they rescued, 4 males, were about 8 months old. the breeder was going to shoot them b/c they were costing too much $$ to take care of and their chances of being adopted were slim. TRUE STORY!!

i have to say, my family has had dogs for over 40 years, so many dogs. and w/o a doubt, Chase, was the hands-down the BEST DOG EVER!!! she had to put him down when u developed a tumor behind his eye, he was 11 yrs old.

know where your dog is coming from!! its not the dog that u adopt, its the breeder females that are stuck in cages their whole lives, they are the victims.!

OP: sorry for the hijack but this is a touchy subject for me

I once visited the Lancaster PA area. While at a roadside series of stores on the edge of a farm, I remember being appalled by what I saw of how brutally several Amish people were handling their animals.

I hope you spoke up at the time. Is there nothing that law enforcement can do to prevent this? I have no experience with the Amish, but my personal observation is that animal abuse is taken very seriously by the authorities.

Animal abuse is not taken seriously in a lot of places. Even horses that are starved to death and found dead on property, with others near death, the owners seldom get more than a slap on the wrist.

I am sure some Amish are good to their animals, but many of them treat them very poorly and use them up and dump them.

I bought Bane because he had supposedly been an Amish horse. I figured if any horse needed a good home, he did. I know he had been beaten until he no longer had good sense, but I am not sure the Amish did it. I know he was whipped at the kill pen when they tried to do something with him and couldn't but I am not sure where his original PTSD came from. They told me the Amish, but I really don't know.

This is sickening. I had no idea that the Amish were known to be so cruel to God's creatures. How very "holy" of them.

In fairness to everyone here, it is best not to paint all "Amish" with such a broad brush. All of us have a type of affiliation that include people guilty of bad behavior, each of us would be offended if others stated "those people" do xyz.

" All of us have a type of affiliation that include people guilty of bad behavior, "

I think you're overly simplifying the issue, it's not just an affiliation with some that have bad behavior. This topic has been about relatively homogeneous cults whose cultures accept inhumane treatment and abuse of animals. Which practices, not unlike those of other cults or extreme religious groups, are NOT acceptable or practiced by the broader societies they live in.

The animal practices of some groups are well known and many are practiced in public, as I saw. In response to idaclaire, my experience would suggest that finding animal abuse in that particular Amish area isn't difficult. No, I didn't do anything about it. I had even been warned about what I might see of this nature in advance.

In my experience, not all Amish treat their animals poorly, but their religion permits it, because they believe their god gave humans (read: men) dominion over animals, so they can use, abuse and discard them at will, with no penalty in this or their expected afterlife. They are seemingly gentle people, but can be quite harsh, and they will shun their own children for leaving the order, no questions asked.

animal abuse is taken very seriously by the authorities

Many places, especially agricultural, farming, etc.areas see to it with powerful wealthy lobbies that either laws concerning animal abuse are kept weak and toothless or that they are specifically made for pets such as cats and dogs and inapplicable to farm animals. Local authorities may take animal abuse seriously, but they are often only as effective as the local laws permit.

In fairness to everyone here, it is best not to paint all "Amish" with such a broad brush.

Their culture prohibits many of them from speaking up-ie-women and children. In addition I would think that peer pressure might prevent some of the men from speaking up. MY brush paints people that don't stand up and do/say something for those that cannot speak for themselves. My earlier post:

They certainly are picturesque, but I've felt a bit uncomfortable with the whole Amish culture after hearing how many of them do not take care of their animals very well.

I guess it is hard to stand up for decency if you feel like your community is going to shun you. Sometimes, the most worthwhile choices you will ever make will also be the most difficult ones.