Horse-drawn buggies have become commonplace on the roadways winding through the lush hills in this town, evidence of the striking growth in the Amish population in upstate New York in recent years.
But Wednesday, many of the buggies were sitting empty in the summer heat outside the home of an elder. The community was gathering to mourn the death of five Amish people killed in a traffic accident last Tuesday.
Bearded men in broad-brimmed hats spoke in low tones. Women sat silently on long benches, their white-bonneted heads bent, dabbing handkerchiefs to swollen eyes.
Photo: Bloomberg
They did not want to speak to outsiders, but the non-Amish society around them was grieving, too.
“Our prayers to our Amish,” read the sign at the local firehouse, underscoring how much the Amish have become an integral part of the agricultural fabric of this region.
“When I heard it was people from our community, it tore my heart right out,” said Robert Mattison, captain of the volunteer ambulance corps in Jasper, which is about 400km northwest of New York City.
Photo: Bloomberg
Upstate New York has been weathering tough economic times and sharp population declines, but the unexpected influx of the Amish has provided a glimmer of hope. Their population in New York has doubled over the past decade, as they migrate from their longstanding population centers in Pennsylvania and Ohio in search of affordable farmland.
Amish farmers and craftsmen have quietly changed the landscape across western and upstate New York, reviving some farming towns and causing moderate conflicts in others, often over building and zoning requirements that are counter to austere Amish customs.
In 2000, the Amish population in New York was estimated at 35 church districts, or independent communities, with 4,725 residents. Now there are 96 districts with about 13,000 residents, according to the latest estimates by the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania.
Nationwide, the total Amish population is 261,150 in 28 states.
In Jasper, where the population was around 1,370 in 2009, the Amish and their non-Amish neighbors have become partners, each needing the other to survive.
When a busload of schoolchildren visited Jasper the other day, an Amish furniture maker gave them buggy rides and let them pet his horse. Amish and non-Amish children play together. Their parents have forged tentative friendships, sometimes hunting together, sharing self-deprecating jokes and attending funerals, residents say.
Rare is the townsperson who denies an Amish neighbor’s request to use the telephone or get a ride in a car. The non-Amish recognize that the Amish have helped to keep this farming town alive: The Amish began arriving in the early 1980s, buying vacant land, fixing up decrepit houses and bringing much needed commerce to town.
Glen Bullock, whose family has owned a hardware shop here for three generations, estimated that 60 percent of his sales were to the Amish. He said the Amish were not fully integrated with the rest of village, but that there were pleasant daily interactions. When his father died in 1986, he said, “The Amish were the first at my door.”
“They’re just regular folks,” he added, “great folks.”
The accident last Tuesday occurred in Benton, about 80km away, when a car trying to pass a tractor on a curve sideswiped a van carrying 13 Amish farmers.
They and about 20 other Amish farmers, in separate vehicles, were on an educational excursion sponsored by Cornell University Cooperative Extension. They had planned to visit farms to learn about the use of high tunnels — low-tech greenhouses with curved frames, covered by a plastic sheet.
Amish generally do not drive but do ride in vehicles.
Those killed in the crash were from Jasper, and the nearby Woodhull and Troupsburg areas. They were identified as Melvin Hershberger, 42; Sarah Miller, 47; Melvin Hostetler, 40; Anna Mary Byler, 60; and Elizabeth Mast, 46.
The driver of the car, Steven Eldridge, 42, of Penn Yan, New York, has been charged with criminally negligent homicide, driving while intoxicated and lesser offenses. The crash, in a no-passing zone, also hurt 10 other people, the police said.
New Amish communities in the US are usually formed by groups breaking off from existing communities in search of land, said Karen Johnson-Weiner, author of a history, New York Amish.
She said that as recently as 1949, there were no Amish settlements in the state. The first began in the Conewango Valley in western New York.
Donald Kraybill, professor of Amish studies at Elizabethtown College, said the Amish population in New York had jumped by 31 percent in the past two years, to around 13,000. Regions like this one, part of Steuben County, south of Rochester near the Pennsylvania border, have proved attractive to families seeking “rural isolation and good, cheap farmland,” he said.
In moments like these, Kraybill said, victims’ families can expect an outpouring of support — emotional and logistical — from Amish neighbors.
“In Steuben County, all the nearby families and relatives will come in, provide food, take over the chores, take care of the children, set up arrangements for the funerals,” Kraybill said. “These families will receive hundreds of cards and letters from other Amish, many of whom they don’t know.”
Last Wednesday, they were also receiving support from non-Amish neighbors, who hauled bags of ice and food to the homes of the grieving, and drove long distances to bring far-flung Amish into town.
Gary Wright, a horse farm owner from Caro, Michigan, drove 11 hours to bring six Amish men and women to the hilltop home of the elder, a cabinetmaker named Melvin Hershberger Sr, whose son, Melvin Hershberger Jr, died in the crash. Wright said he had befriended one of the Amish men he drove, when, about five years ago, his barn burned down.
The man, Wright recalled, showed up at his door, saying, “I’d like to help you build your barn.”
In Jasper, townspeople formed a protective line between the attention-averse Amish and members of the media. One non-Amish woman spent much of Wednesday shooing reporters away from the Hershberger home.
“We don’t want any more reporters,” an Amish man said. “If you are sorry, you will leave us alone.”
Tonya Tyler, from Cameron Mills, New York — home to Elizabeth Mast, who died in the crash — said she looked up to Mast, a mother of many children whose kitchen produced “the best lemon meringue pie you’ve ever tasted.”
Mast’s husband, John, who was injured in the crash, often came to the Tyler home to use the phone, though not without an offering of bread. The Masts even worked on their neighbors’ deck, free, Tyler said.
“They’ll give you anything,” she said. “They’re just caring, giving, forgiving people.”
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