A place to tell our story

Mel Riegsecker was the eldest son of an Amish family, born in LaGrange County, raised on a farm two and a half miles southeast of Middlebury.

His father farmed and, like a good many Amish men, had a second trade. He made and repaired horse harness for the people around him, and he taught his son to do it.

In 1970 the son built a miniature horse-drawn wagon for his own enjoyment. He put it in his father's shop and somebody bought it. Then somebody wanted another, and eventually a buyer from a Chicago department store.

The miniatures were exact. Six-horse hitches with everything from the manes to the bridles detailed the way the full-size versions were. A harness maker's son making harness at one-twelfth scale for people who would never own a horse.

In 1984 he and his wife June bought an old factory building at the four-way stop in Shipshewana and fixed it up. She ran a shop in the front. He worked in the back.

They called it the Shipshewana Craft Barn. What that grew into is its own piece.

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Two years later, across the street, a different group of people built a different building for a related reason.

Their own account of why is four sentences long.

During the 1970s, more and more people came to the tourist town of Shipshewana due to its huge flea market. There was a growing consensus among Mennonite groups of Northern Indiana to have a place to tell our story. In 1986 with the help of many volunteer workers, Menno-Hof had a massive barn-raising to build the beautiful structure housing the Amish-Mennonite story. The new facility opened in May of 1988.

They named it for Menno Simons, the sixteenth-century priest the Mennonites take their name from, and for the German word for a farmstead.

It is governed by a board of Amish, Beachy Amish, Conservative Mennonite and Mennonite Church USA members. It is a nonprofit and it has been since the Internal Revenue Service recognised it in July of 1985, a year before the barn went up.

In their own directions to visitors, they describe where they are like this.

Shipshewana's claim to fame is the largest outdoor flea market in the Midwest with over one thousand vendor spaces. Menno-Hof is located opposite the flea market area.

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Both buildings exist because of the same thing.

The flea market brought people. One man met them with something to sell and the churches met them with something to explain, and the two institutions have stood across a street from each other for thirty-eight years. What the market had become by then took the whole of the sixties.

What they became is not comparable, and the numbers are worth setting down.

Blue Gate Hospitality, which is what the Craft Barn became, now runs three retail stores, a restaurant, a bakery, a theatre, a hotel, an event centre, a catering operation and a carriage business. The restaurant opened with fifty seats and was rebuilt at seven hundred and fifty. The theatre it opened in 2019 seats more than fifteen hundred and cost between three and four and a half million dollars, depending which account you take. A company officer told a magazine in 2018 that at the height of the season they employ nearly four hundred and fifty people.

Shipshewana had eight hundred and thirty-nine residents at the 2020 census.

Menno-Hof's most recent federal filing reports revenue of two hundred and seven thousand dollars and expenses of two hundred and nine thousand. It ran at a loss that year. Its total assets are seven hundred and eighty-one thousand dollars, which is the building.

Its officers were paid thirty-eight thousand dollars between them. In two of the last five years they were paid nothing.

The tours are given by volunteers, some of whom come for a month at a time and live in an apartment on the site.

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In the summer of 2000, a sociologist came to Shipshewana and interviewed seven hundred and thirty-four people.

Thomas Meyers published what he found in the Mennonite Quarterly Review three years later. The paper is about this town by name.

He opens by describing a journalist's account of a traffic jam in Amish Ohio, and says she could just as easily have written about the intersection of State Road 5 and Route 20 in Shipshewana on any Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon in the summertime.

Those are flea market days.

His conclusion is in his abstract and it is not gentle.

Amish tourism is focused less on a quest for authenticity than on a quest for consumption. It involves the commodification of Amish culture. The tourist's goals are to purchase the goods that are available in every major Amish tourist venue. The more subtle hope is to bring home the aura of the Amish along with these items.

And in his opening pages he describes the mechanism.

Visitors can observe, from a distance and often via a facsimile, such as an authentic Amish farm owned and operated by non-Amish, a way of life that is attractive in some ways but more than a bit exotic.

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Menno-Hof is not that, and the difference is in what it charges and what it shows.

Admission is nine dollars fifty for an adult and five dollars for a child. A family of two adults and all their children under fifteen gets in for twenty-two dollars.

The tour takes an hour and a quarter and runs through twenty-five rooms. A European courtyard. A dungeon. A seventeenth-century sailing ship. A print shop. A simulated tornado, which is where they introduce Mennonite Disaster Service. A meeting house.

It ends in a room set up like the inside of an Amish house.

They are closed on Sundays. They publish a pamphlet in which a member of the Old Order Amish church answers ten questions people ask, including whether the Amish pay taxes, whether they vote, why children leave school after the eighth grade, and why they are not photographed.

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Nobody knows how many people come to this town.

The figure repeated most often is one and a half to one and six-tenths million visitors a year, and it traces to a magazine article from 2018 which attributes it to a vice president of Blue Gate.

The Mennonite Mission Network, listing a volunteer post at Menno-Hof, says some half a million visitors from around the world.

Neither is a count. They differ by a factor of three and they come from organisations with different reasons to be interested, which is worth more than either number by itself.

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In thirty-eight years, no newspaper appears to have written about Menno-Hof.

The restaurant's expansions have been covered. The theatre was covered when it was announced and again when it reopened after the pandemic. The auction's centennial was covered.

The building across the street that exists to explain who the neighbours are has not been.

There is one exception and it is not journalism. In June of 2023, Blue Gate published a post about Menno-Hof on its own blog.