They kept dividing as they grew

They came on horseback, two months out from Somerset County, Pennsylvania.

Daniel and Joseph Miller were on a prospecting tour. They stopped at Davis's place in the southwest corner of Newbury Township and bought farms, and Daniel Miller took the old Woodbridge place. Christian and Joseph Bontrager bought in Sections 19 and 20 soon after. Emanuel Miller took land in Section 29.

That was 1844. The town of Shipshewana came forty-five years later.

In November of the same year John C. Yoder arrived, also from Somerset County, born there in 1821. People called him the doctor for his skill in healing some of the human ills. He was still on his farm near the Moses Kaufman millrace thirty-eight years later.

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The name they carried came from two men. Menno Simons, whom Weaver spells Simon, left the state church. Jacob Ammon broke from Menno's followers later.

The name Mennonite is derived from Menno Simon, an ex-Catholic monk of Luther's day, who separated from the state church on the principles of absolute separation of church and state and non-resistance as regards war. The name Amish was later applied to the followers of Jacob Ammon, who pulled away from the Mennonites in Switzerland and advocated literal observance of feet washing as a religious ceremony, and a stricter observance of the "ban," as well as more severe plainness of attire.

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Then more came, first from Pennsylvania and later from Holmes County, Ohio, and they kept coming for eighty years.

By 1881 there were three districts of the old school in Newbury Township. The southern one had a hundred and sixty-one members, the western a hundred, and the northern, which reached into Van Buren, about a hundred and twenty. Each had a bishop and two ministers, and only a bishop could baptise or marry.

They had no meeting houses. Services were held in the members' homes.

By 1920 there were seven congregations across four townships and about eighteen hundred people in them.

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Every one of those seven came out of the one before it.

The congregation at the Forks in southwest Newbury was the first, organised in 1842 as an extension of the church in Elkhart County. Joseph Miller came as its first resident minister in 1846, was made bishop in 1848, and served twenty-nine years. He died in 1877 having seen three churches of his faith established in this county.

By 1866 the Forks had grown enough that it had to divide, and the new district in south and east Newbury took the name Yoder. In 1876 the Forks divided again and the new district in north Newbury and west Van Buren became North Barrens. In 1881 so many Yoder families had moved into Clearspring Township that a separate congregation was organised there, and later that one split into East and West. In 1901 the Yoder church divided again and the new district in Eden Township became Honeyville, which also became two.

Four divisions in thirty-five years, and none of them was a quarrel. Each one was a congregation that had got too large to meet in a house.

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The men who led them are named.

David S. Kauffman, ordained a minister at the Forks and made bishop at North Barrens in 1877, served until he died in 1918. Eli E. Borntrager, ordained bishop at Yoder in 1887, was seventy-eight in 1920 and claimed to be the first living child born of Amish parents in Indiana. His father John E. Borntrager was still alive at eighty-two, a minister himself, and had been a small boy among the first Amish settlers who came from Pennsylvania.

Three generations, in one family, from a boy on a wagon out of Somerset County to a bishop in his seventies.

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What held them together is the part the record describes at length.

The clothes were made at home to a prescribed form. Hooks and eyes on the coats and vests rather than buttons, because buttons were under the ban. Capes on the overcoats. No figured goods. Men wore their hair long and grew beards. Women and girls wore white caps at all times, and unmarried girls wore black ones during services.

Services every two weeks in a different house each time, running long, with dinner served where they met. Feet washing at the meetings. No written creed.

German was spoken and kept deliberately. By 1920 almost none of them was foreign born and the ministers had been schooled in English, and they held to the language anyway.

No automobile, no electric light, no tractor, no telephone. No life insurance and no secret societies. A man expelled was under the ban, which meant he was cut off in business and in company both.

And they did not proselytise. No effort was made to evangelise the world, nor to spread their doctrine beyond their own families.

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The 1920 account puts one thing at the front of all of it.

Of these the principle of nonresistance, which was brought to limelight during the recent World war, is probably the most common and fundamental. This as taught in these churches means no participation in political affairs, no going to law over differences, no voting on political questions, hence no holding of public office.

That was written two years after one war. Fifty-eight years before it, in October of 1862, the state counted the militia in LaGrange County and the return came back with a line in it.

conscientiously opposed to bearing arms, 91

Ninety-one men.

Rerick's whole 1882 volume uses the word non-resistant once, and not about them. Elder Bradford withdrew from the Free-Will Baptist Church, having adopted the non-resistant and anti-slavery principles, and formed the society at Lexington.

The chapter that recorded the county's Civil War runs eleven thousand words and never uses the word Amish.

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Both of the county's histories were written by outsiders, and they do not sound alike.

The 1882 volume's chapter on Newbury was written by Dr. John H. Rerick, a LaGrange physician who owned the county's newspaper. He records the arrival the way he records any settler: names, dates, section numbers. Then he describes the people, and the writing changes.

The peculiar characteristic of the church is a literal observance of every injunction of the Scriptures, as they understand them.

And then this.

The natural grace and beauty of the person is altogether unthought of, or only considered as a snare of the evil one.

The praise in the same passage runs the same way. A marked degree of morality pervades this people, prudent, frugal and successful, and the chapter says what the approval is for: they allow none of their members to depend upon the county for support.

The 1920 account of these churches carries a different name. Ira Ford signed most of his two volumes and three sections carry somebody else's byline. This one is signed S. E. Weaver, and the record holds almost nothing about him except one line in a Newbury family's biography, where he is the husband of a daughter of that family. She had died by 1920. Her parents were members of the Amish Mennonite Church.

Where Rerick wrote that higher studies were considered useless, Weaver writes that education beyond the primary grades is strenuously opposed as worldly evil. The same fact, and one of them is reporting what the church holds.

He begins by sorting out the names.

The names Mennonite, Amish, and Amish-Mennonite have been somewhat confusing to people without.

To people without. Which is to say this publication, and the man who wrote the chapter before it.

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There is a third register in the 1882 book and it is the one the subjects paid for.

The biographical sketches were sold by subscription. Agents called on upward of three thousand persons in the two counties. Seven of the Newbury, Clearspring and Van Buren sketches record a man as a member of the Amish church, and in six of the seven it is nearly the last thing said, in a fixed slot with the same neighbours every time: the acreage, the money, the party, the offices held, then the church, then the children.

David Shrock came from Cambria County in 1846, was given three hundred and fifty dollars by his father at twenty-two, and by 1882 held property worth twenty-seven thousand and five hundred and twenty acres besides. He was School Trustee. He is recorded as a Republican. He owned a Bible over three hundred years old with an inscription written in 1634.

Frederick Sunthimer worked two years in a sawmill in Eden Township for a hundred and thirty-two dollars a year. He is worth about twelve thousand dollars, and is a Republican citizen of enterprise.

Joseph Borntrager served several terms as School Director and Roadmaster and was chosen administrator and guardian a number of times. Hooley in Clearspring served six consecutive years as Township Trustee.

Weaver's account of that church says no voting on political questions, hence no holding of public office.

Both are in the record and this piece does not resolve them. Either the practice changed in the thirty-eight years between the books, or the form these men filled in had a slot for a party and a slot for the offices a man had held, and it was filled in whether or not it fit.

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The books do not even agree about when it started.

The 1882 volume's Newbury chapter says 1844. Its Eden chapter says settlement there had begun before 1842, naming four men who appear nowhere in the Newbury account. Joseph Borntrager's own sketch says he and his brothers left Pennsylvania on the third of January, 1841, and calls them the first Amish settlers in this section, though he went to Elkhart County first and did not reach Newbury for twelve years.

Weaver says the Forks congregation was organised in 1842. Ford's own chronology, in the same volume, says the first Amish settlement in Newbury Township was in 1844. The county atlas published in 1893 prints the same entry, and Ford's chronology follows the atlas throughout, shorter and lightly reworded.

So the 1844 date stands in three books, and the third is repeating the second. Four dates, five statements that were arrived at separately, three books, and none of them anywhere notices that it disagrees with the others or with itself.