To people without

In 1844 Amish families out of Somerset County, Pennsylvania, bought farms in the southwest corner of Newbury Township. By 1881 the county history reported that they occupied almost the whole of it.

Then that history describes them, and the prose changes.

The arrival is written the way the volume writes any settler, in names and dates and section numbers. The description is written from outside.

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

No meeting houses; they met in the members' homes. No written creed. Feet washing at the meetings. No ornament of any kind on the person, no paint or plaster in the houses, no bright colour on the buildings. Hooks and eyes rather than buttons, because buttons were under the ban. German spoken at home. Lightning rods forbidden for a time.

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.

That is a man explaining what these people fail to see. The chapter is signed by Dr. John H. Rerick, a LaGrange physician who wrote eight of the volume's chapters and owned the county's newspaper.

The praise in the same passage is in the same voice. 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.

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Thirty-eight years later the county got a second history, and the chapter on these churches carries somebody else's name.

Ira Ford's 1920 volumes cover four counties and Ford signed most of it. Three sections carry another byline, and one of them is the account of the Amish and Mennonite churches. It is signed S. E. Weaver.

He opens 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.

The record holds almost nothing about him. There is no biography of him in either volume and no note from the publishers explaining who he was, which the third outside contributor got. His name appears once more in the whole set, in a Newbury family's biography, as the husband of a daughter of that family. She had died by 1920, and her parents were members of the Amish Mennonite Church.

So: a man married into a Newbury Amish Mennonite family, writing the county's account of those churches. Whether he was of the community or beside it, the record does not say.

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What he wrote is a different kind of document.

He traces the split.

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.

He is precise about what the words mean now.

In LaGrange County the name Amish is now correctly applied only to the "Hook and Eye" people who hold their services in private houses.

He counts thirteen congregations of Amish and Mennonites across four townships. Separately, about eighteen hundred Amish members. He follows the congregation at the Forks, the first of the seven Amish churches organised in the county, through four divisions: the Yoder district in 1866, North Barrens in 1876, Clearspring in 1881, Honeyville in 1901, each with its bishops named and dated.

He describes the practice the way the community would describe it. Hooks and eyes on coats and vests, capes on the overcoats, no figured goods. White caps on the women at all times, black ones for unmarried girls during services. Services every two weeks in the homes, with dinner served. German maintained deliberately, though almost none of them was foreign born and the ministers had been schooled in English. No automobile, no electric light, no tractor, no telephone.

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.

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And Weaver names the thing Rerick never does.

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.

Oaths refused and affirmations given instead. No life insurance and no secret societies.

Rerick's 1882 volume contains the word non-resistant exactly once, and it describes a Free-Will Baptist elder at Lexington who left his church over anti-slavery.

It also contains this, in Rerick's chapter on the county in the Civil War, in the militia return of October 1862.

conscientiously opposed to bearing arms, 91

Ninety-one men, in a table, between the exempts and the total subject to draft. Eleven thousand words on this county's war, and the word Amish appears in none of them.

The same man wrote both chapters.

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There is one more register in the 1882 book, and it is the one the subjects paid for.

The biographical sketches were sold. Upward of three thousand persons were called upon in the two counties, and the agents wrote down what those people told them. 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.

It sits 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, who 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 and his wife are members of the old-school Amish church. He owns 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 and his wife are members of the Amish church. He is worth about twelve thousand dollars, and is a Republican citizen of enterprise.

Joseph Borntrager left Somerset County on the third of January, 1841, with two brothers, and reached Newbury in February of 1853. His son Eli was the first Omish child born in the county, in the volume's own spelling. He served several terms as School Director and Roadmaster and has been chosen administrator and guardian a number of times.

Hooley in Clearspring served six consecutive years as Township Trustee.

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

The sketches say Republican, School Trustee, School Director, Roadmaster, Township Trustee for six consecutive years.

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 two books disagree about when it started, too.

Battey's Newbury chapter says 1844. Battey's Eden chapter says the 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 in 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, as an extension of the church in Elkhart County.

And Ford's own chronology, in the same volume as Weaver, says the first Amish settlement in Newbury Township was in 1844.

Four dates, six statements, two books, and neither book anywhere notices that it disagrees with the other or with itself.