Gaus, Paul L.'s blog

On the Mt. Hope road, south of U.S.

The contrast of the modern on the old is quite high in Holmes County, Ohio, just like the contrast of black on white in this photograph. Here, the old world and the new operate side by side, Amish living separate lives, dispersed among the English of the county, and sharing the roads and towns as if there were nothing unusual about the contrast between the old world and the new. We who have lived in this part of Ohio don’t even notice the contrast any more. There seems nothing improbable about the seventeenth century and the twenty-first being interlaced.

Do you remember recess at school? Do you remember the swings? I do, and I remember how I used to pump those swings as high as I could go. Amish kids are just like that, too. But here is a pair of girls who have figured out a better angle on pumping a swing - one girl on each side, taking turns to pump from a standing position. I saw several pairs of girls work this swing that day, taking turns on their way back from the outhouse at the edge of the school yard. Kids at recess at a one-room Amish parochial school in winter?

In Holmes County, Ohio, the largest Amish population in the world can be found sprawled across the rolling hills and down in the narrow valleys that so much reminded the first Amish settlers here of their homelands in Germany. It’s a diverse Amish population, and we have everything from the most conservative Schwartzentruber Amish to the rather more urbane and liberal sects who interact extensively with the non-Amish, or English, population.

Courthouse square in Millersburg, Ohio, is often a setting used in my Ohio Amish Mysteries. On a prominent block in the center of town, there is a red-brick jail, a civil war monument, and the ornate sandstone Holmes County Courthouse, all surrounding a central lawn. I thought you would like to see pictures of these landmarks, and I have already posted a photograph of the jail. Here is one of the courthouse. They say that when it was first being built, you could see the gleam of the shiny copper top from the high ground in Salt Creek Township, twelve miles to the north.

In my Ohio Amish Mysteries, soon to be republished as the Amish-Country Mysteries by Plume (a division of Penguin Group USA), the old red-brick Holmes County Jail is featured prominently, and I thought my readers might like to see what it looks like. Here is a picture taken just a few years ago, after Holmes County moved its real jail to a modern facility in the countryside north of town.

We have had snow on the ground in northern Ohio since Christmas, and today we are getting another good dusting. It isn't as bad as last year - at least not yet. Then, we had over a foot of snow on the ground for nearly three months, and about a year ago in the middle of that, I was out in Holmes County to see how Amish people there were coping with the snow and cold, and I got this photo of a new parochial school on Salt Creek Township Lane 601, just south of Fredericksburg, Ohio.

In what has lately been a very hard winter here in Ohio, we got a break in temperatures these last few days, and I made a trip to Holmes County to see what the Amish people there were doing with the respite. In typical fashion, they were out using the day to good purpose, mucking out the stalls and loading up manure spreaders. Almost everywhere we turned, we saw teams hitched to red spreaders, walking slowly over the fields, pitching manure left, right and aft, preparing the soil for spring planting, or working over a field planted earlier with winter wheat.

If you’re like me, you are worried. Times being what they are, we are worried about the economy, we are worried about politics, and we are worried about global conflict. It’s an almost irresistible sense of worry that draws us to the news reports each day to learn what the latest crisis has been. Or to learn what has become of our retirement accounts. Or to listen to the politicians talk about what should be done to fix this or fix that. I think it is an affliction—this modern, electronic, hyper-sense of doom. And I often wish I were immune to it. Like the Amish are.

Where is Amish country? If you were to ask that question in Ohio, the answer would be Holmes County. There we have the largest Amish settlement in the world. In truth, this region of Plain People sprawls out over all of the adjoining counties, too, but Holmes County is the center of it. Its rolling hills and secluded pasture lands reminded the earliest Amish settlers of their lands in the foothills of Germany and Switzerland, and the first group settled here in the Killbuck Valley in 1807, led by Jakob Miller, who brought a group over from Somerset County in Pennsylvania.