Ohio Amish Country Business

So we left the rolling hills of New York State, Pennsylvania and West Virginia behind us and crossed the great Ohio River.   My first impressions of the state of Ohio: countryside with gentle green hills well into spring.  This is fertile farming country.

We spent a very interesting week in a small RV camp near Cochocton.  The Colonial Camp Ground subsists on two types of customers: weekend campers and full time workers who conduct their business in the local area.  On the whole these were younger men and couples, who spent their working weeks based from their trailers. Whether located here on a permanent basis or moving to wherever their work takes them, I’m not sure.  They worked long hours and did not seem to have time to enjoy the campground, in the way the weekend visitors did.  Adults sat chatting around their campfires in big groups, whilst their children played volleyball, horseshoes, and a popular game we have come across but whose name we don't know, where bean bags are aimed at a single hole cut out of a tilted board.  It seems to me that for the workers, it’s a lonely way to make a living.

Cochocton is a fair sized town, with a neglected center but a relatively busy shopping district.  The street and store names are distinctly Germanic, a legacy from early settlers. 

Historic Roscoe Village, a popular tourist attraction separated from Cochocton by two convergent rivers, was once a thriving port town on the Ohio and Eerie Canal.  The canal was built to provide a network for transport and communication to this far flung uncivilized land during pioneer times. The restored village, run by a not-for-profit foundation, is a much cleaner version of what it might have looked like in its heyday, two hundred years ago. 

But the films, exhibits and interactive Living History buildings giving hands on lessons via guides who alternate their roles of smithy, broom squire, printer, weaver, kitchen hand, doctor’s assistant, school teacher, and visitor center staff, make for a very a pleasant learning experience.

Even when the canal was teeming with life, I imagine the majority of workers in this community making a living from hauling commerce would have struggled for subsistence.  Once the rail business offered transportation of goods and people in a much quicker, comfortable and cost effective manner, the canal and the village were doomed. 

We learned of another failed business in Millersburg, about 30 miles north of Cochocton. 

The Millersburg Glass Company started by John W Fenton in 1908 only lasted three years due to Mr Fenton’s poor business acumen, but it did leave a legacy of very unusual and collectable glass. 

Taking the manufacturing process used by his previous family business, Fenton Art Glass Company, he developed it still further to produce his unique variation of Carnival Glass – pressed glass with a pattern and a shiny metallic iridescent surface shimmer. 

Same pattern but differently pressed shapes

By adding colors and reusing patterns but pressing them into different shapes, the result was a more cheaply manufactured product than blown iridescent glass produced by his contemporaries such a Tiffany or Loetz glass. 

Having produced so little in such a short time, Millersburg glass is very collectible, with rarer colors and designs selling for thousands at auction.  I am a bit of a philistine when it comes to glassware, but the pieces I saw in the Millersburg Glass Antique shop in the town which had once hosted the factory, were rather lovely.  Unfortunately, living in an RV is not conducive to carting glassware. I tend to collect cheap and cheerful plastic ornaments.  Richard’s eyes told me he wasn’t interested in collecting any either, though the store owner told us that the local Amish will buy it to store in their chicken coops as long term investments. 

If you watched the film “Witness” with Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis, you will remember that the witness of the title was a small Amish boy who had seen a murder.  As Ford’s character offers protection to this witness, and slowly falls in love with the boy’s mother, the viewer learned about the strict conformist way of life of the Amish community. Since I first saw the film in the mid 1980’s I was intrigued by this religious group.  So you can imagine my delight when I heard that we were in Amish country.

I did my research.  The Amish are actually a splinter group from the Traditional Christian Church Fellowships with Swiss Anabaptist origins, which includes the Mennonites.  Richard and I had first come across some Mennonites when we were visiting state parks in Pennsylvania.  They are easily identifiable with their “plain” dress (long skirts, aprons and white caps covering uncut hair, for women; straw hats and beards without mustaches for fully grown men).  They value humility and a rural lifestyle, practice non-resistance and do not perform military service.  However, their other differing feature – “simple” living (reluctance to adopt the conveniences of modern technology in their everyday lives) varies a great deal between communities.

The Amish differ from the Mennonites, in that the leaders of each individual church district (group of 20-40 families) sets their own “Ordnung” (set of rules that must be strictly adhered to) and non adherents within that community groups set of rules can be punished by shunning or excommunication.   

Once shunned for their idiosyncratic lifestyle, both Amish and Mennonites have nevertheless become an integral part of their present day neighbourhoods, with many successful merchants distributing their food and rustic craft wares in numerous stores in the local area and throughout the USA.  Both are in great abundance in parts of Pennsylvania and Ohio. Richard and I couldn’t wait to try out some of their larger eateries and food-stores in nearby Holmes County.  With my German origins and their Swiss ancestry, I hoped to re-experience some of the tastes of my childhood. 

I did manage to find some locally produced thin pretzel sticks at Walnut Creek Cheese, which tasted just right.  This store is billed as a "highly experiential grocery adventure" in local tourist brochures.  It follows a no frills, low waste business model that reflects the simplicity and frugality of the Amish and Mennonite cultures. Buying top quality products in massive bulk quantities and then dividing those into smaller quantities in no frills packaging appeals to the locals and tourists who arrive by the horse-drawn buggy and busloads.

Whilst the good value cheese and meat selections were also very tasty, I was disappointed at the items in the local bakeries and on restaurant menus, which were very much in the American good home cooking tradition.  

It seems that even adhering to strict religious beliefs doesn’t stop change, commercial acumen, and the tweaking of recipes to suit local customer expectations!  It would be interesting to come back in two hundred years and see if the business model based on the simple rural self-sufficient way of life of the Amish has survived better than Roscoe Village or Millersburg Glass.