Amish Settlements across America: 2013

Abstract

This short research report is based upon previous editions of "Amish Settlements across North America," which was published periodically in Family Life. It accounts for new settlements founded since the last edition (2008), as well as settlements which are recently extinct. The information is presented in a series of six tables, including a list of all Amish settlements as of September 30, 2013 (Table 1). Table 2 summarizes the number of settlements and church districts in each state, while Tables 3 and 4 shows trends in settlement increases, decade by decade, since 1900. Table 5 is a list of settlements which became extinct between 2009 and September 30, 2013. Finally, Table 6 describes 15 facts about Amish settlements -past and present -plus, a projection about future settlement growth. We include a map showing the geographic distribution of settlements across Canada and the United States.

A Mid-Decade Update on Amish Settlement Growth

“…In addition, "…the settlement must forbid ownership of motor vehicles and use the name 'Amish'" (Luthy 2009, 2). This definition is both compatible with a sociological definition of community and consistent with Hostetler's (1993) description of an Amish community, Information for this research note is identical to data collection procedures as described by Donnermeyer and Cooksey (2010) and Donnermeyer and Luthy (2013). In brief, using Luthy's (2009) …”

“…Previous issues of the Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies (JAPAS) included articles pertaining to the demographic and geographic dimensions of the Amish (e.g., Donnermeyer, Anderson, and Cooksey 2013;Cooksey and Donnermeyer 2013;Donnermeyer and Luthy 2013;Donnermeyer and Anderson 2014;Donnermeyer 2015). Continuing this focus, the present research note offers a mid-decade update of settlement growth and dispersion.…”

Online Mapping Tools for Geolocating Amish Settlements

“…Figure 4). It was our intention to use these in conjunction with Amish ministers' residences in our study, but while we geolocated some 198 Amish schools in Pennsylvania (Figure 5), we failed to find schools in some settlements, especially in the northwest of Pennsylvania, where many Amish settlements are relatively recent (Donnermeyer and Luthy 2013).…”

“…Primary among these is the possibility that some of the geolocated households were misidentified, i.e., they are not occupied by Amish. The most likely cause of misidentification is where a household is in fact occupied by other plain people, especially conservative Mennonites whose settlements are intermingled with Amish settlements in many areas Conversely, while our primary data sources (Raber 2009(Raber , 2011 provide very comprehensive lists of Amish ministers, they are not complete (Donnermeyer and Luthy 2013), which will result in an under-documentation of Amish in some areas. Also, a small number of residences listed in Raber's almanacs could not be geolocated using our methods (around 20 in each state).…”

“…Past studies have often focused on locations and population estimates of each settlement, often at county or even state scales (e.g. Luthy 2009;Donnermeyer and Luthy 2013), which are sufficient for many fields of academic interest. However, these community scale inventories are not of sufficient spatial resolution for some analyses.…”