Amish community relocates after nearly 65 years

A farming neighbourhood south of St. Marys saw slow but steady changes in the landscape during the past year as a long-established Amish community disbanded and dispersed.

Change came in the form of powerlines extended to houses where previous residents went without electricity, fence lines bulldozed and huge maples downed on the edges of woodlots or in shelterbelts.

In short, the neighbourhood has begun looking, little by little, like the surrounding farming communities where no Amish ever settled.

“It won’t be the same without them,” has been a commonly spoken refrain in the Uniondale/Wellburn area.

It wasn’t always this way.

It’s likely that, before 1959, nobody in what were then East or West Nissouri Townships knew anything about the Amish, a Christian-based culture with a shared history with Mennonites but who had split, under the leadership of Jakob Amman, from their more well-known and numerous brethren back in 1693.

Fleeing religious persecution (as opposed to the economic factors that largely inform their community-based decisions now), they followed a generationally repeated path of migration starting in Germany and passing through Poland, Russia, France and Switzerland, eventually landing in North America.

John Henry Coblenz, seated for an interview in early August on the verandah of the home that he and his wife and adult son subsequently moved out of en route to Aylmer, Ont., recalled the seemingly depressed nature of the local agricultural economy when the Amish first arrived in the St. Marys area.

“When we came here in 1961, there were eight different farms that we could have looked at to buy, all at a reasonable price, all within a four-mile radius,” he said.

The late Rufus Yoder detailed his family’s journey to Canada in his submission to a 2012 book compiled by the East Nissouri History Committee. Eight girls and six boys — the eldest aged 21 and the youngest aged one (Rufus was six) — arrived in Uniondale with their parents, Elmer and Anna, on March 6, 1959, during a blizzard.

“An older sister, Mabel aged 23, had already married and remained in Delaware.

“Our family had left a day earlier where it was warm and sunny, with our belongings packed in a semi-trailer,” Yoder recalled. “When we reached Uniondale, Dad stopped and went into Hutton Transport to inquire if the road to the west was passable.”

They proceeded with caution with a Hutton employee following behind, but soon became stuck. “I remember seeing the huge headlights of a Hutton Transport tow truck coming from behind and hitching onto our station wagon and pulling us out of the snowbank.

“Our family stayed that night at the home of Henry Hertzler. Three brothers Henry, Sam and Jake Hertzler and their families had arrived four days earlier from Pennsylvania and Maryland. Thus our settlement of the Amish community was established.”

David Graber, who moved to the area in the mid-1960s, was the bishop of the community’s church when the decision to disband was made just prior to the pandemic. It was a difficult decision, he stresses, in part because the neighbourhood into which the Amish immersed themselves became home to a greater degree than many other Amish communities he knows about across North America.

“We had a good neighbourhood,” Graber said. “Our children grew up with the neighbours’ children. And one thing I always thought was good was that we were accepted for who we are.”

In the early 1970s, the St. Marys area community even discussed splitting the local Amish church in two because the families were so numerous.

But, in a mirror image of the decision over 60 years ago to purchase adjacent farms in the former East and West Nissouri, the recent decision was also economical.

“When the price of farms was doubling in a short time like it was, we just didn’t see a future for the next generation to continue on,” said Graber.

He uses a German word to describe their philosophy of decision-making: “gemeinschaft.” There’s no direct English translation but it refers to a morality that puts the community’s well-being first, as opposed to the individual-first approach that might be labelled libertarianism or the state-first approach that might be labelled socialism.

Since the 17th century, Amish people have been on the move. It should come as no surprise to either Amish or non-Amish residents of the Wellburn/Uniondale neighbourhood that farm financial pressures and a “gemeinschaft” approach to decision-making have spurred yet another move.

Over half the St. Marys-area families relocated to two separate church communities in central Michigan. Others joined family members in Ontario, near Aylmer and Milverton.

Even the schoolhouse, transported onto its location west of Uniondale in 1970 after serving as a private home, continues its useful life. It recently undertook a two-day voyage north to the Milverton area and is being converted into a home for one of the relocated families.