An Amish Settlement That Didn't Last

Recently I did an ancestry binder for a young Amish dairy farmer who is a friend of mine.  I discovered that one of his great-grandfathers founded an Amish settlement.

My research for this binder coincided with my reading of a wonderful book called The Amish in America: Settlements That Failed, 1840-1960 by Amish historian David Luthy. The book, published by an Amish publishing house in Aylmer, Ontario called Pathway Publishers in 1986, turned out to be more than the story of 100 Amish settlements that didn’t last; it was also the most useful Amish genealogy book I’ve ever come across—a real keeper.  And lo and behold, there on page 36 was the story of the Amish settlement at Stuttgart, Arkansas, which was begun by my friend’s great-grandfather, a man named Noah Bontrager. 

I used to think that the Amish lived in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, with smaller settlements in a few nearby states like Michigan and Illinois.  But in truth, there are—or have been—Amish settlements in nearly every state in the union, as well as several countries in Central and South America.  Some lasted, but many didn’t, for various reasons—mostly because of cheap land that turned out to be poor for farming, or good, productive land with no economical way to transport their produce to market.  Or sometimes it was due to squabbles within the settlement, or just as often, the lack of leadership—which for the Amish, means a bishop, two ministers, and a deacon.  Without a minister, no church services could be held; and without a bishop, no baptisms or marriages.  A visiting bishop could do only so much for so long.  Without a ministry team, a young settlement would soon die.

But getting back to my story:  Noah E. Bontrager was born in 1874 in Lagrange County, Indiana and married Anna M. Yoder there in 1896.  They had seven sons and three daughters.  By 1916 he was a bishop in the Amish church.  By 1918 the family was living at the Amish settlement in Centerville, Michigan, where his WWI draft card says he is medium height and build with brown eyes and black hair.

Luthy’s book tells the rest of Noah’s story.  In 1927 Noah, age 53, led a group of seven families who left their homes and families in Centerville to start a new settlement in Stuttgart, Arkansas—most likely looking for cheaper land and milder winters.  The other six families were those of his son, Samuel; his brother, Eli; his nephew, Jacob, who was a minster; his son-in-law, Lawrence Yoder; and two families named Schwartz. 

Luthy says that their first winter in the south was mild, and their first spring was beautiful.  By May they had strawberries in their gardens, the roses were blooming, and peaches hung from the trees.  But this was followed by summer which were much hotter than they were used to—hard on the men, and even harder on the draft horses—and unlike Michigan, with its cool summer evenings, there was little relief at night.  Rain was sparse—until autumn, when dry weather was needed to harvest their rice crop—at which time the rain wouldn’t stop.  As the weeks went by and they waited for weather dry enough for threshing, more and more of their grain was lost to migrating birds.

In 1928, Lawrence Yoder lost five of his horses from sickness.  Then his wife had a baby who died, and the mother died soon afterwards.  When his young son Ervin died a few months later, Lawrence returned to Michigan.

In 1930, the settlement’s founder and bishop, Noah Bontrager, had a fatal heart attack; he was just 56 years old.  The following year, his widow returned to Indiana, where her beloved husband was brought by train and reinterred. 

The settlement didn’t last.  (“Failed” seems like such a harsh word!)  As Luthy tells it, the other five families struggled on, but as the Great Depression got worse, the local bank in Stuttgart closed its doors—taking the settlers’ money with it.  The five remaining families had not been joined by any new ones since they came 1927, and when their minister, Eli Bontrager, left in 1932, that was the death knell for the colony.  By 1938, the last holdout, Jacob Bontrager, had left Arkansas.

[Image credit: www.123rf.com – George Burba – used with permission.]

An Amish Tragedy

One of the saddest stories I’ve come across in my Amish genealogy research is the story of Jacob Lambright (1840-1881).  Here’s what I know from the census records and the book “An Amish Patchwork” by Thomas Meyers and Steven Nolt:

Jacob was one of eight children of Elizabeth Hupperich and Johann Peter Lembrich, a/k/a Lambrick, a/k/a Lambright.  (Those German surnames were often spelled a dozen different ways in the early days.)  After Elizabeth’s death in 1845, Johann left Germany with the children and settled in Tuscarawas County, Ohio.  Jacob and a brother ended up in Lagrange County, Indiana, where Jacob became a member of the Amish church and, in 1862, married Sarah J. Yoder.  On the marriage license his surname was spelled “Lambrick.”  By the 1870 census Jacob and Sarah owned a farm in Newbury Township where they lived with their three children, and by the 1880 census they were living on a farm in Eden Township with seven children at home.

 

 Here’s what I know from other online researchers (thanks to Rena Markley via Ron Lambright):

In the autumn of 1880, Jacob was helping to harvest grain at a nearby farm, bundling it into sheaves.  After a thunderstorm came and went, he went back out to set up some sheaves and was bit on the foot by a rattlesnake.  He was quite ill for a long time.  Eventually his wife brought him to nearby Wolcottville to spend the winter with his brother.  He came home in the spring, but continued to be in a deep depression.  One evening when it was time to come in for supper, Jacob told the hired men to go on ahead.  When he didn’t come in, and they went to find him, he was found in the woods, where he had hung himself, his dog waiting nearby.

I hesitated to write about Jacob based only on the stories told by others.  What if the suicide story wasn’t true?  But recently I was contacted by Dalonda Young, who was digitizing old records for Lagrange County.  She wondered if I’d be interested in the coroner’s report for Jacob Lambright.  Of course I was!  Here was the documentation I needed, and it meshed with the stories I’d heard:

 “Are you one of the parties who found the deceased?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Where did you find him?”

“…We saw him hanging by the neck in a basswood tree about 2 o’clock this 25 day of April 1881… He was dead when we found him.”

“Had his mind been affected immediately before his death?”

“Sickness disturbed his mind, and deranged him and made him do things that gave symptoms of insanity...  He would rather die than live…  He had been affected similarly during the winter of 1879-1880.”

Other witnesses, including his wife, testified to the same, with Sarah saying, “His mind was much affected at times, and then at times he seemed all right and rational.  When alone he would be worse…  He said he wished he was dead and thought he would kill himself in some way.”

What a tragedy!

I visited Jacob’s grave recently, in an Amish cemetery in Shipshewana, Indiana, where he is buried with his wife Sarah, who never remarried.  His father Johann is buried nearby.  Seeing his final resting place made the story seem more real, and even sadder.  But Jacob’s name is in the history books today as the father and progenitor of all the Amish Lambrights—now a very common Amish name in Northern Indiana.  Today, in the Lagrange County area, he has hundreds of descendants, both Amish and “English.”  His life was short, but his legacy is enduring. 

Jonas Stutzman, Amish Eccentric

It’s always fun to find a person of historical interest in a family tree, and even more fun to find a “colorful character.”  When I decided to do an ancestry binder for my main and original Amish friends, I found a man who was both.

These particular Amish friends have a history in Lagrange County, Indiana that goes back about six generations.  Like most Northern Indiana Amish, their roots trace back mostly to Holmes County, Ohio— which is presently the largest Amish settlement in the world, numbering around 60,000. 

But someone had to be the first Amishman to go west from Pennsylvania and settle in Holmes County, Ohio—and it happens that he was an ancestor of my Amish friends.  His name was Jonas Stutzman, but he was known in his later life as “White Jonas” (“Der Weiss” in German.)  Much has been written about him. 

Jonas Stutzman (1788-1871) was born in Pennsylvania and came to Ohio in 1809, where he married Magdalena Gerber and had at least nine children.  The 1850 census finds him in Walnut Creek, aged 62, living with second wife Catherine and the youngest four of his eight surviving children.  According to the German Cultural Museum there, Jonas built the area’s first sawmill and the area’s first schoolhouse.

In 1850 he published a booklet in which he claimed that God had revealed to him in a vision that “the time of the fulfillment of his plan with mankind is at hand.”  He said that Christ’s second coming would be in 1853.  So sure was Jonas of this fact, and so sure that he would meet Christ personally upon his return to earth, that he built a special chair for Jesus to sit in when he arrived!  (The chair is in a museum today.)

Jonas had other visions.  It was revealed to him, so he said, that the children of God should wear only beige, gray, and white—“the colors of eagles and sheep.”  Even after 1853 came and went with no sign of Christ’s second coming, he wore only white for the rest of his life.

Steven Nolt, in his book A History of the Amish, says that although the Amish church rejected his teachings, “White Jonas” Stutzman remained a member in good standing.  “His peculiar views and dress were not seen as a threat to anyone, for he never had any followers.”  The census records show that Jonas lived the rest of his life in Holmes County, residing with or near his son Daniel in his old age.

My husband and I recently had a chance to go to Holmes County and do some exploring for ourselves.  We saw the historical markers and how his memory and legacy is still honored there today.  He is remembered with displays at the German Cultural Museum and elsewhere.  His great-great-grandson, Larry Miller, dresses up as his ancestor and makes appearances and gives historical speeches about Holmes County. There is even a facebook page dedicated to him!

The View from an Amish Buggy

I’ve had Amish friends for a long time.  I took this picture from the back seat of their buggy—one of my favorite places to be...  When I first got to know my original Amish friends, their eight children ranged in age from two to eighteen.  Now the youngest is out of school (which means eighth grade in their culture) and the oldest has a houseful of children of her own.  Six of my Amish friends came to my wedding, and I’ve been to two weddings of theirs.

A year ago, I decided it might be fun to do an ancestry binder for my original Amish friends as a gift, so I asked one of their grown daughters for a few names and dates—and I was off to the races doing Amish genealogy.  I was worried about a few things, though:  (a) that it would be impossible to figure out which of the many Yoders and Millers and Bontragers belonged to which family; (b) that I would find lots of instances of intermarriage, which would embarrass them; and (c) that it would be boring—after all, how many Indiana farmers could I write about before I slipped into a coma?

All of these worries proved to be unfounded. 

As far as the common names—they were very creative with their first names, so that helped a lot.  In my friends’ family tree I found first names like Harley, Tobias, and Benedict.  And even if there were two or three Daniel Millers in a town, they never had wives and children with identical names.

As far as intermarriage—I was surprised how little of it I found—very little that was closer than five or six generations back.  (How many non-Amish Americans could swear to a certainty that they are not related to their spouse that many generations back?)  What I found was that the Amish moved around more than I thought.  Most of the Indiana Amish have their roots in Holmes County, Ohio, and farther back than that, in Somerset County, Pennsylvania—but my friends’ tree contained ancestors who lived in Kansas, Maryland, Illinois, and Michigan.  Also, a number of non-Amish family lines have married into the Amish over the years (examples: Whetstone, Lambright), which also kept the gene pool fresher.

As far as being boring—in genealogy there’s always something new to find, always another bend in the road...  And even the Amish have a few skeletons in their closets.  There’s “White Jonas,” for example—but that’s a story for another day.  


Postscript, 2023:  I wrote this post in 2013...  I live here now, and have lots more Amish friends, and my Amish family tree now holds over 22,000 people (and growing)!

See also:  My Amish blog, "My Amish Indiana"