Economy’s reach touches even the Amish

I’ve been hanging around northeastern Indiana for the last several days, reporting for a travel story I’m writing about Indiana Amish country. Indiana is home to the third-biggest Amish population outside of Pennsylvania and Ohio, and, by all accounts, it’s a community that has grown rapidly over the last few decades. It’s also, relatively speaking, a rather wealthy Amish community.

Or, at least, it was.

Despite religious restrictions that basically require the Amish to live off-the-grid (no electricity from public sources, no telephones, no motor vehicles, etc. – with the odd exception), the Amish have thrived financially from a booming industrial economy around Elkhart and LaGrange counties, where most of the state’s Amish live. An Amish-owned manufacturing plant, for example, would have to generate its own electricity (as some furniture makers do). But there’s nothing stopping an Amish worker of craftsman from simply working at a conventional factory.

One big source of income for Amish craftsman has always been carpentry and cabinet-making. Ditto for cheese-making, quilting, auctioneering, confectioning, and – my personal favorite – baking. You simply haven’t lived until you’ve had a slice of Amish-made strawberry rhubarb pie, the likes of which I sampled two nights ago.

The real money-maker over in recent years, however, has been the RV and mobile home industry. Though the Amish are a traditionally agrarian society, population growth, changes in farming, and a family inheritance practice that over the years has divided formerly broad farmlands into ever-smaller parcels has made farming less and less sustainable for many Amish. In recent decades, working in an RV factory, or in any one of the numerous industrial businesses that support RV manufacturing – from maintenance to wood-panel-making – has been a major source of supplementary and primary income for Amish families.

But as one woman at the LaGrange County Convention and Visitor’s Bureau put it to me today, the region has “made the mistake our mothers all told us not to make by putting all our eggs into one basket.” Like Detroit and the auto industry, or Bethlehem, Pa., and the steel industry, this region is really a one-industry economy. There’s even an RV and Mobile Home Museum in Elkhart.

And, suddenly, no one’s buying.

That the RV manufacturing sector has plummeted since the recession hit is widely documented. A few local manufacturers have closed since last year, and lay-offs are pervasive among the survivors. Elkhart and LaGrange counties are now experiencing unemployment rates of about 19% — some of the highest in the country. That puts them just behind Detroit, which, at last count, was up to 22%.

As a result, the Amish in Indiana — who, given their communal and somewhat insular culture, one might have assumed should be better insulated than most — are seeing exceptionally hard times. Recent reports show that some Amish — who have long rejected state-sponsored benefits like Social Security as a matter of religious principal — are even collecting unemployment checks.

I’ve been around the Amish every summer from the time I was about 12 years old, ever since my grandfather bought a small fishing cabin in LaGrange county. But last night was the first time I had ever spoken at length with anyone from the Amish community. The occasion was a dinner at the home of one Amish family, the Mullets, who live just outside of Nappanee. They’ve been hosting communal, family-style dinners at their home for the last six years. The food was amazing, and for the second night in a row I felt as though I had eaten half my body weight in delicious home cooking. All for 16 bucks.

Merlin Mullet and I ended up chatting almost non-stop for four hours. A father of seven and husband to Mary Lou — who, along with the kids, was responsible for the delicious food — Merlin works days in a wood working shop. Business has waned lately because his company makes wood paneling for RV interiors. Business from the communal dinners first slowed when mortgage rates went up a few years ago. Just as things were about to pick up, gas prices spiked. Then the economy tanked. The family used to draw gatherings of 35 people with regularity. Now those numbers have dropped by about a third.

Things might stay difficult for a while. A rebound for the RV industry would be great for the Mullets, of course. But they also used to be one of the only families doing the open-home dinner thing. Now, because of the fallout, more and more families are making ends meet by inviting outsiders like me over to eat. According to the LaGrange County Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, LaGrange county has seen the number of families offering the communal dinners roughly double since last year.

If there’s a bright side to this, perhaps it’s in these small opportunities for new forms of cultural exchange. As more Amish families open their doors to tourism, some will inevitably see that as unfortunate. Based on my conversations, many Amish are ambivalent toward the growing need for tourist dollars (one Amish woman with whom I spoke in a bakery characterized the Amish relationship with tourism as “love/hate”). That’s understandable.

But, if done right, and with sensitivity, new opportunity for dialogue between cultures is usually a good thing. Perhaps that’s easy for me to say. But I think both Merlin and I enjoyed ourselves immensely last night. And that was something I dare say we might not have done not too long ago.

We stayed at the table digesting and drinking coffee well after the table was cleared, well after the other guests had gone. We talked about Obama and about cell phones (which some Amish, but not most, are allowed to use these days), and about how much less his neighbors seemed to talk to one another than they used to. I told him I knew what he meant – that I’d had neighbors for years whom I’d never talked to.

Modernity could be very isolating, we agreed, whether you were Amish or not.

We also talked about baseball. He told me he was happy to see the Indians “beat up on the Yankees” recently. I knew I’d made a friend.