Feature: Abner Comes Home

It was here, into this serene scene, that a man intruded seven years ago with a knock at the door. He introduced himself as a house painter new to the area. He wanted to work with Abner, he said, and left a business card behind. When Abner met with him later, the man revealed himself not as a painter, but as an undercover drug agent. The FBI and state police were investigating the Pagans, he said, and a name — or was it two names? — kept cropping up on their wiretap: Abner Stoltzfus. Now the cops wanted something from the Abners. Something dangerous.

In Amish culture, bishops and elders hand down all social perspective. They dictate how to dress, how to travel, how to work. That’s especially true when it comes to mixing with “worldlings.” For an authoritative view of the Abners and their place in society, I visited a farm belonging to Sam Stoltzfus, in Gordonville. He’s an elder in the community, not related to the Abners but familiar with their case.

From Sam Stoltzfus’s farmhouse stoop I could see the whole of the Amish panorama, surrounded by the ancient farmland. Geologists say it’s some of the finest in the world, a green patchwork quilt spread over the bedrock.

I knocked. “Yes,” someone shouted from within the farmhouse. “Come.”

Tourists love Amish furniture for its simple solidness, made with no more wood than necessary, hewn in the old ways. But the furniture is only an extension of the Amish philosophy; they eat, pray and speak in the same way, without a moment or word to spare. It makes for blunt conversation at the table. While Sam and his teenage sons slurped their soup, the elder asked in the straightforward Amish way about my church background. I told him I’m Southern Baptist, and wondered aloud how we, a Protestant and an Amishman, can have such similar doctrinal beliefs — the basic tenets of Christianity — and yet look so different and act so differently.

“Well,” Sam said, chewing his homemade bread. “One thing is, you believe in slavery.”

To even deny it felt guilty. “I do not believe in any such —”

“Oh yes you do,” Sam said. “You voted for it there at your Triennial Convention. You certainly did.” He smiled happily and continued with his bread. Later I looked up the Triennial Convention, and sure enough, there it was: held in 1841 in Georgia, where one faction of Baptists accused another faction of plotting against slaveholders.

Throughout the meal, Sam whipped the discussion through the centuries without effort or notice. It’s a curiosity of life among the Amish that time and distance seem to compress and elongate at turns, like taffy boiled down, then stretched thin. One Amishman — a gazebo-maker — once gave me directions to a meeting at the top of “Sheep Hill,” the first hill off a major road. I turned off the road and climbed the hill, higher and higher, a small mountain. But the place called “Sheep Hill” by the Amish, it turned out, was the small hump at the bottom of the mountain. When you’re gripping the reins of a buggy, time and distance take on a new deliberation. Same for when another Amishman, a farmer, told me he “kept in touch” with one of the Abners. He mentioned later that they hadn’t spoken in two years.

While short-term measurements stretch out, the Amish keep distant history tucked close. Sam Stoltzfus hastily crumbled a handful of crackers into a bowl of pink marshmallow cream and chewed his way through the sect’s history as though it had unfolded just before lunch:

The Amish trace their roots to 16th-century Zurich, he said, where a group of fiery students felt the Protestant Reformation needed to “get on with it.” The authorities chased them down and hacked them up, drowned them, burned them and cast them into prison. The sect learned to dodge cities and industry and stick to farming in the countryside. Cities and technology came to represent threat and danger, associations that linger with the Plain community even today.

“We wanted to be a little more separate,” Sam said, as though he had been in on the decision. “We are to be a ‘peculiar people.’ That’s what Peter told us, so that’s what we do.” He yanked a callused thumb over his shoulder, as if the apostle Peter worked at the next farm over.

Sam and his sons face a challenge. After the Amish sailed to Pennsylvania, a tradition formed wherein Amish fathers would buy their sons farms when they married and left home. But in recent years, they’ve encountered what Sam calls “the Lunch-Pail Threat.” Many people think of the Amish as akin to the Shakers, an all but extinct religious community. But since 1980, the Amish population in Lancaster County, including unbaptized youth, has leapt from 10,000 to 25,000. In the same period, farmland has grown scarce due to real estate development. The two trajectories are colliding: The Amish have a surplus of sons and a dearth of farmland to give them. So they have turned to other industry, from wooden toys to gazebos to carpentry. But such jobs bring young Amish men (toting lunch pails) into contact with worldlings, and since the jobs tend to be the type a little-educated man can do, they attract a gritty element. “So it was with the Abners,” Sam said. “But that taught us to keep closer to ourselves.” He seemed sad, and his sons listened quietly. “The Abners taught us a lot of things.”

“Oh man,” John Pyfer said, sighing. “They were so naïve.”
Pyfer is a Lancaster attorney who has represented several young Amishmen, mostly for drunken buggy driving and underage tippling. He represented Abner X. Stoltzfus in the drug case, and when he first met with the Abners, he said, “They thought of cocaine as something similar to drinking. When I told them this wasn’t just a fineable offense, you could have blown them over with a feather. They had no idea.”