Come down a back road outside Sugarcreek on a Tuesday morning and the first thing you notice is the sound. A horse’s hooves on warm asphalt. The metal-and-leather creak of a buggy. A man somewhere over the next hill calling to a draft team in a German that has not been spoken in Switzerland for three hundred years. This is Holmes County, Ohio, and these farms are the largest Amish settlement on earth.
Most people think of Lancaster when they think of the Amish. Lancaster has the better postcard. But the bigger settlement, the one that quietly overtook Pennsylvania decades ago, is here in the rolling Tuscarawas Valley, spread across five Ohio counties: Holmes, Wayne, Tuscarawas, Stark, and Coshocton.
The Place
Holmes County sits in the hill country of eastern Ohio, about ninety miles south of Cleveland and a hundred and twenty miles northeast of Columbus. The land is folded and green, cut by creeks that drain toward the Tuscarawas River, with dairy farms strung along the ridgelines and white-frame houses tucked into the hollows.
There are no Interstates. The settlement is laced together by state routes 39, 62, 60, and 557, and by the Holmes County Trail, a paved path with a separate buggy lane. Millersburg, the county seat, is the only town in the county with a working set of traffic lights. Berlin, Walnut Creek, Charm, and Sugarcreek are the other anchors. Most of them are unincorporated.
About half the population of Holmes County is Amish. That is the highest concentration anywhere in the world.
How It Became Amish
1809: A Swiss carpenter walks into the woods
The first Amish settler in what is now Holmes County was Jonas Stutzman, a Swiss-descended carpenter and sawyer born in 1788. In 1809 he walked west from Somerset County, Pennsylvania, claimed land on the rolling ground just east of present-day Walnut Creek, and built a log house for his wife Magdalena and their growing family.
Stutzman was the first permanent settler of any kind in the eastern part of the county. There were no neighbours for miles. He cleared trees, built one of the first sawmills in the area, and waited for his people to follow him out of Pennsylvania.
They did. Within a few years more Amish families arrived from Somerset County and from Lancaster: Millers, Hershbergers, Hochstetlers, Weavers, Masts, Troyers, and Schrocks. Most of those surnames still dominate the Holmes County phone book two centuries later.
Stutzman himself became one of the strangest figures in early Amish history. In his fifties he started dressing only in white. He wrote a booklet predicting the return of the Lord, built an oversized chair for Christ to sit in when He arrived, and lived out his last years known across the county as Jonas Der Weiss, Jonas the White. He died in 1871. He is the only Amish man ever known to have worn white robes.
The 1820s and 1830s: Lancaster looks west
By the 1820s the Holmes settlement was no longer a curiosity. It was a destination. Amish families in eastern Pennsylvania, hemmed in by rising land prices and by the slow division of farms among too many sons, looked west to Ohio and saw something simple: ground they could afford.
Ohio land in those decades cost a fraction of Lancaster land. A young couple could buy eighty acres in the Holmes hills for the price of a fenced quarter-acre back east. Chain migration did the rest. One brother came out, wrote home, and pulled the next two across.
A separate stream came directly from Europe. Swiss and Palatine Anabaptists, some of them never having stopped in Pennsylvania, sailed for Ohio in the 1830s and 1840s and joined the settlement straight off the ship. That is why Sugarcreek, on the eastern edge of the settlement, still calls itself the Little Switzerland of Ohio.
Why Holmes outgrew Lancaster
For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Lancaster was the bigger Amish community. Holmes pulled ahead in the late twentieth century, and the reason is not theology. It is land.
Lancaster County is hemmed in by Philadelphia exurbs, highway sprawl, and some of the highest farmland prices in the United States. Holmes County is not. Holmes farmland is still expensive by Ohio standards, but it remains buyable. Amish families have eight or nine children on average. With land to grow into, the Holmes settlement has expanded roughly four times faster than Lancaster’s since the 1970s.
Today the Holmes settlement counts roughly 39,000 Amish men, women, and children. Add the neighbouring Wayne County districts and the figure crosses 55,000. By either measure, it is the largest Amish settlement in the world.
The Landmarks
Behalt Cyclorama, Amish & Mennonite Heritage Center. 5798 County Road 77, Berlin. A ten-foot-tall, two-hundred-and-sixty-five-foot circular mural painted by the Austrian artist Heinz Gaugel between 1972 and 1992. The word Behalt means “to remember.” It walks the visitor through the entire Anabaptist story, from the first adult baptism in Zurich in 1525, through the martyrdoms of the sixteenth century, to the Amish wagons rolling into Ohio. It is the closest thing the community has to a national museum.
The Budget newspaper office. 134 N. Factory Street, Sugarcreek. Founded in 1890, The Budget is the Amish newspaper of record. Its national edition is filled almost entirely with letters from “scribes” in Amish settlements across the Americas, reporting weather, weddings, deaths, barn raisings, and which families are visiting which. For Amish kin separated by a thousand miles and a hard line against telephones, it is still the way the community keeps itself one community.
Heini’s Cheese Chalet. 6005 County Road 77, Berlin. Founded in 1935 as Bunker Hill Cheese by John Dauwalder, a master cheesemaker who learned his trade in Switzerland before emigrating in the 1920s. Three generations later it is still family-owned, still makes around thirty-six thousand pounds of cheese a week from the milk of two hundred and fifty Amish dairy farms, and still operates the sampling room where you can taste eighty kinds of cheese curd before lunch.
Lehman’s Hardware. 4779 Kidron Road, Kidron. Jay Lehman opened the store in 1955 specifically to sell non-electric goods to his Amish neighbours: wood stoves, oil lamps, hand-cranked tools, gas refrigerators. He died in 2020 at ninety-one. The store has since grown to thirty-five thousand square feet, much of it housed inside an 1849 timber-frame barn moved from Orrville and reassembled on site. Half the customers are Amish. The other half are off-grid homesteaders who drove in from another state.
Yoder’s Amish Home. 6050 Township Road 515, between Walnut Creek and Trail. A working hundred-and-sixteen-acre Amish farm that has opened its barns and two houses to visitors since 1983. Buggy rides, a one-room schoolhouse moved onto the property, and a frank look at how an actual Amish household runs. It is one of the few places where curiosity and respect can sit comfortably at the same kitchen table.
The crossroads at Berlin. Berlin is the largest unincorporated village in the settlement and the de facto downtown of Amish Country. Population at the last census was around 1,500, but on a Saturday in October the streets carry ten times that. The town is the place where Amish business, Mennonite business, and English tourism meet.
Where They Came From
The Amish are not one of the original Anabaptist groups. They are a breakaway. In 1693, a Swiss Brethren minister named Jakob Ammann pressed for stricter discipline among his fellow Anabaptists in the Bernese Oberland and Alsace. He wanted social shunning of the excommunicated, he wanted feetwashing observed at communion, and he wanted clearer separation from the surrounding world. The Swiss Brethren split. Those who followed Ammann took his name. They became the Amish.
For the next century they were hunted. Bern jailed them, Zurich exiled them, and even the more tolerant Palatine and Alsatian landlords kept them on short leases. The first Amish ships landed at Philadelphia in 1737. They settled the Lancaster country.
The Holmes settlement is the western child of that Lancaster generation. Most Holmes families can trace their line back to one of two doors: a Lancaster County farm in the 1820s, or a Swiss or Palatine village that sent a son directly to Ohio in the 1830s. Either way the road ran through Jakob Ammann.
Holmes Today
Holmes is not one Amish community. It is at least four.
The largest group is the Old Order Amish, the mainstream, plain-dressed, horse-and-buggy community most outsiders picture when they hear the word Amish. The New Order Amish, which formed in the 1960s, allow some compromises with the modern world: telephones in shared shanties, generator-powered tools, sometimes pneumatic equipment in shops. The Andy Weaver Amish, split off in 1952 over the strictness of shunning, sit between Old Order and the most conservative wing, and run about thirty church districts in the settlement.
The most conservative are the Swartzentruber Amish, who broke away in 1917 under Bishop Sam E. Yoder. Swartzentruber families do not run indoor plumbing, do not use the orange slow-moving-vehicle triangle on their buggies, do not light the buggy with battery lamps, and farm in much the way an Amish family did in 1880. Pass a Swartzentruber buggy at dusk and you will see only a lantern and the reflective tape required by an uneasy compromise with the Ohio courts.
Holmes Amish scholars at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies count as many as eleven separate affiliations operating inside the larger settlement. Most outsiders will never tell them apart. Inside the community the lines matter. Whom your daughter can marry, whose communion you can take, whose preachers you can hear, all of it depends on which order you belong to.
Tourism is now the third pillar of the Holmes economy, after dairy and woodworking. Berlin and Walnut Creek each get more than three million visitors a year. The Amish themselves are quietly ambivalent about it. Some families run the buggy-ride concessions and quilt shops. Others keep a hedge of trees between their kitchen window and the road, and ask only to be left alone.
The honest note: Holmes Amish farms face less land pressure than Lancaster’s, but pressure is coming. Sub-divisions are eating into the eastern edge of the settlement around Sugarcreek. Some young families are already migrating again, out to Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Wisconsin, and as far as Maine, looking for the next stretch of cheap ground. The pattern is exactly what brought Jonas Stutzman to Walnut Creek in 1809.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Holmes County, Ohio the largest Amish settlement in the world?
Holmes County overtook Lancaster, Pennsylvania in the late twentieth century because of land. Amish families average eight to nine children, and Lancaster farmland is hemmed in by Philadelphia exurbs and very high prices, while Holmes farmland remained buyable for longer. With room to grow, the Holmes settlement has expanded roughly four times faster than Lancaster since the 1970s.
Who was the first Amish settler in Holmes County?
Jonas Stutzman, a Swiss-descended carpenter and sawyer from Somerset County, Pennsylvania. He arrived in 1809 and claimed land just east of what is now Walnut Creek. Within a few years more Amish families followed him from Lancaster and Somerset, founding what is today the largest Amish community on earth.
What are the main Amish subgroups in Holmes County?
Holmes County contains at least four major affiliations: the Old Order Amish (the mainstream), the more progressive New Order Amish, the somewhat conservative Andy Weaver Amish formed in 1952, and the very conservative Swartzentruber Amish formed in 1917. Scholars count up to eleven separate affiliations inside the larger Holmes settlement.
What is the difference between Holmes County and Lancaster County Amish?
The Holmes settlement is larger, more recently settled, more diverse in subgroup affiliation, and contains some districts that are stricter than anything in Lancaster, especially the Swartzentruber Amish. Lancaster Amish, by contrast, are mostly one affiliation. The two communities share the same Anabaptist roots through Jakob Ammann, but their daily practices and Ordnungs vary.
What should I see if I visit Amish Country in Ohio?
The Behalt Cyclorama at the Amish and Mennonite Heritage Center in Berlin is the best single introduction to the Anabaptist story. Heini’s Cheese Chalet, Yoder’s Amish Home, Lehman’s Hardware in Kidron, and a drive through Walnut Creek, Charm, and Sugarcreek will fill out a long weekend. The Holmes County Trail offers a quiet alternative for cycling alongside buggies.
Where did the Holmes County Amish come from?
Two routes. Most families trace their American line back to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in the 1820s, when high land prices and large families pushed Amish couples west to cheaper Ohio ground. A second stream came directly from Switzerland and the Palatinate in the 1830s and 1840s, with some Swiss families landing in Ohio without ever stopping in Pennsylvania. Both streams share a common Anabaptist root in Jakob Ammann’s 1693 division of the Swiss Brethren.
If your family’s story passed through Holmes County, Walnut Creek, Berlin, Sugarcreek, or any of the Anabaptist settlements that crossed the Atlantic between 1737 and 1850, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the Swiss Oberland and the Palatinate to Lancaster, to the Tuscarawas Valley, to wherever you are now.