Before dawn on a back road outside Bird-in-Hand, you hear it before you see it. The metronome of hooves on tar. The lantern swinging on the back of a black box-buggy. A farm window glowing yellow across a field of corn shocks. Lancaster County in the half-light is the oldest Amish settlement in the Americas, and it has been waking up like this since the 1730s.
The Place
Lancaster County sits in southeastern Pennsylvania, about 60 miles west of Philadelphia and 30 miles southeast of Harrisburg. The land rolls in long limestone ridges, fed by Pequea and Mill Creek, with topsoil so deep that early settlers called it the garden of the colonies.
The Amish communities cluster east of the city of Lancaster, in a band of small towns and townships strung along Old Philadelphia Pike (PA 340) and Route 30. Intercourse, Bird-in-Hand, Paradise, Gordonville, Strasburg, Leola, Ronks. White clapboard farmhouses with green shades. Hex-signed barns. Roadside stands selling shoofly pie and pretzels under hand-lettered signs.
The Lancaster settlement is not a single village. It is a network of church districts, each roughly 25 to 35 families, stitched together by horse-and-buggy range. According to the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, by 2025 the Lancaster settlement counted 267 church districts and roughly 44,000 Amish residents. It is the largest single Amish settlement in the world.
How It Became Amish
The 1693 Split in the Alps
The Amish are an Anabaptist Christian community, born from a schism within the Swiss Mennonites in 1693. The break was led by an elder named Jakob Ammann, a tailor and minister from the canton of Bern who had moved north into the Alsace, where Swiss Anabaptist refugees had been settling for decades to escape persecution.
Ammann wanted stricter church discipline. He pressed for foot washing at communion, twice-yearly communion services, and above all the Meidung, the practice of shunning members who had been placed under the ban. The Swiss Brethren in the Emmental refused to go that far. By 1697 the two sides had separated. Ammann’s followers became known as Amish.
For the next thirty years the Amish remained a small, harassed community scattered through the Alsace, the Palatinate and parts of Switzerland. They worked rented land, kept to themselves, and watched neighbours lose farms to war and tax.
William Penn’s Invitation
Across the Atlantic, William Penn was advertising. His colony, granted by Charles II in 1681, promised something almost unknown in Europe: freedom of worship for any peaceable Christian. Penn’s agents toured the Rhine Valley with pamphlets in German, recruiting Quakers, Mennonites, Moravians and Amish to the new province.
The first Amish families crossed in the 1710s and 1720s, landing at Philadelphia and pushing inland along the Conestoga Wagon Road. The earliest documented Amish settlement was at Northkill, in what is now Berks County, organised by 1740. From Northkill, families moved south and west into the limestone country that became Lancaster County.
Lancaster Takes Root
By the 1730s Amish farmers had established themselves in what are now East Lampeter, Leacock and Paradise townships. The names on the early deeds, Stoltzfus, Beiler, Fisher, Lapp, Esh, King, are still on the mailboxes today.
The land suited them. Limestone soil meant heavy yields of wheat, corn and hay without manufactured fertiliser. Streams powered small mills. The terrain was open enough to farm and rolling enough to drain. A family could live, marry off children to neighbouring farms, and bury parents in a churchyard within a five-mile circle.
A second wave of Amish migration arrived between 1815 and 1860, this time from Bavaria, Hesse and Waldeck, fleeing conscription and crop failure. Many of the newer arrivals did not stay in Lancaster. They pushed further west into Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, where land was cheaper. The Lancaster Amish, already settled on the best ground, stayed put.
The Old Order Forms
Between 1862 and 1878 the American Amish held a series of ministers’ meetings to debate revival meetings, Sunday schools, meetinghouses and dress. Lancaster’s congregations sided with the conservative bloc, refusing the new measures. The split produced what historians now call the Old Order Amish, and Lancaster became its centre of gravity.
The Old Order kept worship in homes and barns, taught in one-room schools, drove horse-drawn buggies, and laid out their farms so that life and labour stayed inside the community. The shape of the church set after 1878 is still recognisable in Lancaster today.
The Landmarks
The Amish Farm and House (2395 Lincoln Highway East, Lancaster). Opened in 1955 in a 1805 farmhouse, this was the first attraction in the country to introduce visitors to Plain life. The Amish themselves do not run it. They never have. But for seventy years it has shaped how Americans first picture an Amish kitchen, an Amish bedroom, an Amish barn.
Plain & Fancy Farm (3121 Old Philadelphia Pike, Bird-in-Hand). The hub of the tourism economy that grew up around Lancaster Amish country in the 1960s, with a restaurant, a theatre, a homestead tour and a market. Plain & Fancy sits between Bird-in-Hand and Intercourse on the road most Amish families use to reach Lancaster.
Mennonite Life Museum (2215 Millstream Road, Lancaster). Formerly the Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society, founded in 1958. Its archives hold three centuries of Amish and Mennonite records: family genealogies, deeds, ministers’ books, photographs and quilts. For a Lancaster Amish descendant trying to trace a line back to the Alsace, this is the room where the trail starts.
Gordonville Print Shop (located off Stumptown Road, Gordonville). A small Amish-owned printer that supplies the community’s own books: the Ausbund hymnal still sung in worship, school readers, family genealogies, the Pathway magazines. The press is one of the few enterprises in the county that is by and for the Amish, with little non-Amish presence.
Strasburg Rail Road and the surrounding farmland (Route 741, Strasburg). The country’s oldest continuously operating short-line railroad, opened in 1832, still runs steam trains between Strasburg and Paradise. The track cuts straight through working Amish farms. From the carriage you watch teams of mules pull cultivators across fields that have been farmed in the same family for two centuries.
Roots Country Market and Auction (705 Graystone Road, Manheim). Open Tuesdays since 1925. Amish and non-Amish farmers bring produce, livestock, dry goods and quilts. The auction barn fills before sunrise. The market is not a tourist set-piece. It is where the community actually trades.
The one-room schoolhouses. Scattered across the eastern townships, set back from the road, small, white, with a hand-pump and a bell tower. There are more than 200 Amish parochial schools in Lancaster County, each one built and staffed by the surrounding church district. They run through eighth grade. After that, children enter the family economy, full time.
Where They Came From
The Lancaster Amish trace their families to a narrow band of country between the Swiss Emmental, the Alsace and the German Palatinate. Their ancestors were Swiss Anabaptists who, after the 1525 Reformation in Zurich, refused infant baptism and were hunted from canton to canton by both Catholic and Protestant authorities.
Many of those families had already been pushed north into the Alsace and the Palatinate before Jakob Ammann’s 1693 reform. Towns and villages like Heidolsheim, Markirch and Steinseltz turn up again and again in early Lancaster church records. So do places further east in the Palatinate, near Mannheim and Worms, where landlords welcomed the Anabaptists for their farming skill if not their faith.
The language they brought with them was a Rhineland German dialect, mixed with bits of Alsatian and Swiss German. In Pennsylvania it kept evolving in isolation, and the descendants now call it Pennsylvania Dutch, the language still spoken at Amish kitchen tables in Lancaster today. Worship is in a more formal Standard German. English is learned at school.
Lancaster Amish Today
The community is not shrinking. It is multiplying, and that is the single most surprising fact about Plain Lancaster. Amish families have an average of six or seven children, and roughly 85 percent of those children are baptised and stay in the church. Population doubles roughly every twenty years.
The pressure is on land. A 100-acre Lancaster County farm now sells for well over a million dollars, beyond the reach of most young Amish couples. Districts have responded in two ways. Some sons buy small shops or carpentry businesses and keep a few acres for a garden. Others leave Lancaster entirely, moving west into Adams, Bedford, and Mifflin counties in Pennsylvania, or south into Kentucky and Tennessee, where farmland is still cheap enough to start out on.
The Ordnung, the unwritten rule that governs daily Amish life, has not stood still either. It is renegotiated district by district, year by year. Battery-powered tools are allowed in many shops. Bottled-gas refrigerators are common. Cell phones, kept in a barn or a phone shanty rather than the house, are a settled fact in most Lancaster districts. The principle is not technological refusal but separation from the world. The Ordnung tries to draw that line freshly each generation.
Tourism remains the loudest tension. Roughly 11 million visitors come to Lancaster County each year. Most of the businesses with the word Amish in the name are not owned by Amish people. Plain & Fancy Farm, the Amish Farm and House, Sight & Sound Theatre, the buggy rides on Old Philadelphia Pike. The community tolerates the trade because it puts dollars into the surrounding economy and keeps the farmland from being subdivided. But the families themselves stay back from the lens. They do not pose for photographs. They do not give interviews to camera crews. They are not, in their own self-understanding, a heritage industry. They are a church.
What you find in Lancaster today, if you go on a weekday morning before the tour buses arrive, is what was there in 1740. A family in a kitchen by lamp-light. A team of Belgian horses in a field. A child walking to a one-room school with a lunch tin. Three centuries of continuity, made not by museum design but by a community that chose, again and again, the same small disciplines.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the Amish settle in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania?
The Amish settled in Lancaster County because William Penn’s colony offered religious freedom and rich limestone farmland at a price European Anabaptists could afford. Amish families began arriving in the 1710s and 1720s, with the first Lancaster County settlements established by the 1730s in what are now East Lampeter, Leacock and Paradise townships.
How many Amish live in Lancaster County today?
According to the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, the Lancaster settlement counts roughly 44,000 Amish residents across 267 church districts as of 2025. It is the largest single Amish settlement in the world, ahead of Holmes County, Ohio.
Where did the Lancaster County Amish come from in Europe?
The Lancaster Amish descend from Swiss Anabaptists who, by the early 1700s, had been pushed north into the Alsace and the German Palatinate. The 1693 reform led by Jakob Ammann produced the Amish church in that border country. Early Lancaster families trace their roots to villages in the Emmental, the Alsace around Heidolsheim and Markirch, and the Palatinate near Mannheim and Worms.
What language do the Lancaster Amish speak?
At home, the Lancaster Amish speak Pennsylvania Dutch, a Rhineland German dialect that has evolved in Pennsylvania since the 18th century. Worship is conducted in Standard German, particularly when reading from the Bible and the Ausbund hymnal. English is taught at school and used in business with non-Amish neighbours.
What is the Amish Ordnung?
The Ordnung is the unwritten code of conduct that governs each Amish church district, covering dress, technology, transport and church discipline. It is reviewed twice a year before communion and can change district by district. The Lancaster Ordnung is what produces the distinctive Plain clothing, horse-and-buggy transport and rejection of public-grid electricity that visitors see in the county.
What is Rumspringa?
Rumspringa, Pennsylvania Dutch for “running around,” is the period in Amish adolescence between roughly age 16 and baptism, when young people are not yet under the full church discipline of the Ordnung. The popular image of wild Rumspringa is overstated. For most Lancaster Amish youth it is courtship time, spent in singings and weekend gatherings with peers from the church district. About 85 percent are baptised and join the church.
Can you visit the Lancaster Amish?
Visitors can drive the back roads east of Lancaster, eat at family-run restaurants and farm stands, and tour reconstructed homesteads such as the Amish Farm and House. The Amish themselves ask that visitors do not photograph their faces and do not enter private farms uninvited. Tourism is a feature of the Lancaster economy, but the church is not a museum.
If your family’s story passed through Lancaster County, or any of the Plain communities that the Anabaptists carried from the Alsace and the Palatinate to Pennsylvania, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the Emmental, the Alsace and the Palatinate, to Lancaster, to wherever you live now.