Shoofly Pie: Amish Historiography

We've been spending some time with the Cheesy Grits side of the family, so now it's back to the Shoofly Pie side.

I should first say something about Amish historiography. Because the Amish don't place a high value on the higher levels of formal education for themselves, they don't generally invest themselves in producing what the rest of the world thinks of as historical scholarship. (There is one notable current exception, David Luthy, although he also represents a different kind of rarity: someone from the "outside"—a Roman Catholic with a Master's degree from Notre Dame—who joined the Amish as an adult.) The lack of formal training emphatically does not mean that there is no interest in history among the Amish; rather, and for various reasons, they simply refrain from producing what academics think of as historical monographs. Modern scholarship about the Amish is generally produced by ex-Amish and Mennonites, with the late John A. Hostetler, and the still very-much-alive and prolific Don Kraybill amongst the leading lights.



Many Amish are on the other hand great collectors of family histories, and one of the ways that family histories and family stories are circulated, gathered, and preserved is through "circle letters."

A "circle letter" was actually an envelope containing a bundle of letters and a list of addressees. For example: suppose Abe and Lydia had four married children, several of whom lived a few hundred miles away. Lydia would write a letter setting out the happenings in her community and family and send it to the eldest child, along with a list of the addresses of the other children. The eldest child wouldn't reply directly to Mother Lydia, but would write a second letter setting out the news and events in their family and community. Then Eldest Child would take that letter along with Lydia's letter and the address list and put them all into an envelope and send the packet to the next name on the list. Each addressee would follow suit, and when the packet had completed the circle by returning to Lydia, she would open it to find letters from all her children with reports of the goings-on in their homes and communities.

But the "circle letter" didn't stop there: it would just keep going. Lydia would begin the next round by writing a new letter to catch up on everything that had happened since she had written the first one, and exchange that new letter for her original one, and send the packet on its way. And each subsequent addressee would do likewise.

Now take the idea of the "circle letter" and make a weekly newspaper and, presto, you have the Sugarcreek Budget, published in Sugarcreek, Ohio, since 1890. Correspondents from various Amish communities around the U.S. would write in to relate the latest happenings in their communities. A correspondent might write of the corn looking pretty good after a dry spring and early summer; of John Glick's horse that kicked so hard in the stall that it broke its leg and had to be put down; of Aunt Fanny in the hospital with gall bladder problems ("She had two spells before they took her in"); and Bishop John Stoltzfus's oldest daughter Sadie, the one who married Gid Yoder's Amos, had twins, but one of them is sickly; or of Jonas Blank from Kinzers and "Windy" Joe Miller's son, Omar, from Holmes County helping with Amos B.'s thrashing. Oh, and the tomato crop looks good this year.

The Budget was regular weekly reading around our house, primarily because many of the correspondents were from the Midwest, where my dad had grown up. It was his way of keeping up with what was going on in the communities of his boyhood.

But the Budget also had another function: it delivered Amish readers for advertisers. Now that may not seem like a large market, but given that the Amish had both a penchant and a need to find new places to farm and raise their families, there were lots of real estate speculators who traded on the Amish desire for land by placing their ads in the Budget, where they knew the Amish would read them.

I don't know how many of the settlements begun after 1890 were advertised in the Budget, but there was one advertisement that almost certainly caught my Grandfather Miller's eye. I'll write about that next.

To be sure, the modern-day Budget, linked to above, is not like the one that used to be delivered to our house. The modern one has pictures, including pictures of "English" (the Amish term for "non-Amish") and of activities that aren't part of Amish life as it was familiar to me.

Anyway, the back issues of the Budget turn out to be a quite useful if not terribly organized repository of information about persons, issues, and activities in various Amish communities across time. Both Sharon Leichty, whose work I have already referred to, and David Luthy, whose work I will be referring to in the next two posts, rely quite frequently on correspondents' reports from the Budget.