Farmers can almost always use an extra hand or twelve come harvest time, so it has been a very long-standing tradition for young unmarried Amish men to travel around from community to community, helping with the harvest or just working regularly as a "hired man" for Amish farmers who needed that extra help. One of these young men came with a friend to the Amish community in Newton County, IN, where Bettie Anderson and her family lived, to work for a season. His name was Phineas Miller.
Phineas had been born in 1882 in LaGrange County, IN, about 150 miles north and east of Bettie's home in Newton County. His family moved north to White Cloud, MI, when he was a teenager, and, in the manner of Amish young men, he struck out to find work. Sharon Leichty found him in the 1900 federal census in Jasper County, working for his uncle as a farmhand. As it turns out, the Amish community in Jasper County actually straddled the line between Jasper and Newton Counties, so it was no surprise that in due time, Phineas found work in Newton County, where he met the young Amish woman he would eventually marry, Bettie Anderson.
Phineas and Bettie were married on February 8, 1906, in Mt. Ayr, IN. They set up housekeeping in Newton County, but Phineas seemed to still have an itch to wander that wanted scratching. The Amish have long been on the lookout for open spaces with good farm land so they can live, work, raise their families and worship in peace. At one point or another, they've established communities in most of the lower 48 states, plus Canada and Mexico. But not all of these new communities succeeded.
Amish historian David Luthy has collected some narratives of some of these unsuccessful efforts to establish Amish communities in his The Amish in America: Settlements that Failed, 1840 - 1960. He documents the recruitment of the Amish by land speculators this way:
"Through advertisements placed in the The Sugarcreek Budget, [t]he A.H. Maas Company of Minneapolis, Minnesota promoted Amish migration to Cheyenne County. It owned thousands of acres along the Union Pacific Railroad which it offered a $12 to $18 an acre. During 1909 it sponsored special excursions on the first and third Tuesday of each month for homeseekers to investigate the land. The train fare was at a reduced rate and was refunded to anyone who purchased land. A large advertisement appeared in the August 5, 1909 issue of The Sugarcreek Budget, inviting settlers to 'Go To The New AMISH MENNONITE COLONY Located Near Wildhorse, Cheyenne Co. IN EASTERN COLORADO: Fine Alfalfa and Mixed Farm Lands.' It went on to state: 'Remember we are the owners of this land and have set aside a large tract especially for the Amish Mennonites...'" (p.55)and went on to name some of the Amish who had already moved there. I don't know exactly how the land speculators figured out that the Amish were a crop waiting for harvest, but they did and they were. The siren call of cheap farmland elsewhere reached Newton County and Phineas's ear, and the song struck a chord with Phineas's urge to move on. I presume that between word of mouth and the Budget, Phineas got the idea it was time to head west.
It was only after his and the other families got to Cheyenne County that they found out that they had been...um..."misled" by the land companies. Perhaps not quite as baldly as Erik the Red had misled folks back in Iceland with his notion that the ice-covered island he discovered should be named "Greenland" in order to entice settlers to move there, but misled nonetheless.
Sources:
Sharon Julia Leichty, History of the Jasper-Newton County, Indiana Amish Settlement and the Miller Amish Cemetery. (Argos, IN: 2011)
David Luthy, The Amish in America: Settlements that Failed, 1840 - 1960. (Pathway Publishers: 1991).
No comments:
Post a Comment