Amish Craftsmanship

Told by an Amish guy:

There were a girl and a boy that were going with each other and the boy asked the girl if she wanted to marry to him.

She asked him, “Do you have any money laid up?”

“No.” he said.

“Well I think you ought to lay up some money first, don’t you think?”

“How much do you think I ought to lay up?”

“Probably $3000 ought to be enough.”

Nothing more was said about the matter until a couple months later when the girl asked, “Did you get any money laid up yet?”

“No.”

“Well, how much to you have?”

He stuck his hands in his pockets and pulled out $1.59.

The girl thought for half a second and said, “I think that ought to be enough.”

What has:

Four stiff standers

Four down hangers

Two lookers

Two hookers

One wiggly waggly?

We are surrounded by Amish settlements. If your knowledge of Amish comes from the movie The Witness, the documentary The Devil’s Playground and reality shows, you know as much as a Tibetan knows about American Baptists based on Hollywood movies.

“Amish furniture” is not a style like Shaker furniture. One Amish cabinetmaker invited me into his showroom. Most of the pieces were manufactured in Amish factories in either Ohio or Lancaster County. It was very nice and perfectly finished. In fact it looked just like factory furniture. The prices were quite reasonable.

One woman visited another Amish shop nearby. “I’d like an Amish Chest of Drawers,” she said.

“I’d be glad to build you an Amish chest of drawers,” said the Amish cabinetmaker. “But I have one question,” he continued. “Just what does an Amish chest of drawers look like?”

Amish, unlike the Shakers are more like Ayn Randian capitalists. They may approve or disapprove of your tastes, but they are happy to make whatever you’ll pay for. One guy complained to me that he used to buy Amish pies at a stand. Then he found out they were buying 5 gallon buckets of pie filling and mass producing their pies.

If there is an Amish furniture style, it would have to be furniture that the Amish make for and sell to other Amish. Amish house interiors are strikingly different than English households—big rooms, a coal stove in a large kitchen, big plain functional desks, cupboards and bentwood chairs and rockers and no fancy edges or ornamentation.

If you are interested in real Amish stuff rather than what people write about them, you won’t find it on google. It’s more interesting to read them than about them.

The Budget, P.O. Box 249, Sugarcreek, OH 44681 ph. 330-852-4634 publishes a weekly newspaper format “gossip” paper with news from hundreds of communities, plus ads, recipes, and information column. It’s worth subscribing for awhile. While most of the news isn’t that interesting, the contributors often write about amusing occurrences.

Pathway Papers publishes monthly and include Blackboard Bulletin for teachers and students, Young Companion for teenagers, and Family Life for Adults. You can subscribe to all three for $17.00 at Pathway Publishers, Route 4, Aylmer, Ont N5H 2R3. They’re short and contain moral true stories and fiction. Some of the writing isn’t that good, some is quite entertaining. Any of them are good for young readers.