How did hundreds of ‘Old Order’ Amish wind up in Minnesota’s Driftless Area?

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HARMONY, MINN. – Eddie Swartzentruber’s childhood growing up in Minnesota’s Driftless Area was different than many of his “worldly” neighbors.

There was no TV or video games — or even electricity, for that matter.

Most days were instead spent doing household chores by hand, following the Twins box score in the newspaper and ignoring any outside pressures about how to be a kid.

It wasn’t a bad way to grow up, Swartzentruber remembers.

“In a lot of ways, I was sheltered from a lot of the traumatic events that young kids deal with today,” he said.

Swartzentruber, who now answers questions on social media about his experience growing up Amish, was raised in a settlement in Fillmore County, an hour southeast of Rochester. The community is the largest Amish settlement in Minnesota — and one of the most conservative of its kind in the country.

After spending years driving through the region for work, David Campbell began to wonder why and when the Amish selected this sliver of southeast Minnesota to call home. He turned to Curious Minnesota, the Strib’s reader-driven reporting project, to find answers.

“I used to go through there and there were always horse and buggies all over the place,” Campbell said. “And I have always been curious as to why they picked that spot all those years ago.”

The Amish families whose farms dot these rolling hills were drawn to the area’s abundant and fertile farmland in the 1970s. They sought to leave crowded settlements in other states and were searching for a place to preserve their way of life.

The history of the Amish dates back more than 300 years. The group was formed when a sect of Anabaptist Christians broke away from Mennonites over disagreements about how to adapt to modern times.

Despite their differences, however, both groups continued to face religious persecution in Europe. By the 18th century, Amish and Mennonites began migrating to America in search of religious freedom.

After settling mostly in Pennsylvania — still home to the largest Amish population in the country — settlers continued to make their way west into Ohio and Indiana. But by the second half of the 20th century, many of the settlements had become overcrowded by Amish standards.

“It was becoming like a city out there in Ohio,” recalled Fannie Miller, an Amish quilter whose family was part of the wave of settlers to Minnesota.

Four Amish men first came in 1973 from Ohio to the Fillmore County town of Harmony in pursuit of affordable land, local historian Amy Jo Hahn wrote in a Minnesota Historical Society article. They liked what they found, including small farms with good soil that were going for $300 to $700 an acre, and natural springs.

By 1974, the first Amish families began to make their way to the Harmony area. In the five decades since the Amish arrived in southeast Minnesota, the community has grown to about 800 people.

Today, it’s one of 25 settlements in Minnesota, with other clusters having formed farther south along the Iowa border and in Todd County, in the central part of the state.

Just as the Amish split with the Mennonites centuries back, the Amish today continue to grapple with how to navigate the modern world.

While some Amish residents in places like Lancaster, Penn., have gone as far as to open restaurants and ride e-bikes, the Amish in Harmony have been more reluctant to modernize.

That’s because they adhere to the “Old Order” way of life. That means no electricity, no cars and no attending public school.

The Amish here are also expected to follow strict rules regarding their appearance, with women required to tuck their hair under a prayer cap and men required to grow a beard out once married.

“Sameness is very important to the Amish,” said Rich Bishop, the longtime owner of Amish Tours of Harmony. “They don’t believe anyone should be better than anyone else. So, they all have to follow the same rules, no matter if you’re a bishop or a farmer or a construction worker.”

While some Amish traditions, like holding church services in people’s homes rather than in a centralized location, have held up for centuries, other rules are becoming more and more difficult to follow.

Even in the Old Order world of Fillmore County, stationary gas engines are becoming more common on Amish farmsteads as families turn to them to pump water into greenhouses and run woodworking equipment.

And because dairy farming is no longer considered as a viable way of supporting a family, many of the men are now used to riding in pickup trucks as passengers on the way to construction sites in the area.

Even cellphones and solar panels are no longer off limits in the way they were a decade ago — though both remain a point of debate among local Amish.

“Some of this stuff is quite contentious, and so it’s not always smooth sailing,” Bishop said. “It takes a long time. As you can see, even in the last 100 years they haven’t made a whole lot of changes.”

Despite efforts to maintain a private life, the Amish are increasingly connected to the greater community through commerce. The Amish in the area can now be seen in grocery stores, on construction sites and along roadsides selling handmade goods, such as baskets and quilts.

John Torgrimson, a former newspaper publisher who now writes for the Root River Current, has lived among the Amish for the better part of the past three decades.

He said that early on, some in the area had misconceptions about who the Amish were. They also were concerned about them buying up land.

But over time, he said, the Amish and the “English” — the term used by the Amish to refer to their non-Amish neighbors — have mostly learned to coexist.

“They enhance the area,” he said, pointing to the number of local Amish shops and bakeries.

For his part, Swartzentruber, 28, has adapted to life among the “English.”

He left his Harmony Amish community about a decade ago with a dream of traveling the world. He still sees many positives, though, in the slow pace of Amish life he left behind, and its insulation from public pressure.

He visits family and friends back home “who continue to live Amish and are actually very happy,” he said. “Some of the rules nag them a bit, but they’ll put up with it for the lifestyle.”

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