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.