1951 Animal Friends and Visitors

1951  Animal Friends and Visitors. Buster, Patsy, and Sally. Sunday fellowship meetings at Beechvale; A.A. M. becomes associate editor of Herald der Wahrheit; Andrew goes to second Amish Mission Conference at Nottawa, Michigan, and visitors Russell Maniaci, Gertrude Enders Huntington, John A. Hostetler, and Alma Kauffman; James born on December 24.

Farm animals were a part of my life from my earliest memory, and I always thought I would be a farmer, mainly to be around animals. In the early fifties our main childhood animal was Buster, but I thought of him more as lower level member of the family. I don’t recall ever being without Buster as a young child. Buster was a large Collie and Shepherd mixed breed. He would eat meat, old bread and table scraps of all kinds, and I don’t recall that we ever bought commercial dog food. Sometimes we even handed him vegetables and fruit such as carrots or apples, and Buster would graciously nibble at them, not because he liked them, but simply to be courteous. 

For this against expectations behavior, Buster entered our family lexicon; to be a Buster was to do something out of family courtesy and loyalty, even though you may not wish to do it. Later in life I learned that dogs are actually omnivores, like humans, so maybe the vegetable eating was not that unusual but I still liked the thought. You could lie down on Buster and he was warm and friendly. You could even tell him your complaints, and he would understandingly and sympathetically look you right in the eyes; my father Andrew regularly addressed Buster as his personal friend: “He’s a dogatee, and a dogatee.”

But he was also our protector. When our neighbors Eli Weaver and later Bill Millers’ dog would come to our place Buster would fight with them in the lawn until our parents and the neighbors settled them down. Then both dogs like some unbeaten boxers would eye each other from their corners. Buster was our watch dog and unlike the rest of us, not a nonresistant pacifist; Buster believed in police work, if intruders, peddlers, or any unknowns, arrived and no one was at home, Buster would not let them on the porch. Even when we were home, when strangers came to our place and they appeared to be unfriendly and tried to come too close to us as children, Buster would stand between the stranger and us. The hair on the back would stand up, and you could hear a deep sustained low growl. If my Father or Mother told Buster all was okay, he would soon lie down on the porch and was asleep. But without my parents' approval, he would stand his ground, and I don’t know of any case where someone went past him. In fact, I don’t remember any time that he actually attacked a human either. But I always thought he would have if we would have been violated. He was our enforcer and protector.

And then sadly Buster became old, short-tempered and hard of hearing. One of the saddest days of my boyhood was when Buster’s eyes watered constantly, and he lost his mind and snapped at little James, or maybe it was one of the girls. Our parents said that Buster had to go. We took him back down behind the railroad tracks to near Salt Creek, and my father took the 22 rifle along, and that was the last day of Buster’s life. We buried him in the sand along Salt Creek. Several years later, I read the children’s novel Old Yeller (1956). I cried through much of that book because I was reliving our life with Buster. In the story’s ending, Old Yeller dies, and then a young puppy comes along, providing the reader some consolation. But for me, although we later had other good dogs, there was only one Buster who taught me about loyalty and mortality.   

Patsy was our pony, and certainly not a Buster. She was a cute, chunky Shetland pony who could be ridden or driven with our cart. We did not often ride her because when she walked, it was slowly, and her cantering was very bumpy, and when we finally got her to gallop (which she did not like to do), it was hard to keep her going. The additional issue with Patsy was her stubbornness; if she did not want to go, she just stood there until we really kicked her in the ribs or gave several cracks on her rump. So we would drive her with the pony cart which our father had converted from a low milk can cart. He replaced the handles for a pony shaft in which to hitch Patsy. Andrew never replaced the rubber balloon tires on the store-bought milk cart turned pony cart which became a church issue, bringing a visit from the Amish ministers. So Andrew explained to them that the tires were not air filled but simply rubber without inner tubes. That seemed okay.

Patsy then became our boys’ transportation, and we often took others on rides and drove her to town. On roads she was pretty good, but if we took her into a soft field, or near a plowed field especially, which was comfortable, she would simply lie down, even try to roll over, and refuse to go. One additional element of Patsy was that she was a mare, and we wanted to raise little ponies. We would take Patsy to our neighbor Albert Miller (Jockey Bert) who had energetic young studs who eagerly mounted up on Patsy, for me some early sex education. For all our efforts in getting Patsy bred with Albert’s little studs, she never took. Whether she simply was unable to have little ones or whether she was too fat, we were never sure. One final positive thing about stubborn Patsy which probably saved her long tenure during our boyhood: she did not kick or bite us.

Then there was Sally, a young Holstein heifer, which as a calf we trained to pull the pony cart. We trained and tamed Sally so we would put her in Patsy’s harness, and we would hitch her to the cart. She became somewhat of a town celebrity when we drove her through Holmesville's streets. Sally’s harness and cart career however only lasted for a summer; she soon became too big, was bred as a heifer, and had her first calf; she became a dairy cow. 

  

Other animals were what we called projects. These were small animals which we raised in hopes of making a little money. Our parents allowed us to have a number of rabbits, ducks and little chickens called bantams or banty. These projects did make a little money, but only because, as our parents generously reminded us, we did not pay for the feed. We often got the rabbits from the Rudy Coblentz’s because they raised quite a few. The Muscovy ducks we got at auctions and raised them. We did not have a pond for them, and Salt Creek was too far away, so the ducks would hiss and sit and poop in the driveway, making them probably Andrew and Mattie’s least favorite projects.

Rabbits and banty fowl could be sold at the Wooster poultry auction, or sometimes we would just take them to the Holmesville and Fredricksburg auctions. One time we took bantams to Fredricksburg for an evening auction, and for some reason, probably sheer mischievousness, we released the banty fowl to go wild on the Main Street of the small town. Days afterward when we traveled through Fredricksburg, we thought we saw a few of our fowl still roaming about the streets. It became a kind of brothers' joke to look for them--long after they had disappeared. Andrew sometimes good-naturedly complained about our projects eating all the feed, but Mattie was generally indulgent about them—as long as we helped her in the garden, with fruit picking and canning and in the house with drying dishes.

For my father Andrew this was a very busy year not only as a farmer and a bookstore manager, he was also writer and leader in an Amish mission movement. Already since the mid-forties, he wrote regular articles for Herald der Wahrheit (a German and English language fortnightly of the Amish and conservative Mennonites) and other magazines, and during this year he was named associate editor of the German section of the Herald, a position he would serve until 1956.

That spring and summer Andrew’s interest in greater Christian witness, personal Bible study and moral improvement among the Amish and especially the young people led him to organize Sunday afternoon Bible classes at the Beechville school house near Benton. These fellowship meetings were during the summer when the public school classes were not in session. We held them on the alternate “off Sundays” when there was no regular Amish church service. Andrew kept a small brown notebook of the classes, noting attendance, (often between 20 and 45) along with biblical text, and offering and some notes.

On August 12, Andrew notes that “some regulars not present today, and we miss them. Some opposition in evidence making us more humble and to pray more. Interest in general very good. Weather fair and warm. Amish boys playing ball on grounds caused some annoyance and concern.”  Andrew sometimes invited ministers to speak at these Bible studies, but mostly it was a movement of young adults with similar interests. I remember especially the Church and Sunday School Hymnal singing of the large and talented Joe and Susan Coblentz family's youth and their friends. They all seemed to have beautiful voices, matching the young women’s faces.   

Given this local background and his writings, Andrew was poised to become a key player in a mid-western Amish stirring, what was called the Amish Mission Movement. Strange as it may seem today, there was a period of time during the 1950s when the Amish sponsored mission projects, allowed young people to go to college, and supported mission and service workers as far away as Puerto Rico, Mississippi and Germany. To stimulate the movement they published a monthly publication called Amish Mission Endeavor and convened an annual national mission conference. The initial catalyst for the movement was a Detroit machinist and lapsed Catholic named Russell Maniaci (1895-1972). He had read some mainly inaccurate newspaper stories of the Amish and believed that he had discovered the true biblical Christians. As a step in their direction, he converted to the Mennonites, and moved his family to Elkhart, Indiana, where he became active in mission work. 

But as historian Steven Nolt writes, “Through it all he credited his conversion to the Amish—and therein lay his biggest disappointment.” If the inaccurate news stories of the Amish got Maniaci interested in the Amish, the truth of their disinterest in evangelical mission activity and gaining converts such as himself combined with the rowdy goings on of some of their young people made him want to convert them! He organized the first Amish Mission Conference on a Kalona, Iowa, farm August 6-8, 1950. Manaici publicized the meeting by sending out the Amish Mission Endeavor Newsletter to several hundred addresses of Amish ministers. The free periodical was not welcomed by all, however, and soon a note would appear above the address label, apparently expecting some opposition: “Please do not tear this until you have read it.”

 

But my father Andrew welcomed it, and by 1951, Andrew attended the second Amish Mission Conference held at the Chris Stauffer farm near Nottawa, Michigan (just across the Indiana state border from the Elkhart and LaGrange County), September 2-4.

Here Andrew was thoroughly at home, meeting people who had similar interests, many of whom already met him earlier in his writing, although his several names (Andrew A., A.A., and Andy) apparently could cause some confusion.  A.J. Beachy of Kalona, Iowa, wrote to him shortly afterwards: “I well remember the name. A.A. Miller. When I met you in the conference in Michigan, it was Andy Miller of Holmes County, and I never once thought that this is the same brother that we are appointing as assistant editor [of Herald der Wahrheit] until on the way home I looked through my book, and here I had his signature, A. A. Miller, Holmesville, Ohio. Then I wished I had taken a little more time to talk with you.” Beachy also reminded Andrew that it was his neighbor Joseph G. Gingerich (who had since died) who had invited Andrew to Scottdale, Pennsylvania, some four years earlier [1947] to work as a Mennonite Publishing House German typesetter and editor. 

The organizers invited Andrew to give an invocation prayer on Monday morning early in the conference, and he presented a talk on mission work at home on Tuesday afternoon. Anna Beiler’s notes in the Amish Mission Endeavor Bulletin quoted and summarized Andrew’s talk: “My thoughts have taken me to the two disciples who witnessed the transfiguration mountain top experience, but we can’t stay on the mountain. We must go home and start from there our mission work. Satan strikes at the home, at the church and at the nation.” Anna Beiler concluded that “Brother Miller gave out many good points based on Mark 5:19; 1 Timothy 5:8 and Acts 2:10.” By the end of the sessions, Andrew was named to an eight-member steering committee, charged with planning future conferences and also to give some organization to this mission movement.    

Andrew was stimulated in meeting like-minded Amish people from across North America. At the Michigan conference, people from seven states were represented. Andrew also enjoyed meeting people from varied background or as he and Mattie sometimes called them outsiders. The Italian immigrant Maniaci (we simply called him Ma-na-see) would have been of this kind of interest. But others less than full outsiders, also came calling at our house. The young Quaker and Yale graduate student Gertrude Enders Huntington arrived at Sugarcreek, Ohio, near Aunt Clara and Noah E. Miller where she would live several months at a time among Amish families over a five-year period till 1956.

Enders Huntington’s doctoral dissertation “Dove at the Window” was the result of her living and study. She would stop at Andrew’s bookstore and visit and often follow up with a letter, sometimes giving him additional historical background on a topic they had discussed—such as a quote by Menno Simons on “anti-secrecy.” She also included an order for a Dietrich Philip “Enchiridion or Hand Book” for one of her professors.  Roland Bainton did major studies on the Sixteenth century reformation and on the Anabaptists, as well as writing the influential Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace.  

Another visitor, not an outsider to us, was the young John A. Hostetler now at Mennonite Publishing House at Scottdale, Pennsylvania. Hostetler was also of Amish background, having grown up among the Amish of Kishacoquillas (Big Valley) of Pennsylvania and Kalona, Iowa, and had earned a doctorate in rural sociology at Penn State University. Now he was wanting to change public perceptions of the Amish community. Tourism was still in its very early stages in the Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, but the popular and garish books by Ammon Monroe Aurand Jr. focusing on the exotic customs such as bundling and hex signs were inaccurate and what Hostetler called “foul, filthy and obscene.” So the annoyed and offended Hostetler decided to write his own description of the Amish especially for the beginnings of the Pennsylvania Amish tourist market.

The next year (1952) Herald Press published his Amish Life, and others would soon follow, such as Mennonite Life and Hutterite Life. During one of Hostetler’s visits, Andrew especially told him about the Amish renewal meetings which resulted in Hostetler’s main description of the movement in the Mennonite community magazine called Christian Living. Hostetler’s article,  “God Visits the Amish,” was quite positive about this movement at this point. A decade later when Hostetler had done more research about the Amish and published Amish Society (1963), he saw this reform movement largely through the eyes of the traditional Lancaster Amish, something to be ignored at best, to be resisted at worst.

Another friendly visitor at our house was the Amish-raised journalist Alma Kauffman who was then working for the Wooster Daily Record. Alma was the daughter of John and Susan (Schlabach) Kauffman and had grown up in our area; I simply remember Andrew and Mattie calling her a writer and light-hearted (nix nutzich). Later she would go on to work for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. When she retired from journalism, she moved back to Holmes County, attending the Millersburg Mennonite Church where she was a good friend of my mother Mattie.

Finally, much of this chapter is about Andrew because he is the one who wrote and hence left a box of writings in the Archives of the Mennonite Church. This was however a busy year for Mattie because she kept the home and farm going when Andrew was away, and was a full partner with the children on the various projects. Even more, she was busy in caring for us little ones, and on December 24, she gave our family a fifth and final brother for Christmas. James was born.   

Much of this chapter comes from memory and family conversation. A full treatment of the total Amish mission movement is in Steven M. Nolt “The Amish ‘Mission Movement’ and the Reformulation of Amish Identity in the Twentieth Century,” in the Mennonite Quarterly Review (January, 2001, pages 7-36). Nolt’s work was largely based on the Andrew A. Miller collection of letters and publications in the Archives of the Mennonite Church, Goshen, Indiana. Andrew kept an excellent record of his writing, letters and activities during this period. The Beechville Bible classes notebook and quotation comes from this box as do references from Gertrude Enders Huntington letter. The annoying Amish literature which got John A. Hostetler going is noted in The Amish in the American Imagination by David Weaver-Zercher, Johns Hopkins University Press (2001). Hostetler’s positive description or the Amish mission movement appeared as “God Visits the Amish,” Christian Living (March, 1954, pages 6-7, 40-41). 

1950 Beginning School

1950  Eva Sterling Humrichouser, beginning elementary school,Christmas and Santa Claus, anxieties and my parents’ consolation, German measles, death of grandfather Martin Miller, April 1950; Holmesville classmates Benny Miller, Eli Hostetler, Patty Dilworth, Alice Ramseyer, Joyce Paulocsak, Roy Snyder, Sarah Miller, Mary Miller, Joe Gooding; Goodwill Book Exchange, Andrew’s publishing and piety.  

Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up

Foster’d by beauty and by fear;

Much favor’d in my birthplace,

I started school at the Holmesville Elementary school at age five with Eva Sterling Humrichouser; we called her Missus Humrichouser. School would begin early in September and I think my parents wanted me to go to school behind my two brothers, so we were always a grade apart. Eva Humrichouser was a patient and friendly, even jolly, woman. Having taught in a one-room school in the country-side earlier in her career, being a farmer’s wife, and having a son Sterling our age, she seemed thoroughly at home with young children. 

If Eva Humrichouser ever became angry with any of us, I do not remember it. She grew up in Prairie Township, had graduated from Holmesville High School in 1926 and was an experienced teacher by 1950. She, Roy Stallman and Nellie Siegenthaler all graduated in the same year (but the latter two are separate stories) and all three would be teachers of our family children by the time the three retired together in 1972.  Mrs. Humrichouser had already had my brother Roy in her class so she knew our family. 

Almost all of that first year I’m sure was a good experience, but I remember mostly the anxious moments. I may have been somewhat of an anxious child. For starters, I felt I was not drawing correctly a rabbit and a tree when we had art class. It was basically an assignment of drawing circles on top of each other for a rabbit and a tree with a trunk and a circle for a rounded and leafed maple type of tree. I knew I was not doing it right, would feel sick, lost sleep, and finally cried and one morning I went with my brothers as far as the railroad tracks. But then I shuffled around, told Paul and Roy I was sick, and turned around and went back home. I told my mother and father that I was not able to do my work at school and anyway, I was not feeling well with an upset stomach.

My father then went along to school with me; school was already in session when we arrived, and I took my seat while Andrew visited with Mrs. Humrichouser at the desk. It seemed like a long time. Then they came back to me, and both my father and my teacher assured me that my drawing was quite okay. Mrs. Humrichouser even stroked me on the head with her soft hand. It was an early learning that my anxiety could go high for no rational reason if not checked by other people. Later in life family members and office colleagues often helped me on this anxiety on a fairly regular basis, symbolically, stroking my head much as my first grade teacher and my father had done.

But there were other anxious moments. Another one came perhaps more at my teacher’s assumption about what would happen at the Holmesville School Christmas. Mrs. Humrichouser told us that Santa Claus would come to our class, and there was some feeling that he may be scary to me and the Amish children. In the Pennsylvania German culture, we already knew of a Santa Claus character called Belsnickle, and I recall one time my Uncle Melvin dressed up in red and white Belsnickle suit at Grandpa Levi L. Schlabach’s family. It was all kind of a joke, and we all knew it was Melvin. 

Still, my mother went along on the last day of school before Christmas when we had gift exchange and Santa appeared and gave us a little brown bag with an orange and candies, mainly what we called hard tack and chocolate drops. There were a number of parents there, and Santa like Belsnickle turned out to be funny rather than scary. Later in school Calvin Klingerman, the school custodian and also the town marshal, would often be our Santa, but I’m not sure who served in that first class. But it turned out to be simply a pleasant experience of having Mattie visit the school.  

Anxiety would be a regular visitor with me during my childhood and would visit me off and on for the rest of my life, whether real or imagined danger. I was not always a good judge. During this time, it began to show up early in sickness. Early during my school years (actually 1953), I got what we called the German measles, (Rubella); my brothers and I brought them home from school, and eventually the rest of the family got them. Most of my brothers and I got through it okay, but I developed a fever and some swelling along with the little red spots on my body. In my fever I would begin to hallucinate and have bad dreams of someone chasing after me with a club. I tried to run away, but I could never quite outrun the club because of the soft clouds in which I was walking; it was a terrible fright. The dream would go on and on, and then I would wake up all sweating and wet. One time I went into shaking and convulsions and my mother got cold water on a towel and put it on my forehead until I stopped shaking.  Whether this was my physiological sickness from the fever of the measles or my fear of dying I do not know.

Then just as we brothers were getting better, things got worse for the family. A few days later my parents got the measles, and now my mother and father were very sick. Rubella measles generally come to children at a fairly young age and are mild, but for my adult parents especially, it all was terrible and severe as they were in bed. My mother got a high fever and our family doctor Luther High came to visit our house. My mother lay on a sofa right in the living room, and she seemed so pale and weak, and I thought she was going to die.  During these days, Uncle Abe Schlabach came up and helped with the chores while Dad was sick and Grandma Martha Miller came up too while my mother was down, so their presence brought some excitement while fear of death was going on. About this same time it became quite common to take rubella immunization shots, but my father was quite skeptical of taking immunization shots, even several years later when polio was abroad.

Another time of anxiety would come during the night when I had bad dreams. These would come it seemed to me quite often as in nightmares I described above during the measles, and I could never get away. I would wake up frightened and shivering and would go down the winding steps and to my parent’s bedroom. At door entrance to the little bedroom off from the living room, I would say, softly “Mom, Dad,” and if no answer a little louder “Mom, Dad, I can’t sleep.” Then there would be a rustle and one of them would grunt “Okay, come on in.” It did not matter summer or winter; I would crawl in between my parents. They never said anything, but mumbled something like “There, now lie down, it’s all okay.”

Their bodies were warm and they had the slight and friendly smell of human perspiration. I could hear them breathing evenly and imagined that I was a little Duroc piglet (those were my father’s red breed) which was lying down with its litter, and soon I was asleep. Generally, when I woke up, it was morning, my parents were already gone from the bed. How often I did this, I do not recall, but I do recall that my parents always responded the same, as though this were the most natural thing in the world, that a child should have bad dreams and that the parents were sleepy old codgers. It had such a favorable impression on me that later in life as a young parent I always wanted to have our children finding their parents’ bed a safe haven when they had bad dreams. And now writing this as a grandparent, I discover that the good practice continues to the next generation.    

But we did have a real loss that year when my grandfather Martin Miller died on April 20. I had never known my Grandfather Martin very well so it did not make a big impression on me, except at the funeral itself; it was the first burial I ever attended. After the funeral, we went up to the family burial ground behind what is now Holmes Door and Lumber buildings near Sharp Run west of Berlin. At that time, it was then mostly an open field. The wooden coffin was transported up to the open grave and then there was a delay as the coffin had already been lowered into the rough box but not closed. The pall bearers all at once got out a screwdriver and the coffin was opened up, the top head part. I was standing in front of my grandmother Martha, and she kindly said, “Now, take your last look.” I later visited the grave site with my Aunt Betty Weaver, and she said that it was because she was sick with measles and could not come to the funeral inside a house, only to the burial outside so that they opened the coffin for her viewing at that point. 

The final thing that I remember about school was a pleasant one on one of the last days of school, either first or second grade, we had a class outing which probably was planned with my parents and the teachers; we had a school picnic at our family’s front lawn. I was so proud to have the students and teachers visit our farm, and I remember we gave our fellow classmates pony rides with our little pony called Patsy. In this early school experience I also met some friends which I considered life-long friends during my eight years at Holmesville School. These classmates are only a sampling, and from my first grade; I may mention others in later years.

I don’t have a grade one class photo, but standing next to me on the grade two photo was a good friend Ben Miller. Benny, as we called him, was the smartest student in our class, somewhat eccentric, and loved to read. Benny’s father Reuben was a minister in our church which had its complications given our family’s uneven relationship to the Amish church during those years. But somehow that issue never seemed to interfere with Benny and my friendship. Standing on the other side was Eli Hostetler from the large Tobias (Tobe) Hostetler clan who lived north of town. Eli seemed the strongest and healthiest of all the boys in our class. When we studied health and brushing teeth, he had the cleanest and whitest teeth, even though he claimed never even have had a toothbrush at home. 

Patty Dilworth lived west of town on a farm and was always a good friend. She had similar farm roots, and her family was a loyal member of the Church of Christ, and later in school when I sometimes read teenage romances of a pretty and virtuous small-town girl, I’d think of Patty. Alice Ramseyer was the closest we had to a bluestocking in Holmesville; her mother Della was a Patterson. And she was exotic; her father Robert was a veritable Swiss and our cheese maker.  The Ramseyers even had big many-toned cowbells, and her father once yodeled for us at a school assembly. Joyce Paulocsak was a Catholic, about the only one I knew during my elementary school years. But she and Patty were neighbors and friends, and it didn’t seem to matter. Joyce was smart too.  

Roy Snyder lived in Holmesville and was my best English-speaking friend in class; we affectionately called him Butch. He often visited our farm in the afternoons and summers, and when I heard later in life that Roy had some distinction in riding horses I was not surprised. Sarah Miller was from the large Melvin B. Miller family west of Holmesville, skipped school quite often to help her mother at home and still was usually the last one standing on spell-downs (well, along with Benny). She was really smart too. Another Miller who often sat near me alphabetically was Mary Miller, a very proper and pretty Amish girl who later married William Hochstetler and moved to Walnut Creek. 

Joe Gooding was the son of our church friend and the poet Lorie C. Gooding. The Goodings lived up on the woody hill, we called it a mountain, west of Holmesville. Joe missed school off and on, and did not have a very big interest in school studies. He had a Huckleberry Finn mystique (getting into trouble but well-meaning), and we boys liked him. I could name others, but these are some which stand out as I view the photo and think back of those days. 

In recess, we played softball but in the early grades we mainly played together with swings, a merry-go-round, and teeter totters. A railing on which the high part had swings provided endless enjoyment. And the lower rails had long teeter totters; if you were a little first grader like me you might have a friend join you if at the other side was a big heavy third-grader. The railing also provided a place where the English girls would do entertaining flips. For a first-grade-boy in a household of boys, this exhibition had all the entertainment of the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes.

In the meantime, our father Andrew continued his literary activities, especially in translating, writing, publishing and book selling. Goodwill Book Exchange, Box 3, Holmesville, Ohio, became the address of a new bookstore which Andrew started up in the small room behind our kitchen. People would visit the little store with German and English books mainly for Amish and conservative Mennonite readers, but Andrew also started a mail order business to the Amish constituency by advertising in The Budget. This broader distribution brought a stern rebuke from Levi A. Miller (better known as L.A.) who was editor of the German section of Herald der Wahrheit and operated a book store in Arthur, Illinois. He considered himself the exclusive Amish supplier, same as the Scottdale publishing house was for the Mennonites. Miller wanted to know why Andrew was advertising in The Budget when he had not bought out anyone’s book business or book store. And is this advertising not to “covet someone else’s trade; the Bible teaches us we should not covet.” Miller said John A. Raber of Baltic, Ohio, also said he was only going to serve the local community but soon he “worked some dirty tricks on me,” getting into the mail order business, so now several Amish book suppliers emerged.

L. A. Miller’s dismay may have over-estimated Andrew as a competitor because Andrew’s mail-order distribution which he did the rest of his life in various books and musical instruments was more a hobby than a business. Andrew sold German Bibles, Bible commentaries (Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, a favorite), hymn books and other mainstream Amish Mennonite books, but mainly he promoted specialty books which caught his attention. Among these were his grandfather’s deathbed admonitions to his children (below), Joseph A. Yoder’s Rosanna of the Amish, and the Dorothy Snapp McCammon missionary story in China, We Tried to Stay. He loved to get mail, and opening the mail was clearly a highlight of his day, but he never was seriously in the book business.   

In 1949, Andrew translated a copy of his grandfather Jacob A. Miller’s witness to future generations called “A Writing of Admonition.” His grandfather often called Andy Jake had written the admonition for his twelve children before he died on July 6, 1911, and the pamphlet was first published by Samuel D. Guengerich of the Amish Mennonite Publishing Association of Kalona, Iowa. The genre was a fairly common literature, to write a last confession or admonition to the next generation, at its best, a gift to the next generation. Miller urges his children to surrender themselves to God, follow the narrow way of Jesus and honor their parents. Andrew wrote in his 1949 introduction that he hoped the booklet “might encourage us to all to do good, and to have faith in Jesus, who is the salvation and hope to all of us, so that we, as children and descendants, may meet our dear parents and grandparents in yonder, beautiful land of the Redeemed. This is our wish.”  Andrew distributed many copies by mail from Goodwill Book exchange, and then re-issued it in 1992.

Admonitions were common among the Amish, and Andrew was already poised to present his own counsel to the young people or older people of his own generation or anyone who would listen, especially in regards to their personal piety, morals and habits. He was among the young Amish leaders often called the Amish Mission Movement who were concerned about some laxity in the community about such issues as bed courtship and tobacco use, traditional practices among some of the Holmes County Amish. One weekend his uncle Nathaniel and Elizabeth Miller came down from Hartville to visit us and go to church with us. Nathaniel (we called him Zeniel) was a minister, but this office and respect did not exempt him from being asked, more likely insulted, by us boys on why he used tobacco. This was a time when tobacco use was quite common among the general population, as well as the Amish, and I’m not sure whether he smoked cigars or chewed. But our parents mentioned the incident quite often to us, as though this rhetorical question were a badge of honor for their young children.

Actually, my father Andrew was not a purist during these years either; he carried cigars in the pocket in back of the buggy and would sometimes light up on the way home from church. I would later in life use my father and the British author and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis’ example to legitimize my own Sunday evening cigar or pipe smoke with a neighbor or friend.  Now, of course, our smoking came during much less tolerant and innocent days. Smoking was now proven to cause cancer, and considered a threat to public health, banished from the workplace and public spaces such as restaurants and school property.

“Fair seed-time had my soul” is from William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805, lines 301-3.   Jacob A. Miller’s A Writing of Admonition was published in a third edition (Holmesville: Miller Publishers, 1992). A copy is in the Andrew A. Miller collection in the Archives of the Mennonite Church. The book distributor Levi A. (L.A.) Miller’s comments are from a December 9, 1950, letter in the Andrew A. Miller collection in the Archives of the Mennonite Church, Goshen, Indiana.  Background on L.A. Miller came from a telephone conversation with David L. Miller of Partridge, Kansas, November 12, 2011. 

1949 Holmesville Ohio

1949 Finding the Holmesville farm, description of house, barn and location; Amish districts and briefly buying a car; English neighbors and Mel Marquis; blicka, telephone office visits and Paul Jameson grocery, the Pennsylvania Railroad, tramps; the founding of state of Israel; Amish, Mennonites and Jews.   

Andrew and Mattie Miller were looking for a new farm during the winter of 1948 and 1949. First, they went down to the south and western part of the Holmes County, the Clark and Glenmont area, and they looked at several farms. These places seemed too far away from towns and isolated, similar to the Hummel farm. Then, they went to the northwest part of the county, several miles west of Holmesville and looked at a farm, not far from where my Aunt Betty and Dan Weaver now live in 2010. Again, although they liked the farm, it was too far away from town and neighbors. Finally, although it was dark, Robert Croskey the local Holmesville land agent and driver took them to a farm which was on the market for a few months, just east of town on the Holmesville Fredricksburg road. It was now dark, and they did not want to disturb anyone, so they only drove by and looked in the drive. Andrew and Mattie told the driver to turn around and let’s go home; it’s too late to disturb the people, but let’s come back first thing in the morning. They liked the location.

The next morning the Millers were back and saw a plain white clapboard house with the traditional symmetrical design, a large kitchen dining room on the north side and equally comfortable living room on south side. On the back side was a small bed room off of the living room and two small back rooms off of the kitchen, one a pantry leading to the basement steps, and another little room off the pantry. Andrew was probably already eying it for an office, library and bookstore. On the second floor were two equal- sized large bed rooms on either side of the winding stairs. Behind the house was a large cement spring house with a built-in concrete tank tub area in the back.

A white clapboard bank barn was again in the traditional symmetrical shape with two shed roofs along both ends. The front covered a shed and shop and the back covered the corn crib and machinery storage. At one time a silo had been a part of the barn, but it was gone except for the cement foundation. The barn floor was partly cemented with milking cow stalls on the one side and a water trough in the middle. Although the buildings had electrical wiring, not much else was updated on the house and barn. The barn had only one entrance at the west or front end, and the house did not have indoor plumbing of toilet and bath.

But the physical features of the buildings were not what attracted Mattie and especially Andrew the most. It was location, location, and yes the public location; here was a big front lawn with the house right along the road and right smack next to the little town of Holmesville.  “That’s our farm,” said Andrew quietly to his wife (and probably in Pennsylvania German as he often did in front of English-speaking store clerks and sales people) and Mattie heartily agreed. After all, it was a farm, a virtual requirement for any self-respecting Schlabach, and her husband was happy. But even if the buildings had not been modernized, it turned out to be a productive farm of 80 acres, about three-fourth of it the sandy loam and some gravel especially near the creek plain about the same level as Salt Creek which flowed along the back of the land. The buildings were safely on a flat rise of several acres safely above the flood plain, and a 20-acre woods was also on a hill above the creek level. The front of the property was the Holmesville Fredricksburg Road and through the back third of the acreage, several hundred yards behind the house ran the Pennsylvania Railroad and a switch track.

And for Andrew, there was the public road. The Fredricksburg Road not only ran in front of the house and barn, it  also ran to the bottom of the flat Salt Creek Valley farmland, turned left and headed to the Salt Creek itself and a bridge where the road continued up the valley to Fredricksburg. Andrew and Mattie bought it from Cliff Edwards, and a little earlier the Nickolas (Nick) Yoder family had lived there. The moving started soon with Andrew taking wagon loads before the actual moving date in March of 1949, the week of baby David’s first birthday. Paul was in first grade at the Sharp School, and Roy went along on these trips with the team.

One of these Berlin to Holmesville moving trips became memorable in family lore because little Roy peed in his pants by the time the team Dick and Bob got to Millersburg. Andrew went to Gensemers Department Store and bought Roy some dry shorts and socks and continued the rest of the five-mile trek to Holmesville. Okay, dear reader, if scatology bothers you, skip the rest of this paragraph because we’re going to sample the many little pee stories from this period. Another one before we moved happened at a wedding in the winter where the guests’ boots were all lined up on the porch, and Paul watered a good number of them. Somehow, Paul managed to blame it on his two little brothers, but eventually the truth prevailed. Then after the move to Holmesville, our upstairs bedroom window was an inviting opening for me, a persistent little bed wetter till about sixth grade. This al fresco approach into the shrubs and grass below generally worked fine except for two major exceptions. The upstairs window was right above the kitchen window where mother Mattie held court, so it was unwise to do it during daylight hours or when she was in the kitchen. Second, I soon learned that it was equally unwise to do it in the winter when there was snow on the ground.

The Holmesville farm was an excellent fit for our family, and took on special meaning because we always called it our family home in the sense that the earlier places were called the Lapp place and the Hummel farm. Andrew and Mattie settled in at Holmesville, raised our family there, and we lived there until the early nineties when my father Andrew died. For Andrew it provided a new public location, but I think it also provided some freedom from the closeness of his Miller and Mattie’s Schlabach families, even if he may not have wished to say it at the time. In church two Amish districts were being established during these same years, one on the east and one on the west of the town; again church had some social freedom in that we had no close relatives in either of these districts. My parents even tried a brief fling with owning a car and joining the Mennonites during this year, and my father wrote to his sister Nora, quoting verses by “Max Reich, a converted Jew who left all to follow the Savior.”

            “In the light no sin can sully

            And no earth-born mist can dim.

We shall joy—not in our blessings,

We shall joy—alone in him.” 

The poetry did not impress his sister Nora. Her answer was for Andrew and Mattie to remember their vows and obedience to their parents, God and the church. In any case, by the end of the year, Andrew and Mattie were back in the Amish church. 

For us boys, there were the new neighbors, so many new English-speaking neighbors in Holmesville. Now, within a half mile were 350 residents with new names such as Stallman, Umstead, Lecky, Hites, Myers, and Jameson.  One of our first acquaintances was the elderly Mel Marquis, our nearest neighbor who lived on an acre between our house and town. Marquis was elderly (the 1907 Atlas of Holmes County had him serve on the Holmesville school board forty years earlier), and my mother would send a pie or bread to him whenever she did weekly baking. I was sometimes the baked goods delivery person, and this was an introduction to needing to speak English. We spoke Pennsylvania German or Dutch at home and heard German at church, so most of our English was to hear our parents speak English at stores or to peddlers, rare at our Berlin Township Hummel farm. In our old neighborhood even many of the non-Amish people were bilingual at that time; it was not unusual for a livestock or milk truck driver, a town merchant or a public school teacher to speak Pennsylvania German. 

But at Holmesville, we had only English-speaking neighbors, and when I would take a pie to Marquis, Mattie would tell me what to say. I don’t recall it all, but she said you can say “Here is a pie,” and he will say “Thank you.” And then you say, “You are welcome.” Marquis whatever his biological and social origins lived up to his name as a French nobleman; he seemed a formal gentleman, and sure enough the conversation would go about as my Mother had stated. I later thought I had an advantage in learning Spanish, because I had already learned a second language in childhood. 

As children, we often repeated Marquis’ speech patterns which were clearly spoken in a mix of Shakespearean and King James English, aphorisms such as “neither borrower nor lender be.” When we boys visited Marquis with my father, the conversation would soon turn to a religious topic, at my father’s urging, of course. Andrew would make some discreet inquiry about our neighbor’s eternal salvation. To this Marquis would have a ready reply spoken in eloquent tones. “Now, Andy. I was booorn and raaaised a Presbyterian.” Then came the clincher. “And I prefeeer to make no changes.”  I may be overstating (perhaps in part from hearing my brother Paul later in life repeat it charmingly to audiences), but we loved to hear him enunciate these words. Anyway, it seemed to answer theological and biblical issues for Marquis, although I’m not sure my father was totally satisfied. Still Mel Marquis and my parents were good neighbors and friends, and it was an early introduction to religious pluralism.

On language at Holmesville, during the summer my mother also used a Pennsylvania German word frequently which I never forgot: blicka. It was my mother’s word for preparing freshly picked fruit and vegetables for edible use; we’re talking strawberries, cherries, peas and beans. In the early mornings, we were out in the patch or up in the trees, picking vegetables and fruit. Next, when we got them home, the project was sitting around in a circle and blicking: the process was removing the peas from a pod, pinching the caps off of strawberries, cutting the ends off of beans, or taking the seeds out of sour cherries. It was all blicka, and you could do it from your pre-school years on up. None of us were ever as fast as Mattie was in doing this, but she never insisted that we keep up with her; but she was insistent and cheerful that we help with the activity. I’ve never seen the term in a Pennsylvania German dictionary, but it was a common Holmesville term. Abpetza means pinching off, and maybe Mattie did not use it because petza (to pinch) was a negative term. For my mother, the term blicka was always positive.

Holmesville was convenient because now we had access to a telephone in town. We could not have a telephone at our home, but we could go to the telephone operator in town. These were adventuresome night walks with our father Andrew lighting the pressurized gas lantern. Sometimes my father hoisted me on his shoulders as we walked, crossing the railroad tracks, passing Albert Myers where the chickens and bantams were now roosting in the  coop between the house and garage, and then along Main Street to the square. The telephone operator was located one house down old state route 76 along Millersburg Street. Grace Firebaugh’s telephone office had a little lobby where we would sit until she would signal for my father to enter into a little booth for his call. Meanwhile, Firebaugh would answer calls, and then plug the wire connections into the wall behind her.

When we were finished, and my father was in a good mood, he would stop at Jameson’s Grocery for ice cream bars (chocolate covered ice cream). The store was closed for business, but this did not seem to bother my Father. The grocer Paul Jameson lived next door, and would come out and go over the store, unlock the front door, and treat Andrew and his little sons to ice cream bars. Paul Jameson was the consummate small-town merchant, affable and good natured to young and old alike, even to treating these new customers to night service. My father loved to treat his children to ice cream, and this was only an early sampling of a pattern which would continue to his treating the grandchildren at every opportunity. The Jameson grocery store was a house of charms for a small boy; here was all kinds of gum, life savers and root beer barrels along the counter; Jameson had toys, and here was where my grandpa Moses Troyer took us to buy a kite in the spring, and in the back was a dry goods and clothing section where you could get store-made denim pants with little copper rivets in them. Jameson kept a billing tablet where he would mark down when people would purchase but could not pay for it immediately.

Finally, Holmesville had the newness of the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks behind our house. Each day we could hear and then see the big black coal powered locomotives go past our place. The smoke would billow out of the engine, and one could hear the choo—chooing  coming from a distance, only a slight sound and then the rhythmic drumming that seemed to come right up to our house, and then it would fade again as the train made its way on to Millersburg or Fredricksburg. Sometimes we would go back the little trail and watch the train cars go by, waving to the engineer, fireman, brakeman, and the switchman as they went by. I was especially fascinated when there were livestock cars carrying hogs or cattle. And sometimes one could see someone sitting or lying on top of a car; it was a tramp. We would put pennies on the track and then find them squished larger after the train had passed; another favorite pastime was simply to count the cars.

But the main tracks were not by themselves; there was also a rail switch right behind our house, so often the train would slow down and park on the railing. There was even a little house (with stove) for the train operators. For slowing down, the brakes made a whistling steam and screeching sound and when cars were hooked or unhooked there would be a tremendous kerchunck sound. You could hear that kerchunck echoing over the Salt Creek valley and then all quiet. They seemed so huge, and often the engineer or switchman would get out and make a telephone call from the box which was also stationed beside the switch. Now, we could get a close up look at an engineer and brakeman who though friendly, I don’t recall being open to visiting; they seemed to have such great responsibility and the huge speed. In all the time the trains ran, I do not recall one accident which happened near our home, although I often hear stories of train accidents.

The switches slowed down the trains, and that brought other visitors to our farm, hoboes or the tramps, as we called them. We knew these travelers were around, when we would see smoke coming up from behind the tracks beside our field. They would sit around a fire behind the tracks, but we generally watched them from a distance, visiting the scene after they left, checking out the empty sardine tin cans, paper bags and cigarette butts. I don’t recall ever approaching the tramps, however, at the same time I do not recall them ever being unfriendly. What I do recall is that when the weather was cold, the tramps would come up to the house and ask for food or to sleep in the barn. My mother would tell them to wait, and then she made them a warm scrambled egg sandwich, and then Father would take them to the barn. Andrew would ask them to turn over any matches and that seemed to be the extent of any overnight requirement for lodging. In the morning the tramps were gone.    

On the other side of the world, Israel elected its first president Chaim Weizmann in 1949, having become a nation the year before. Weizman had been named provisional president in 1948 and the prime minister was a fellow Zionist and Labor party leader named David Ben-Gurion. The Israelis moved the capitol from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the western section of which was under the new nation of Israel while the eastern part of Jerusalem was under Jordanian rule. This was the first Hebrew nation in 2,000 years, and a strong influx to the Palestinian Jewish population came from European Jews who had survived the Holocaust in Nazi Germany during the Second World War. For these Jews who escaped the European pogroms and crematoriums having their own homeland meant life, freedom and hope.

For the local Arab and Christian population who lived in the villages throughout Palestine, this founding of a Jewish state was a deep tragedy; the Palestinians would call it their disaster. Many of the Arabs were forcibly removed from their villages and homes where their families had lived for centuries. They were not allowed to return, and many would live in refugee camps provided by the UN. Aside from this local displacement, the neighboring Arab states did not recognize the state of Israel, nor were the displaced Palestinians integrated into neighboring Arab societies.

Yes, reader, I realize this is not the place to tell this story in all the Jewish and Arab hopes, fears and grievances at the beginnings of modern Israel. But the arrival of a state of Israel in the ancient biblical lands with Jerusalem as its capital was also of considerable interest to Christians especially to America’s conservative Protestants. Many believers including some Mennonites saw this development as a fulfillment of Scripture. Our Fredricksburg neighbor, the free-wheeling evangelist and music promoter Harry Weaver, made plans to go and talked the local Amish Mennonite entrepreneurs Emanuel and Alma Mullet to go along, financing the trip. Other Mennonites also headed for Palestine, including the conservative Mennonite bishop Harry Stutzman who took his camera for slides and an eight millimeter movie camera. What I remember most, however, in these Israel reports was one evening at Fryburg (between Benton and Mount Hope) where Harry Stutzman spoke and the Emanuel and Alma Mullet daughters sing the sad Hank Williams song “Little Paper Boy.” I never forgot it, nor heard the song again until February 4, 2013, in Sarasota, Florida, when my Brother Paul threw a birthday dinner for Levi Troyer and the Mullet twins Martha and Mary. By the end of the evening, the twins with sisters Lillis and Anna Catherine sang the “Little Paper Boy.” They said it was their mother’s favorite song; I always thought the little boy was a Palestinian.       

Andrew and Mattie however had little interest in Palestine and the formation of Israel; Andrew said that from his reading of the New Testament, we as Christians were already the new Israel. We did not need to travel to a geographic spot, nor were the Jews that special. Furthermore, Andrew was plenty busy in the near east of Holmesville: farming, reading, writing, and editing for Herald der Wahrheit. He wrote a meditation on “On not growing weary” which appears below. And my grandfather Levi L. Schlabach, also busy with his farms, told me as I grew up that we ourselves were already Hebrew Levites, of the priestly tribe of Levi.

Descriptions of the Holmesville move and property come mainly from memory and especially my mother’s Mattie conversations in 2010; my brother Paul also told me much of the background. My father’s December 2, 1949 letter exchanges with sister Nora Wingard and other members of his family are in the Andrew A. Miller Collection in the Archives of the Mennonite Church, Goshen, Indiana.  On the blicka section, in my personal 1998 file is an unpublished tribute to Mattie on her 80^th birthday June 29, 1998, entitled “Blicking.” Some of the background on Holmesville in the forties comes from David A. Stallman’s Our Home Town Holmesville, Ohio (2001). Stallman does an excellent job of describing his family and the town as he experienced it growing up in the 40s. Harry Weaver tells of visiting Palestine with the Mullets in the Herald der Wahrheit (September 15, 1952, pages 565-66).

On Not Getting Weary (Nicht Müde Werden)

“And let us not be weary in well doing, for in due season we 

shall reap, if we faint not.” Galatians 6:9.

Humans have a tendency to get tired in our work, both in the natural and in the spiritual. In the evening when we lie down to rest, we are tired from the day’s work. But then through God’s love, we get food and health and rest during the night, and we get the new strength we need for the following day.

So it is with our spirit also from day to day which must be renewed and fed. As the Apostle says in 2 Corinthians 4:16: “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day.”

Without this renewal of the inner person we get sick and lose strength. This renewal is promised for those who strive to do good, who wait for the Lord, and who keep their eyes of faith on what is not visible. Those people will get a kind of new strength which makes even the weak to be strong. 

Our Lord is our refuge and our strength and he is merciful. And through our Lord we will have harvest if we continue and do not lose heart. As it says in Isaiah 40:29: “He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might, he increases strength.

“Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young people shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

So be it, may God help us to do good, and encourage each other to follow on the narrow way of life. May God be loved, honored and praised as we do good to our fellow humans through Christ. This is our prayer.

A.A.M. (Andrew A. Miller) wrote scripture-based meditation articles of this nature about once a month during the late forties and early fifties. This one appeared in Herald der Wahrheit (January 1, 1949). Translated by Ilse Reist of Scottdale, Pennsylvania, in 2010.  

1948 Mennonite Publishing House

1948 Paul M. Lederach, a young bishop from Franconia Conference, his education and work at Mennonite Publishing House; Overholts and Loucks family of Scottdale, Pennsylvania, coal and coke history and institutions to mid-century, Abraham Jacob Metzler; Andrew’s invitation to work at Scottdale, its mid-century vitality and image; Miller domestic life, fourth son David is born, and Andrew’s urge to move; Roy R. Miller and Berdella Blosser, birth of daughter Gloria Elaine.

In the late forties, Paul M. Lederach was a young Mennonite leader and student on the move; at age nineteen, he was ordained a minister the Franconia Mennonite Conference, the old eastern Mennonite conference north of Philadelphia.  Known as a bright young student, from the conference’s historical Mensch and Lederach families, he kept study and ministerial leadership together in his youth and for the rest of his life. In a conference still somewhat skeptical about higher education, the young minister asked his bishops if he could continue studying, and they approved. By 1945 he had finished his bachelor’s degree at Goshen College in Indiana, and a year later he earned a Bachelor’s in Theology from the newly created Goshen Biblical Seminary led by the Anabaptist Vision dean Harold S. Bender (chapter 1944). A year later, Lederach was at the nearby Eastern Baptist Seminary earning a Masters in Religious Education. And finally there was a doctorate in education which he earned from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Ft. Worth, Texas, in 1949; the topic of his dissertation: “History of Religious Education in the Mennonite Church.”  And if that schooling trek was not enough, he was also ordained a bishop, as his neighbor John L. Ruth would say “at the ripe old age of twenty-four.”

Paul M. Lederach would greatly influence my life several decades later, and his son James was a neighbor and friend. What fascinated me coming out of the Amish Mennonite stream, was that the old Mennonites carried a parallel history of which I knew very little. The Lederachs had arrived in the Americas already in 1717 and their conference carried the Mennonite stream of church life for several centuries right next to urban Philadelphia. Lederach was also the great-grandson of the legendary Franconia minister Jacob Mensch who while a minister in his traditional Conference also carried on correspondence with Mennonites all over rural North America.

But Lederach often mentioned to me that although much of the Mennonite and Amish heritage is rural, his was not. I remember when I first met him at his office; he had a large print, a cityscape of Pittsburgh hanging on the wall. His parents Willis and Mary Lederach had been commissioned to be workers of a city mission at the Norristown, Pennsylvania. His father Willis was a banker and his mother Mary oversaw a growing family and was matron of a city mission.  She was also a capable public speaker, more so says John Ruth, than most of the preachers in the conference. She must have passed along some of her public speaking qualities to her tall minister scholar son because he was an eloquent Bible teacher and forceful speaker, even taking on controversial issues such as upbraiding his local traditional members for their leisure of smoking and chewing tobacco.

But by 1948, Lederach’s study and ministerial duties were soon supplemented by also actively working for the Mennonite Publishing House (MPH) in Scottdale, Pennsylvania. He did some writing for the Uniform Series Sunday adult school lessons for editor Clayton F. Yake; and he  wrote the first edition of a Mennonite Youth Fellowship (MYF) manual. A year later, Lederach became employed full-time in publishing where he would continue in employment for three decades, generally giving leadership to curriculum and Christian education materials for the denomination. In the late forties, the Mennonite Publishing House in western Pennsylvania was at its height of influence among the Mennonites, hence a good institution to which an aspiring  young leader might attach himself.   

The printed page was still the main form of popular communication at mid-century, and Mennonites had a new generation at leadership which was ready to do publishing. Literature professor Paul Erb had replaced the elderly Daniel Kauffman as editor of the popular weekly Gospel Herald. An entrepreneurial local son fresh out of Civilian Public Service, Ralph Hernley came back to his hometown and was heading up the production and printing presses. The Hernleys had lived in Scottdale since 1908, and by mid-century most of the Hernleys were working at Mennonite Publishing House; it was a veritable family as well as church business. One of the lead editors was Clayton F. Yake who created the popular magazine Youth’s Christian Companion and an influential Herald Sumer Bible School Series. One measure of Yake’s self understanding was that he called his office “the East Room.”

In 1948, the publishing house had built a new brick addition to its tile walled-plant along Walnut Avenue which housed printing presses in the basement, provided space for a bookstore, shipping and warehousing on the ground floor, and the top floor provided space for a warren of twenty-six editorial and business offices. Over one hundred people worked at the institution, and leading it all was a charismatic executive minister called Abraham Jacob Metzler.  At that point it was popular to call people by their initials and Yake would have been C.F. and Metzler, A.J.

The energetic Abraham J. Metzler was at his prime as general manager which he served from 1935 to 1961, and the business was expanding, including other languages such as Spanish (the Herald Summer Bible School Series) and the historic German used for the Amish and conservative Amish Mennonite groups and now by the immigrant Mennonites who were driven out of the Russian empire. My father Andrew wrote articles for Herald der Wahrheit, a German and English twice-monthly journal and read the Mennonite Publishing House’s weekly Gospel Herald. He even wrote an article “A Christian’s Weapons of Warfare” which appeared in June of 1947. But mostly he was writing for the German English language Herald der Wahrheit, also printed at Scottdale.

Dear reader, surely you are wondering why all this commentary on Mennonite Publishing House in Scottdale, Pennsylvania, during my early years in Holmes County, Ohio? First, I would spend most of my professional adult life here, but there's a more immediate reason. In the mid-80s, my father Andrew got up in our Scottdale Kingview church one Sunday and said he had been invited to come to Scottdale in 1948, and since he could not come he was glad that his son could come a generation later in his place. I had never heard this direct connection so explicitly before, and I thought my father may have drunk too much coffee that morning. At best I knew that A. J. Metzler was expansive, traveled widely during this period and often made a comment that people should come to Scottdale and work at the publishing house. I thought he may have made such a random comment to my father. The occasion was that we had returned from Venezuela, and my extended family was present for a ministerial licensing service for work at Laurelville Mennonite Church Center. Unusual as it sounded to me at the time, I made a journal note and then got busy at Laurelville and never asked much about it.

But it was more than a passing comment. In the Spring of 2010 when I looked at Andrew’s correspondence from the late 40s, I discovered that Andrew had indeed been invited to come to Scottdale already June 22 of 1947 in a letter from Joseph G. Gingerich, president of the Amish Mennonite Publication Board in Kalona, Iowa. This board published the Herald der Wahrheit which was printed at Scottdale’s Mennonite Publishing House. Apparently Andrew had sent an inquiry earlier regarding Scottdale employment and regarding the church situation. Gingerich responds that in consultation with the manager “Brother Metzler” at Mennonite Publishing House, the work would be full-time year round to serve in German typesetting, proofreading and editorial, “such work as you could do around there.” Regarding church life, he admits that although only a Mennonite church exists at Scottdale, “Somerset is 35 or 40 miles away and has Mennonite, Conservative, Old Order Amish and what we call the Beachy church.”

On the back side of this same page of the letter, Gingerich continues to write personally in German of some relatives and people he has known in the Holmes County area, and of his desire to see Andrew and speak to him personally. My mother also remembers the invitation and of an Amish publishing delegation coming to the Hummel farmstead to visit with Andrew and her about this position. But mostly Mattie remembers that when my Father's side of the family got wind of this possibility, they were firmly against such a move. I suppose more pointedly, the Millers were hysterically against it, my mother claiming that there was weeping and wailing for a week at even the thought all this. They knew that this move would be the end of Andrew and Mattie’s family as members of the Amish if they moved to Scottdale.

By mid-century Scottdale was the most common publication address of the Mennonites, and even the Mennonite Community Association which was begun in 1948 used Scottdale as its office with Ralph and Elizabeth Hernley among its main leaders. The Hernleys even bought some land west of the borough, selling off lots and hoping to have it settled with Mennonites in a kind of back-to-the-land communitarianism. Hernleys were influenced by rural American  sociologists and by some post-World War II Mennonite leaders, notably the Goshen College ethics and history professor Guy F. Hershberger, author of other influential work in 1944: War Peace and Nonresistance. The Mennonites and the Amish retained a rural heritage longer than the rest of North America, and some of their students had studied rural sociology at universities, hence there seemed to be somewhat of a fit for renewing this effort. A generation later, some Mennonites would repudiate this rural community effort with equal vigor but that is a later story.

In spite of the Scottdale address for Mennonite publications and institutions, it would not have been a natural place to think of the Mennonites living and working, notwithstanding the Mennonites living in the area since the 1790s. Scottdale was located in an industrial and mining region in the middle of the rich Connellsville coke vein. For over 50 years this region provided the coal and coke energy which stoked the Pittsburgh blast furnaces to produce the iron and steel for America and the world. America was becoming a post- agriculture manufacturing and industrial society, and the Pittsburgh region was the key player in this industrial and financial growth. The steel industry had begun with leaders such as Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie in the late nineteenth century and was still going in the mid-twentieth with the giant United States Steel Corporation leading the way.

By the 1920s Scottdale had a good number of industrial and banking magnates (attested by the stately houses still standing), and the surrounding workers’ coal patch houses (mainly the photos still remaining). Although Scottdale had suffered severely during the1930s economic depression, it was recovering with the resurgence of need for steel during the World War II years and by the late 40s was again a vibrant small town with good employment, neighborhood clubs, a theater, a roller rink, and a high school hang-out called “Ye Olde Nut Shoppe.” It was a mix of the traditional Scotch-Irish and Germans and the gritty still bilingual Italian, Polish, Hungarian, and other eastern European neighborhoods. There was also a small African American community at Kiefertown along Jacobs Creek. Whatever the vigor and diversity, the area also had a certain coal and coke town shadow of soot and attendant health issues.  

This industry was not all foreign to the early Mennonites who had arrived from Lancaster County and Bucks County with the westward expansion shortly after the nation became independent. In the nineteenth century Abraham and Maria Overholt had built up a large farming, milling, distillery, coal mining and coke business, a veritable industrial community which is still standing near Scottdale, now called West Overton Village. The Overholt’s grandson Henry Clay Frick would go on to coal and coke leadership eventually joining with Andrew Carnegie to form what became the United States Steel Corporation. Fame came for his contribution to industry, finance and art collections mixed with infamy for labor relations and presiding over one of the most tragic labor disputes in United States history, the Homestead Strike of 1892. Even the town of Scottdale was laid out by the Mennonite families, the two brothers Jacob and Peter Loucks who a generation earlier came from the Franconia region where Paul Lederach had grown up.

But if the first generation or two of the Overholts and Stauffers and Loucks remained Mennonites, their children and grand children left en masse, and by the end of the century membership had dwindled to fewer than twenty elderly members. However, among the end-of-the century remnant were an earnest elderly widow Nancy Stauffer Loucks (1808-1900) and her son Jacob Loucks and grandson Aaron all of whom were especially staunch Mennonites and carried a vision of renewed church life. Young Aaron seemed to have a head for both business and ministerial leadership (often combined in that era). So Nancy and Jacob provided the family finances to build a new church building in town in 1893, and a few years later to build a printing and publishing firm across the street on 616 Walnut Avenue.

So why a twentieth century Mennonite publishing headquarters in Scottdale? One might respond that a wealthy and devout Stauffer and Loucks family once lived there and provided leadership.  And as mid-century publisher Abraham Jacob Metzler would proclaim, it was at the center of the old Mennonite world, it was within a one-day car-driving distance (400 miles) and good rail connections to the big Mennonite communities of Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Harrisonburg, Virginia; Kitchener, Ontario; and Goshen, Indiana.   

Although my father Andrew never physically visited Metzler’s Mennonite Publishing House at Scottdale until several decades later, he often spoke of it. Before I arrived in 1970, the name was an early image for Andrew’s desire for publishing, writing and public life. Scottdale provided a counterpoint to the domestic tranquility at the Hummel farm hidden among the Holmes County hills. Andrew was restless, even as so much of his life seemed to be going well with a growing family and success at farming.

In March Mattie delivered a fourth healthy son to join Paul, Roy and me; they named him David. As with the other children he was delivered at home, but their Millersburg family doctor Luther High told Mattie this birth was the last one he would deliver at home. She would now be expected to go to the Pomerene Hospital in Millersburg. Mattie had plenty of help nearby as her father Levi Schlabach’s family lived within a mile, and her in-laws the Martin and Martha Millers were only a few miles over the hill by what we used to call the schloop weg, a hidden one-path trail. Paul the first-born was in his first year at Sharps school, the one-room school within a half-mile and with the bilingual teacher Loyal Brown. Paul’s aunts and uncles were at the same school--Mary, Katie, Abe and Melvin. 

If Mattie was contented with her growing family, farming and living near extended family, she was sensitive to her husband Andrew’s increasing unhappiness in living in a lane behind the knob of the Berlin Township farm. The farm lane went off of a little township road and then you went up over that little knob and down below, you could see the three buildings, the barn, a glazed block hog or chicken house, and the house still farther down into the wide gulch, heading towards the woods. For our dog mixed-terrier Bounce this was ideal territory for hunting raccoon, groundhogs and squirrels, and, of course, to the four little boys this all seemed natural.

But for a young father who grew up in a large family sitting almost on top of the well-traveled Berlin-Charm road and who worked away with English-speaking folks most of his life, the Hummel place was too much isolation. You got up in the morning and saw only wooded hills, several fields and tree lined valley heading down into more backwoods. This might be okay for a hermit or a Henry David Thoreau, but not for a restless and now lonely young man who would rather live in Concord, near a library or maybe a bookstore. 

Finally, there was the nearness of the aggressive father-in-law Levi Schlabach (L.L.). When Andrew’s male dog wandered off the Hummel farm one time, he returned home without his cajones. The prime suspect for rendering Bounce a eunuch was L.L., and I still remember as a boy when my father would tell me this story. He admitted that he was never sure who neutered his dog; but it was clear to me that the story had symbolic meaning to my father. In any case, Andrew and Mattie began to think about a move. That winter they started looking for another home—maybe not as far away as Scottdale, Pennsylvania, but at least at the other end of the county.  

A Berlin teacher and school executive Roy R. Miller (1906-1985) who had been away in Civilian Public Service (CPS)  during the War was contented to settle back into life in Holmes County, bringing along and his new wife Berdella Blosser (1920-2003). Roy R. and Berdella had met in CPS during the war while Berdella was working in the offices of the Mennonite Central Committee in Akron, Pennsylvania. Roy R. was an educational leader at the Sideling Hill Camp also in Pennsylvania. Miller had been executive head of Berlin High School and East Holmes Schools from 1939-42, and in 1947 picked up his duties again. Roy R. resumed his established professional role, had lots of family relationships, and was conversant in the bilingual English and Pennsylvania Dutch culture. On the other hand, Berdella had grown up in Columbiana County, Ohio, and found life in the Holmes County community a considerable adjustment what with its newness for her and without close friends nor family nearby. But she and Roy would soon start a family, and on April 30, 1948, Berdella gave birth to a daughter; they named her Gloria Elaine.    

Most of this chapter comes from family conversations, especially my mother Mattie. Some of Paul M. Lederach’s story comes from a telephone conversation with him on March 1, 2010, as well as John L. Ruth’s Maintaining the Right Fellowship (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1984); the Scottdale Mennonite  history is told in Edward Yoder, The Mennonites of Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania (Scottdale: Scottdale Mennonite Church, 1942) and on publishing, John A. Hostetler’s, God Uses Ink (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1958). I told my own version of this story in “The Growth and Decline of the Mennonites near Scottdale, Pennsylvania: 1790-1890,” Pennsylvania Mennonite Heritage (October, 1990, pages 2-15). Joseph G. Gingerich’s letter of June 22, 1947, inviting Andrew to work at Scottdale is in the Andrew A. Miller collection in the Archives of the Mennonite Church, Goshen, Indiana. In this same file is a copy of the article A[ndrew]. A. Miller, “The Christian’s Weapons of Warfare,” Gospel Herald, Supplement (June, 1947, page 269).