Ohio: Berlin

🏭 From the Rust Belt to Rolling Hills — Erie, Pennsylvania and the Road to Amish Country

We crossed the Canadian border into New York State at Buffalo, which itself deserves a mention — not for Buffalo’s famous chicken wings, though we did consider it — but because it marks the point where you stop being a visitor to Canada and become, briefly, a visitor to one of America’s more overlooked corners. From Buffalo, we headed south, tracking along the eastern shore of Lake Erie.

Now, Lake Erie is genuinely beautiful. It’s the fourth largest of the five Great Lakes, stretching roughly 388 kilometres from west to east, and on a good day it looks like something you’d find on a postcard. It’s been fished commercially since the mid-19th century and was once so productive that by the 1960s it had been fished and polluted almost to ruin. Mercifully, it recovered — a rare environmental success story — and these days the water is clear and the scenery is lovely. The area around it, however, is a different matter.

We pulled off the road into the city of Erie, in Pennsylvania, to see what was on offer. This seemed like a reasonable idea at the time.

Erie has an interesting history, if you’re the sort of person who finds industrial decline interesting. The city grew up around its position on the lake, which made it a natural hub for both fishing and manufacturing. During the 19th and early 20th centuries it became a serious industrial town — locomotives, boilers, plastics, paper — and by the mid-20th century it had a population nudging 140,000 people. It was, by all accounts, doing rather well for itself.

Then came the 1970s, which were not kind to a great many American industrial cities. Erie sat squarely in what became known as the Rust Belt — that great swathe of the northeastern and midwestern United States where manufacturing had once roared and now, slowly and painfully, began to wheeze. Steel mills shuttered. Factories closed or moved. The fishing industry on Lake Erie had already been struggling for decades. The jobs went, and they didn’t come back. By the 2020 census, Erie’s population had fallen to around 95,000 — a drop of roughly a third from its peak. The city continued to shrink as replacement employment failed, stubbornly, to materialise, which meant investment stayed away as well. It’s the sort of cycle that’s deeply unfair and very difficult to break.

We walked around a bit. The city looked, and we say this with genuine sympathy rather than cruelty, a bit dowdy and uninviting. There were empty shopfronts and that particular stillness that settles over places where the momentum has left. The weather was overcast, which didn’t help. Overcast weather and post-industrial decline are not a cheerful combination. We bought a coffee, felt slightly guilty about feeling deflated, and got back in the car.

🐄 Ohio Appears — and Brings Its Hills With It

We pressed on towards our destination for the next few days: the village of Berlin, in Holmes County, Ohio. And here is where things improved considerably.

The countryside changed as we crossed into Ohio and pushed south and west. The industrial flatness gave way to something quite different — rolling green hills, well-tended farms, fields of cattle and other livestock arranged in that satisfying patchwork way that makes you feel, briefly, that everything might be alright. Holmes County sits in the unglaciated Allegheny Plateau, which gives it a more varied and attractive landscape than much of the surrounding region. It’s farming country. Always has been. The air smelled different — cleaner, quieter in some hard-to-define way.

It was, genuinely, picture-perfect. We are not people who use that phrase lightly.

🕯️ Berlin, Ohio — Unlikely Capital of Amish America

Berlin (pronounced, locally, as BUR-lin, since this is Ohio and not Germany, and don’t let anyone catch you getting that wrong) is a small village of a few hundred permanent residents. It sits at the heart of Holmes County, which holds the distinction of being home to the largest concentration of Amish people anywhere in the United States — and, by most counts, in the world.

The figures are worth pausing on. There are approximately 32,000 Amish in Holmes County, and when you include the related Mennonite communities, these two groups together account for around 80% of the local population. That is not a tourist attraction with a bit of heritage thrown in. That is a living, functioning, genuinely distinct society operating according to principles that most of the Western world abandoned a century or more ago.

The Amish in America trace their roots to the Anabaptist movement of 16th-century Switzerland and Alsace — a branch of the Reformation that insisted, among other things, on adult baptism, the separation of church and state, and pacifism. They were persecuted thoroughly across Europe for these views, which is a depressingly familiar story. Beginning in the early 18th century, many emigrated to Pennsylvania, invited by William Penn’s promise of religious tolerance. Holmes County’s Amish community grew significantly from the early 19th century onwards, drawn by the affordable farmland and the opportunity to establish themselves away from the encroachment of the outside world.

We had wanted to come here for a long time. We’d had an interest in Amish culture from a distance — the simplicity of it, the deliberateness, the way it represents a conscious and collective choice rather than an accident of poverty or isolation. We were also, we should be honest, a little nervous about turning up as obvious outsiders with cameras and notebooks, essentially treating people’s daily lives as a tourist spectacle. The word “voyeuristic” did cross our minds more than once on the drive down.

We talked ourselves out of the guilt — or rather, we assuaged it, which sounds better — with the straightforward acknowledgement that our interest was genuine. We weren’t there to gawp. We genuinely wanted to understand how and why this community functions as it does, what the Ordnung — the set of rules and traditions that govern each Amish district — actually means in practice, and what it looks like to live in a community where the decisions of the collective are placed deliberately above the convenience of the individual.

Whether we managed to achieve that understanding, or whether we were just two more tourists buying jam and taking photographs of horses, is a question we’ll come back to. Either way, we were there, and Berlin was waiting.