Red shops and white houses
The Swartzentruber Amish that make up the Ethridge community are very traditional. This means history and sameness is important to them. They have a look to themselves and everything they own. You may see a farm and wonder why the shops are red and their homes are white. The color scheme was set on the barns rusting and giving them a red color and their homes are harder to cool than heat so they are painted a neutral white color to reflect the sun.
Most homes will have a basement or underground area where they can have a storage area of food where they can develop a pantry. So many pots and pans are kept here for future use along with fermented food in stages of preparation. With large families of 8-12 kids, this area also doubles as a places to play and place to stay cool during the hot parts of the summer days.
The barn means business
The Amish farm use animals for power so any transportation is done by horse and buggy. Some Amish men ride horses western style with just a saddle to keep the horses in good condition. The buggy horses can be very expensive and need advanced training to be safe on the road with cars while the plow horses seldom get to pull anything but farm equipment.
The Amish will buy or make their own equipment by sawing metal with machines run by gas or diesel engines depending on the ordnung of the church district bishop. They will use English welders who have travel trucks where the welder has to be left outside the building in order to keep the rules. This equipment will usually be seen around the barn. Kids will usually tend to the animals in the barn as the loft is filled with hay and silage so they can feed animals during the winter.
Saddle me up Scotty
The old order plain communities are those who use a horse and buggy for transportation. This distinction will separate many of the groups like conservative Mennonite who do dress like the Amish but drive cars. The Amish use Standardbred, Saddlebred, and Morgan hoses with a hard shoe for pavement traction. These horses are known to go long distance with little effort as they have genes of racehorses in their DNA. Plow horses like Belgian and Percherones are calm and pull with a heavy gate. Some of these horses can be 2000 lbs and can pull in a line with other draft horses while a young boy commands them.
Water and Land Management
The water can be manually pumped out of the ground by a hand pump or sometimes by the windmill tuning a shaft. They can fill up a basin and take it into the house or water the animals in their trough or their spraying equipment for spraying the garden. The garden and crops are planted on the ground and will be planted with produce and crops for sale so they can have money. The Amish tend to discourage tree bearing crops as they take years to develop to bare fruits and usually need heavy pesticides that cost money. Ground plants can also run their course in season and be plowed up again for a new crop. We will cover their use of chemicals in another lesson.
Conclusion:
These attributes of the Amish farm is what you will normally see when driving through the Amish community. My premium course has 8 distinct areas of focus over the 4 I share here but I feel most people observe these 4 first and most prominently. In the next lesson we talk about the Amish community as members of the church.