Charles Hillinger’s America : The Budget Chronicles Amish Life

SUGARCREEK, Ohio —  The Budget, a nationally circulated weekly newspaper published for 99 years in this tiny Ohio hamlet, has more than 500 reporters--more contributing writers than most, if not all, of the nation’s largest dailies.

The Budget is not your run-of-the-mill country weekly. Its scribes, as the newspaper’s reporters are called, and its 18,000 subscribers are throwbacks to the 19th Century.

They live in the past. They are farmers. They use horses to plow their fields, a horse and buggy for transportation.

They’re self-sufficient, erecting their own homes and barns, growing their own livestock and crops. They get along without automobiles, electricity, telephones, radios and television. They still use wood cook stoves, iceboxes and outhouses. Kerosene lanterns are their source of light.

Readers of the Budget, which doesn’t have headlines or photographs, wear old-fashioned clothing made in their homes. Their shirts, trousers and granny-style, ankle-length dresses have no zippers or buttons. Hooks and eyes are used instead. Women and girls wear bonnets.

The Budget subscribers are Amish, an estimated 100,000 closely knit, religious people whose simple way of life is a living museum of the past. The Amish are scattered across the United States in tiny settlements from Montana to Florida, from Texas to Upstate New York.

Since 1890, the Budget has been the sole communication link among Amish settlements throughout the country. Each Amish community has a scribe who files weekly or biweekly reports to the paper on the weather, births, weddings, deaths, accidents, illnesses, buggy wrecks, sightings of the first robin in spring, funny and odd happenings.

Reports from different communities--at least 325 are published each issue--are like letters from home. It’s the way the Amish keep in touch with relatives and friends all over America and find out what’s happening in the far-flung settlements of the plain people.

Scribes file their copy in longhand on sheets of lined paper or any scrap paper such as backs of calendar pages or backs of children’s homework. They mail the latest news from their community to the Budget’s office here in east-central Ohio, 100 miles south of Cleveland, in the heart of Ohio’s Amish country. Sugarcreek has the largest concentration of Amish in the United States, with nearly 20,000 living in Holmes, Wayne, Coshoctan and Tuscarawas counties--more Amish than in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County.

The Budget doesn’t print news about local, state, national or international events or issues. The Amish aren’t interested in what happens outside their own communities; they have turned their back on the outside world. They don’t read daily newspapers, listen to the radio or watch television.

Crime stories are virtually non-existent because crime seldom occurs in Amish settlements. Stories about politicians never appear in this newspaper. Amish don’t vote.

Some recent samples of the coverage found throughout this quaint 20- to 24-page newspaper of the plain people:

Scribe Ida Kinsinger reports from Meyersdale, Pa.: “Katie Yoder’s cough seems to be letting up. They put a rag in hot vinegar and applying that on the chest, then a flannel over it and then a plastic on top of that to hold in the heat. The first night they had that on she rested better.”

At the Farmerstown, Ohio, Meathouse: “The stuffer we used to stuff the bologna broke. The lid popped up and we had 90 pounds of bologna mix all over the ceiling and all over the walls. One worker had meat in the face and ears and up the nose.”

The big news from Cynthiana, Ky.: The Mullets “butchered a huge sow. She weighed over 700 pounds. The lard was 3 inches thick on her back. She was fed day-old baked goods.”

In Swanton, Md., Lydia Mae Kauffman had a bad case of pinkeye. At Withee, Wis., “The chicken pox is visiting the children of the different homes.” At Limpytown, Ohio, “An albino red-tailed hawk was spotted.” At Altamont, Tenn., “We feel extra busy the last three weeks since the flu found us. Seems like there’s always a nose to wipe or a dose of one thing or another to give to someone.”

And, at Fredericksburg, Ohio, “The church was well attended yesterday but minister Loyd A. Yoder was not present due to a sore thumb. A knife hit him on the thumb while working at home in the shop skinning it to the bone.”

The scribes are volunteers. They receive no compensation other than a free subscription to the paper and stamped envelopes to send in their reports. A subscription to the Budget costs $21 a year. It is a distinctive honor for an Amish to be a scribe for the Budget.

“We print the reports from our correspondents pretty much the way they write them--which often is in fractured English, but that’s the charm of it,” said 82-year-old George R. Smith, associate editor of the weekly newspaper.

“You know, the Amish speak Pennsylvania Dutch in their homes and at church. English is a second language with them. Their education ends at eighth grade because they don’t want to learn too much about the world. They live the simple life on the farm.”

Smith has worked for the Budget 69 years, since he was 13, when his father, Samuel Allan Smith, bought the paper in 1920. S. A. Smith was owner-publisher until 1936 when he quit to become postmaster of Sugarcreek. George Smith succeeded his father as publisher until he sold the paper in 1974 but he has stayed on to supervise the scribes, to edit and lay out the paper.

There are different groups of Amish such as the Old Order, the New Order, Swartzentruber Amish, Beachy Amish, Nebraska Amish. The Budget covers all groups as America’s Amish paper.

The Budget’s plant is not in keeping with the traditional Amish ways. It is a modern print shop. George Smith, a Lutheran, and the 11 others who put the paper out are not Amish. That has been the case since the newspaper was first published in 1890.

Smith probably knows more Amish than any other living person. He and his wife of 54 years, Julia, each year make trips to Amish communities throughout the country.

“Over the years I’ve seen some gradual changes in the people,” Smith notes. “They would never ride in a car, for example. Today, there are a number of non-Amish men and women who make a living hauling Amish in cars and vans to visit relatives, to attend weddings and funerals in other states.

“Another development is the creation of new communities in states where there had not been Amish in the past, in places like Wisconsin, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas. The Amish population doubles every 20 years and there is always a need for young people to find new land so they move out from the traditional settlements.”

Smith said the Amish, almost to the person, are totally honest, passive, not aggressive. “Scoundrels among them are extremely rare. I have tremendous respect and admiration for them and for their life style.”

As it has for nearly a century, the Budget continues to this day to bind the plain people together.