By noon on any Wednesday, Dale Schlabach, the Amish blacksmith of Sugarcreek, puts down his hammer and walks up Main Street to buy a copy of the Budget. Then he returns to his little red shop to find out who died, who married, who was born, who traveled, and who planted the most corn. This qualifies as breaking news around Sugarcreek.
Schlabach and his neighbors all enjoy the Budget, Sugarcreek’s local paper combined with an international Amish journal. Newspaper owners in Sugarcreek distribute the separate Amish edition throughout the world; at home, they wrap it inside the local news section. As most of the world sees it, the Amish paper is a weekly anachronism defying convention in favor of a deeper tradition. No news of wars, movies, business, or fashion stocks the pages; no comics or horoscopes appear. In fact, the Budget should have died a long time ago, according to most publishing odds. Yet it continues, a newspaper hopelessly and contentedly out of touch with the times and a ghost of newspapering’s past. In that way it’s like the Amish. Rejecting the electric cord, they use battery-powered alarm clocks but they also milk cows by hand and use buggies and shun the world’s modern ways.
The Budget is strong in northeast Ohio, the home of the world’s largest Amish population. Their ancestors began in Europe as a part of the Anabaptist movement that started in Switzerland in 1525. One of the Anabaptist leaders, Jacob Amman, left the main group because he believed it was too liberal; he preferred plain dress and old customs. His followers became known as the Amish. A similar group, led by Menno Simons, became known as the Mennonites. The Amish came to America in the late 1700s and early 1800s and settled in Pennsylvania. By the 1970s, they had arrived in large numbers in northeast Ohio farm country, especially in western Tuscarawas and eastern Holmes counties. The area now claims fifteen thousand to eighteen thousand Amish people.
At the news office, I met Don Sprankle, editor, general manager, Lutheran. He laughed at my observation. From a small brown frame building with yellow trim and alpine photographs inside, he directs a newspaper with a circulation of twenty thousand. “Not bad for a town of about two thousand people,” he said.
Reading the Amish paper is an unusual experience for a reporter who has worked at modern daily newspapers. There is plenty of essential “news,” yet no stories about politicians’ broken promises, war, terrorism, bank robberies, and murders. In this way, perhaps, the Budget serves as the ultimate modern paper by fulfilling the fantasy of every suburban soccer mom who pleads with newspaper publishers, “No more bad news, please.”
On publication day, Sprankle sat back in his office and looked over the crowded, dense pages of the freshly printed eighteen-page national, or Amish, edition. It could be mistaken for a museum piece, or for any small-town paper of 1910, at least until the reader finds the unusual Amish and Mennonite news stories. Six hundred correspondents, called scribes, write about their communities from all over the world. They jointly or individually write about 450 dispatches a week. In exchange, they receive pens, paper, postage, and envelopes—but no money. “It’s an amazing workforce,” explained Keith Rathbun, the assistant publisher. “We have a bigger staff than the New York Times.” Whether in Paraguay or Canada or the United States, a scribe usually starts his or her report with the date it was written and a description of the weather conditions. Scribes avoid controversy. Their stories are like short letters from home. Reports fall under bold, unusual datelines: Carbon Hill, Ohio; Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania; Gonzales, Texas. Paragraphs are lean: “It feels like autumn now. Silos are mostly filled. Some fourth crop hay has been put away.” And: “May 20—rain again today. Somebody said this was the fourteenth Sunday we had rain. Farmers are starting to make hay, but not much hay weather so far.”
Reports from scribes are glimpses into Ohio’s and America’s past and a little of the present. “I haven’t heard the coyotes howl once this month,” wrote David Mast of Mondovi, Wisconsin. “I always loved to hear that lonesome, eerie howl during the night.”
Another scribe from Aylmer, Ontario, Canada, discussed an important social problem: “At the same meeting at Elmos, another topic was presented for us to think about, and that is the long-range effects of the computer age on our [Amish] churches, and what we ought to be doing to steer clear of the dangers. The question was raised as to how an earlier generation was able to sense the profound effect the automobile would have on society and on the churches, so that it was decided not to allow the ownership of cars. Are we in the same point today in the computer revolution, having already accepted their forerunner, the calculators?”
Wrapped around scribes’ reports are advertisements for flycatchers, hand-cranked bread kneaders, kerosene-powered refrigerators, steel wagon wheels, cook stoves, and treadle sewing machines—in short, things that the rest of us see in antiques shops and museums. With its reports from Amish settlements all over the world, the Budget is a communications link between a separated people, who are as scattered as the November leaves. They read columns called “Our Suffering Brethren,” about people who are still persecuted for their religious beliefs. Another column, “Es Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch Eck,” discusses everything from Amish recipes to quilting. And where else but the Budget could a reader ask where to buy Cornell Horse Liniment, or what to use for poison ivy? One reader advised another: “For the ivy use homemade lye soap. Make wet and rub on affected area. This is also good for chiggers and other itching. We have found it very effective.”
Contrast this old-time approach with the Budget’s desire to stay in the public eye. (Some things change slowly, while others, like the Budget, evolve in ultra-slow motion.) Although the newspaper is still firmly connected to the turn of the twentieth century, its owners understand that they must serve all of their readers. So they have started a company Web site—www.thebudgetnewspaper.com. It will serve local readers as well as any Mennonites (and any renegade Amish) who don’t mind using the World Wide Web to get information. When I looked up the paper’s new site in 2004, it told me that I was visitor number 663.
Progress and technology notwithstanding, the newspaper cannot be fully explained or appreciated without first knowing Sugarcreek, a town fiercely proud of its past. The town has proclaimed itself the Little Switzerland of Ohio (one third of its people are of Swiss descent, said historian George R. Smith, associate editor of the newspaper). “Of course,” he said, “our Amish brothers came from Switzerland too, but they wandered around all over Europe first. So we really don’t really count them as Swiss.”
Sugarcreek is a prosperous country town that is preoccupied with all things Swiss. Every September, more than a hundred thousand tourists converge on the town for its Swiss Festival. People expect to see black Amish buggies, an old Amish newspaper, and yellow Swiss cheese. They are not disappointed. These trappings of rural Ohio enable the Budget to exist as an independent enigma. The newspaper and its readers fill their own small nooks in this world, a place in love with technology. But in Sugarcreek, the story is a little different. Everyone knows that horsepower still means horse power and a newspaper still means long columns of small black type. No color pages, no fancy graphics. No gimmicks clutter the paper.
As I walked around the town, I thought of Sugarcreek as a fort on the edge of the future. The town is a piece of the old Ohio. Here all the refugees—those who want to hold back tomorrow and keep life as it has been for centuries—have gathered for the final stand because there is no other place to run. I wondered how long the fort would hold, for development will surely arrive in time and money will change Sugarcreek into just another modern and homogenous town.
A focal point of the old life is still in the downtown, where the Amish and “the English” work together and coexist nicely. The town has turned its heritage—Switzerland—into a communitywide theme. At first glance, the small downtown is disconcerting, with Swiss music being piped through loud speakers. The whole town seems curiously still and colorful, like a timeless town in a snow globe, dressed brightly in gingerbread with blue mountain paintings and long Alp horns adorning the fronts of shops. Even the town library looks like a ski resort, and the entire business district looks imaginary, a shimmering prism of mad colors amid a wide patch of green.
Life has been this way since 1953, when the town fathers encouraged a growing tourist business in the area’s cheese factories. So that year they started the Ohio Swiss Festival and changed their storefronts to look like a little piece of Switzerland. Businessman Ranson Andreas donated a building to start the Alpine Hills Museum. “He decorated his own building like Swiss and then dared the rest of the town to do it too,” said Claude Zimmerman, a grandson of the town’s founder. “The only problem is, when July comes with its ninety-degree heat and high humidity, visitors can have a little trouble imagining they are in the Alps.”
Sugarcreek has been a bastion of the Old World since the 1800s. In 1920, Smith’s father, Samuel A. Smith, bought the newspaper. The younger Smith worked there after school and later edited the scribes’ handwritten reports. Even after he became the editor, he continued to tend to about three hundred of their letters each week. He sold the paper in 1969 but continued to edit reports from the people who had become his friends. On a more recent visit, I read that ninety-three-year-old George Smith died in the fall of 2000, after working at the Budget for eighty years. That figure—eighty—staggered me. In today’s flighty workplace, it is unusual to find a forty-year company veteran. After Smith’s death, the paper’s first photograph—at least the first one that anyone can remember—finally appeared on page one of the Amish edition. If any subscribers cringed, they kept their feelings to themselves.
Smith and the scribes had a close relationship. They trusted him, even though he was not one of their faith. They knew he would not make them look silly. Smith got something out of the relationship, too; he simply enjoyed it.
“Once,” he told me on an earlier visit, “a scribe wrote that a woman was going to have her third consecutive set of twins—in two years. I know the Amish have large families, but three sets? Another time, we had a person write: ‘A farm family had a chimney fire Tuesday night, but, with the aid of the local volunteer fire department, the blaze was soon out of control.’ And then every so often we get the stories in which somebody is ‘fatally murdered.’ I like that style. I won’t change the writing much because I don’t want to lose the Amish flavor.”
That flavor has helped sell the Budget since it was founded in 1890, the year Sugarcreek started to grow economically. A local printer, John C. Miller, decided the bustling town needed a newspaper, so he printed one with four 9 x 12–inch pages and mailed copies to six hundred prospective subscribers. From the start, the paper was destined to ignore conventional publishing rules. On October 15, 1891, Miller wrote: “The reason for the delay is that on Tuesday of last week, while returning from Farmerstown on a buggy, behind a kicking horse, we thought it safer to jump out of the buggy, and in so doing we had our right arm broken near the wrist, which will keep us from work for several weeks.” In a month, when he was well enough to resume publishing, Miller had already received dozens of letters from Amish friends who had moved to other states. Without thinking much about editorial policy, he decided to include their letters in the next edition. Readers enjoyed them, so he continued to publish them and the Amish continued to write. By December 1892, Miller was sending the Budget to 18 states and 463 post offices. Circulation increased to five thousand by 1906, and the newspaper earned a name as an important Amish journal.
Except for a few years during the Depression, the newspaper has been healthy. Sprankle said he does not want to change it or conduct market research or to offer advertising. Lately he has turned his efforts toward expanding the Sugarcreek section of the newspaper, which, in keeping with tradition, is also offbeat. After all, Sprankle dislikes hard news. He looks instead for positive stories when he can find them, and to get them he doesn’t mind posing as he milks cows at the county fair. “Next month, I think I’ll enter a dress-a-calf contest,” he said. He prefers a front page uncluttered with terrible happenings. “I’m probably the only editor of a worldwide paper who devoted only two inches of copy to the shooting of President Reagan. But I did put the story on the front page.”
Like Smith, Sprankle can’t seem to run from the magnetic pull of the Budget. He worked there in high school and quit to enlist in the Air Force after his graduation. When he returned, he decided to buy a part of the business, but he later sold it. “I had quit again, but the owners asked me to come back to run the paper,” he said. “I thought, what the heck, I’ll buy forty percent of it. Now, I own it with my partner, a Jewish businessman. So you’ve got an Amish paper owned by a Lutheran and a Jew. Kind of odd, huh?”
Not when you consider the paper’s policy. “We like to run only good news,” Sprankle said. “Of course, out of necessity there are some things we have to get across to our public. For instance, the other week in our local section we ran a picture of a man’s front yard here in town. That might not sound newsworthy, but his grass was too long. It looked horrible. The picture fixed that, though. We put it on page one for everybody to see. By the next day, the grass was mowed. A good thing, too, because we were ready to put a goat on his lawn and take a picture for the next issue.”
Tired of walking, I stopped at an old building, the blacksmith shop. I looked inside a murky room with two light bulbs dangling from the rafters. A bearded man held an ice cream cone in one hand and a hammer in the other. He looked annoyed.
“If you’re closing, it’s all right,” I said.
“No, no—wait! Do come in, please, but you’ve got to excuse me. By five o’clock I smell like a horse myself.”
He motioned to step closer on a floor littered with the pieces of his life: twisted nails, leather collars, rusty horseshoes, harnesses, and copies of the Budget. “It connects us,” he said. Without blinking, he picked up the hammer and slammed it upon the anvil. The sound resonated off the walls and died in the street.
Dale Schlabach, Amish, was thirty-four years old at that time, with red hair, a stiff white shirt, and dark work pants. His hands were those of a worker—rough and dirty and thick. The grin was that of a boy. He was loud and warm, a man in whom life’s meaning seemed revealed. The center of his universe was the shop. It was low, faded red, and rickety, like something on the set of Gunsmoke. He said he came to it every day, early.
The village, which owned the building, kept the rent low so Sugarcreek could show a working blacksmith to the tourists who came to town each year to see how Swiss cheese was made. The arrangement was really subsidized industry. The large Amish population, with a horse-drawn lifestyle, assured the blacksmith of much work.
For some reason, visitors always ended up in front of Schlabach’s door, their eyes probing every inch of the dusty shop. “Other day,” he said, “a fellow come in and said he heard that blacksmithing was being taught at a college. Can you imagine that? I never went to college, just to the eighth grade. I wonder if they teach you how to milk a cow out at that school?”
Schlabach opened the shop because he has a reverence for hammer and horseflesh. The job forced him to rise at 3 A.M. and, after doing the chores on the farm, to drive his buggy (“My van, man”) to the shop in town, about five miles away. Visitors usually gathered around as he opened up the shop each day.
“People come to see a blacksmith,” he said with a shrug. “Aren’t many of us left these days. Sometimes they stand in long rows in front of my building. About noon I walk over to ’em and say, ‘How many of you folks have ever held the foot of a horse?’ They don’t say anything, so I open up my hand to show ’em something—an old yellow horse’s hoof that I keep here on a shelf. They groan pretty loud at that. At least once a week somebody will come up and touch a red-hot shoe. I’ll say, ‘Was it hot?’ The guy’ll say, ‘Uh, no, I just don’t like to hold a horseshoe too long.’”
Visitors look at Schlabach and see a breathing anachronism, somebody foreign. Sometimes he invites people like me out to his farm for a meal and a chance to watch him milk his cows. His family roots are planted as firmly as an oak in this rolling countryside. But, like all Amish, he has maintained a detached sense of citizenship. His people belong first to the earth.
“The old town stays about the same,” he said. “Only the storefronts change. Other day a fellow come in here and said he was a missionary in Africa. I said, ‘But where are you from?’ He thought about that for a minute and said, ‘I’m from nowhere, really.’ Well, being from someplace is kind of like putting on a necktie. You don’t have to do it, but it sure helps.”
Dale Schlabach lives somewhere: “On a little farm, fourteen acres, where the wife and I are trying to bring up seven kids and fifteen Belgian horses. No electricity, no telephone, no car—just fun. I mean, you ever see seven kids at six in the morning? Ah-ha! Oh, well, I guess the only guy who has no troubles is the guy who has nothing.”