Growing Up Amish

Hi. We're just gonna have some fun. We're gonna have fun tonight. And we're going to just share our experience of growing up Amish. Priscilla and I both were born in very conservative, old order Amish communities. And as time evolved, as we were married, things changed and we're not very traditional. I'd say we're called non-traditional at this point. But we still value our heritage and our roots very much. And so we thought we'd share a little bit with you about how we grew up, what it was like to grow up Amish, and what it was like to grow up without electricity, with running water, which means you have to run and get it. And no indoor plumbing, no indoor toilet, the way I grew up until I was around 12 or so. So let's start in. My beautiful wife, Priscilla, I'm Joas. We have five wonderful children, ages four through 13. And they're tucked in bed. And now is our time to make a little movie about our life. So go ahead, Priscilla, tell us where you were born. And tell us a little bit about your story. Okay, so this, I actually have still some of my old traditional Amish clothes. So I wanted to show you. So this is my, this is a shawl that we would wear to go to church. Put it on, put it around us, and just use like a big safety pin to close it. And here is this cap, we called it, in German we called it kappa, or kap, which means cap. So, and it was very, you can see in the back, it was really, it was a real skill to be able to make these. I never was, I never was good at it, but my oldest sister would make them. And then also this was our bonnet that we would wear, we would put on to go to church. See if it still fits. So there you go. Isn't she cute? So cute. Cute little Amish girl. I was born in Missouri. And just, I was just a little, still a little baby when my parents moved out. It was, in Missouri it was a very conservative Amish community. There was no running water in the house, unless they had like this pump. Right, a hand pump. A hand pump thing. No indoor bathroom. It was just a outhouse, but I don't remember much about living there, but we moved to Pennsylvania, and then a little later we moved to Michigan, and that's where I grew up. How old were you when you moved to Pennsylvania out of Missouri? I was just, I don't think I even was one. So no memories of Missouri, and then how old were you when you moved to Michigan? Seven years old. I was seven when we moved to Michigan, and I lived there until I was 18. So that was my childhood home, Michigan. Yeah, and then I was born in Montana. My parents moved from a large community in LaGrange, Northern Indiana, LaGrange, Indiana, where a lot of my relatives still live. And my parents moved in 1974 to a little unknown place called Rexford, Montana. And it's just, our home was one mile from the Canadian border. We lived 30 miles from town, and the only way to get to town, we never took a horse and buggy. It was just too far, as we'd hire a driver to go to town, and we hardly ever went to town. I would go to town maybe once a year or so, just didn't go to town. I grew up out in the sticks. We were very poor. I was born there. Actually, I was born in the town of Whitefish in the hospital. And then I'll tell you a little funny story about that. We're gonna interject some stories because I know we like stories, and I'm sure you guys like stories. So I'll tell you a little bit. This is some of the culture. We're gonna share with you some of the culture of the Amish. So we love the Amish. First of all, we're just gonna tell you that we love the Amish people. There's their heritage, their culture. There are people. Yeah, there are people. And I have, years ago I read a quote in a book that says if you don't know where you come from, you'll never know where you're going. And so that's been very important to me. Anyways, as part of the culture, I was the youngest of eight children, eight living children. My mom had 10 children. The first one was a stillborn, and I had a nine-year-old brother that passed away, both in horse and buggy accidents. But when mom brought me home from the hospital, the neighbors came over and said, you know, mom's bringing something home from the hospital to my older brothers and sisters, which my next oldest sibling, my sister is six and a half years older than I am, and my brother is 10, 10 years older. So he was 10 and a half years older than me. And my other next sister was 12 years older than I was, you know, since I was just born. And the neighbors asked him, you know, your mom's bringing something home from the hospital. Can you guess what it is? And they didn't know what mom was bringing home from the hospital. They didn't know she was pregnant. So my brother Elvie guessed a new bike, and a pony, you know. So anyway, they were really surprised when I came home from the hospital, not even knowing that mom was expecting a baby. So that's pretty normal in the Amish culture. So we lived in a little home up by the Canadian border that my dad and my brothers built, and that's where I grew up. So tell us a little bit more, Priscilla, about like your school and how that, tell us a little bit more about that, your growing up years in Michigan. Yeah, and in Michigan, just growing up as an Amish girl, it was, there was a lot of work. Children worked a lot, but there was also a lot of hard play. And I remember spending many hours out in the mulberry trees. There were mulberry trees in Michigan, and as children, after the work was done, or in the afternoons when we had time, we would run up to the mulberry trees and sit in there and eat mulberries. In the branches. In the branches, yep, up in the branches. And, but as far as just everyday life, we had, there's just, for the girls, it was housework. We did sweeping, mopping, washing windows. We learned how to, we learned how to clean house. We learned the basics of keeping a home. We learned how to cook, sew, and can. Tell us how you did, how you washed your clothes. Well, we had this. There's no electricity, so. We had this, well, we had a generator. We used a generator. You did, okay. At that time. I don't remember before that. We had like this, but it was this wringer. Wringer washer, so it was electric. I mean, it was, you plugged, you started a motor, and then you plugged it in, and it was a wringer washer. And you, so you put the laundry through this wringer. Right, Maytag, Maytag wringer washer, so the way that I grew up until my mom, even just until a few years, just a few years ago, matter of fact, she liked her Maytag wringer washer, and we had a little Honda motor with a belt. We'd start the motor, you know, exhaust on the basement, try to pipe it out, but it always was exhausty. And this wringer washer on a belt, a little Honda motor, and she would, you know, run all her clothes through the Maytag washer, and then rinse them in the tub, and then run them through again to squeeze them, then hang them out on the line. Now my mom and my parents are both in their 80s, so we finally insisted she get an electric washer and dryer, which she does use that now. Yeah, we always hung all the washout on the line, and. And I'll still say, there's nothing that smells better than fresh laundry from the line, it smells so good. Yeah, and folded it, and I came from, there was nine children, I had eight siblings, and so we had loads of laundry. And how often did you do laundry? Twice a week, everything, yeah. Mondays and Thursdays or something? Something like that, yeah, so. Yeah. Okay. And school, the school was just, we, it was a one-room schoolhouse, and it was from grade one to eight. We always had an art class, a German class, and by the way, I grew up Swiss, so I spoke a Swiss dialect, plus I was. Swiss German. Swiss German dialect, plus I learned another German dialect. My dialect of German, which is Deutsch, but people have coined it Dutch, which is not Dutch, but you probably know it as Pennsylvania Dutch, but it actually came as Deutsch, which means German, and came from Pennsylvania, so it's a German dialect, actually called Schwäbisch, which they still speak in Germany. My brother actually has visited Germany, and he was able to communicate exactly in our language, in our Schwäbisch dialect that we speak. So yes, Priscilla grew up Swiss German, I grew up Schwäbisch, with the Pennsylvania Deutsch, Dutch dialect. Yeah, and then we also learned English, so almost three languages in a way, so yeah. So we still speak, because there's fewer Swiss people in our community, so we have chosen to speak, to teach that to our children, but they have a lot of cousins and friends that speak the Schwäbisch, so they also speak that, and then of course they speak English as well, so our children are what we call trilingual or something, but it's funny, because they have kind of developed their own language, and so we have to help them with that, because they've come up with these words that don't exist, which is kind of funny, between English and German, like Jinglish or something, and Swinglish, I don't know what it is. Anyways, yeah, and I also grew up in a one-room schoolhouse, grades one through eight, and we always ran to school, never took a school bus or anything to school, school was always less than, for me it was always less than a mile away, about a mile or a lot less, so I always ran to school and ran back home. And when I was in third grade, I remember waking up in the middle of the night, and the neighbor was beating on her door, said, Aura, Aura, which is my dad, wake up, wake up, the schoolhouse is on fire, and I remember running in my PJs with my sisters, down through the woods, and during the dark, it was like 4 a.m., and we watched the whole schoolhouse cave in, just the whole walls and the roof and everything just implode, and so that was quite amazing, and we built another schoolhouse then, a few weeks, about six weeks later, we started school again. It was kind of towards the end of the season, so I believe we started school earlier that year. Our school typically goes, even now, from the beginning of September through the end of April, and there's only about one week off total during the whole school year, and the reason that the Amish have chosen that is so when the children go to school, they're focused on school, and then they have all the way from May, June, July, and August, four months to spend at home with their parents, apprenticing, working on the farm or the family business, so that's a really good way of, you know, for us, it's worked out well, where the children are in school, they're doing their studies, and then they're working with their dad or their mom during the summer, so that's how we do that. I'll tell you a little story that I thought about just now, and that was when I was, we always had, we always went everywhere with a horse and buggy, and when we say buggy, we didn't have a buggy, we called it a spring wagon, it was an open wagon, so it had like a seat at the front, a seat at the back, and then, you know, you would classify it almost like a truck, because you could carry things in the back with two seats, so it could hold like six people plus room for like stuff in the back, so an open spring wagon, but so we'd go throughout the community in the West Scootie, in the Rexford, Montana there, in that open spring wagon to church and different places, wherever we needed to go, we had some faithful horses that would always take us there, but I remember one evening coming home from church in the evening, on every Sunday evening there would be what we called a hymn singing, and all the community would gather, and there would be a dinner together, and then we would sing for an hour or so, hour and a half, and just sing, first it was usually sing German songs for 30 minutes, and then sing English songs for the remainder of the time, but this particular evening was in wintertime, I was about eight or nine years old, I remember, and we had a horse named Rufus, and we took the sleigh to the singing, but on the way home, we kind of took a shortcut through the woods, it was like an old trail, and there was this kelly hump, this bump in the trail, and something happened that, I don't know what happened, but the sleigh ended up overturning, and I remember I fell out, and it was like, I had probably two or three of my siblings along with me, my dad and my mom, dad was driving the horse and the sleigh, and this thing overturned and threw us out, as we went over this kelly hump, and mom was stuck underneath the sleigh, and I always think of the horrific thing that could have happened, had the horse panicked, and taken off, dragging the sleigh and mom underneath, it had been awful, but the horse was a good horse, and somehow he, dad was able to hold him or something, and the shafts that the horse was in was all twisted up and everything, but the horse didn't run away, and we were able to tip the sleigh back up, up and mom got out of there, bumps and bruises, but there's so many things that happen, and like I mentioned, I had a brother that I never knew, at nine years old, fell off the back of a wagon, and hit his head on the pavement, and he passed away, as well as my oldest sibling that was stillborn, when mom was still pregnant, she fell out of a runaway horse and buggy, and that causes the baby to die inside her, so mom and dad have known multiple deaths in their family, so the horse and buggies, it's a dangerous thing, a good place to grow up, I think the Amish, it's a very, very good culture, as far as growing up in that culture, about family and work ethics, there's many things that are not good about the Amish, one of them being just another religion, but there's many good hearts, many good people, and many of them, they all want the truth, they all want to know the Lord, they all want to follow to the best that they know how, there's just a number of misinformation that they are not fully aware of God's love for them, and that type of thing, so we're thankful that God has brought us to a place where we know his love and believe that he came to the cross for us, and many things like that, so very thankful for that. Good memories that I have growing up is life was in a way slower paced, because you didn't have vehicles, you didn't have, no media, yeah, you didn't have phones, you were very creative, you became very creative, and I remember us children and youth, we would have many skating parties, we'd be out in the pond skating in the wintertime, and like there was a town about seven miles from us and that had a Walmart, and sometimes we would literally take the whole day, take the buggy and go to Walmart, the horse and buggy, and take the whole day to go to Walmart, and we'd eat out, because we rarely ate out. And fast food. Yeah, and so that was so special, we'd go to McDonald's sometimes, and just walk around in Walmart, and sometimes, yeah, I was just, those were good memories. Because we never got to go to town. Yeah, we never got, we didn't get to do that much of it, so. Tell us about some of the first jobs you had, or did, when you were growing up, as far as outside the home. Right, a lot of Amish girls will mostly stay at home and just help with the family farm, or help in the house, or sometimes they will become a teacher, or be a babysitter, or stuff like that. But my dad was a little different in that way. He encouraged us to go out and get jobs. And so, at 14 years old, the first job I had was picking asparagus. And it was behind a wagon, and the owner drove the tractor, and we lay on the wagon and picked asparagus. We got really, our backs got really tired. But that was my first job, and then I started working at this guy's fruit farm. He had a fruit farm where we cut up a whole bunch of different fruit and put it in packages, and it sold in grocery stores, like fresh fruit ready to eat. And so, I worked there for two years, and then, after that, I worked at a harness shop. It was, we sewed racehorse harnesses. So, I learned how to, had these big. Commercial sewing machines. Yeah, commercial sewing machines. So, I worked there probably another two years, and after that I had, I had a teacher job where I taught first grade class, and then, after that, I worked at a bakery. And that was my favorite job. I loved baking. And she was good at it, too. Yeah, so, my dad started Metal Art Log Homes when I was, at that time it was called Kootenay Log Homes, when I was, the year I was born, essentially. A few years before I was born, my brothers actually built a little log cabin out in the woods, and that kind of broke the idea of a log home business. But in 1980, Dad started the company the year I was born, actually. And so, I grew up all my life building log homes. So, I still am. My dad is retired out of Metal Art Log Homes. We sold the business when we moved from Rexford, Montana, to where we currently live in Libby, Montana. We restarted another company here that was called Metal Art Log Homes. So, I grew up, I remember, some of my first memories were when I was six years old, peeling logs with a draw knife, which we still do that today. Fortunately, I don't need to do that anymore, but it's a hard job. But the reason I remember doing that at six years old is because I got a very bad sunburn that day. So, I just, during the summer I would operate, when I was about nine years old, I started running the crane to set the log houses. Now, you're probably thinking crazy, a nine-year-old, but that was just what we did. All us children worked. My sisters ran the cranes. That was like my first thing I could do that I was, you know, and I was good at it. I ran the crane for years and years till I was sick and tired of running the crane. It was a mental, mental job, but it was good. It was good for me to do that. Peeled logs for a lot of time. Done everything in Metal Art Log Homes. But growing up, that was just, it was working hard is what we did. After school, we'd do our chores, which included, at one time we had 100 chickens that we raised for eggs, and we always had a cow or two. So, doing the chores, and then I always would have to go help run the crane until the, you know, end of work day. And then, of course, during the summertime, that was just, we didn't have to start early necessarily. Like, usually I think around eight or nine o'clock I would go back to the mill, but then I would have to work all day running the crane, and it was really tiring for, you know, a nine-year-old. And I'm sure I played more than I remember, but nonetheless, that was something that was just expected of us, was to work. And then, some of our hobbies growing up, I was always more, I guess, of the entrepreneurial type. So, talking about jobs, let's talk about that. Our money, where did our money go to? In a typical Amish community, family, even nowadays in the way we grew up, the children are just expected to work in the family business, and therefore don't receive wages. And then, when you turn a certain age, then, you know, maybe you get a little spending money here and there or whatever, but you typically just, you're part of the family business until you reach a certain age of 20, 21 years old, and then you're able to receive a full wage and start saving your money that way. So, I always worked in the family business, so that means if I wanted extra spending money, I had to make my own money. So, I did all kinds of little jobs, and one thing I always did was raise rabbits. And I always had rabbits, and that's something I enjoyed. I raised rabbits, butchered rabbits. I raised ostriches for some time. Raised exotic birds, pheasants, and... When I met him, he had these huge cages of all these different birds, and yeah. I love birds, I still do, actually, but yeah, exotic pheasants and those type of things. And then I did taxidermy work for a while. I started my own little taxidermy business in Malmedere and elk and stuff like that. So, that's, yeah, always did the odds and ends and tried to, you know, have little businesses for myself. He had so many hobbies, but he was so creative. So, one thing, every time I had a lot of hobbies, he was going into marriage. So, every time I had a child, I had to lay down about two hobbies. So, now I'm down to, like, what? Hardly any hobbies anymore. Not any. My hobbies are now my wife and my family, so yeah. Very good. I hope he can get into it, which he just did. He mounted a deer with his, with Ethan. Yeah, Ethan and Justin and I mounted Ethan's deer recently. I just made a video of that, too. That was kind of fun doing that. So, anyways, to conclude, we just want to give you a little snapshot of our life growing up. There's so many more things we could spend. I feel like there's an hour we could spend talking about, you know, just trying so many different things. We pushed a lawnmower, for example. We pushed a lawnmower that had blades. Okay, you know that Home Alone movie where the guy, there's a Home Alone movie where the guy is, like, pushing this lawnmower through the attic and mows the guy's hair off? Okay, it was one of those lawnmowers. You push the lawnmower. There was no motor. Yeah, no, it was manually driven. The wheels drove the blades, and it was hard work. You had to push and then stop, push and stop, so. Some Amish people would just put their horses in the lawns so they'd eat up the grass. Yeah. So you never had manicured lawns, hardly one, you know. So, just a lot of things. Yeah, we got running water and propane lights in our home when I was around 10 years old, I believe. Otherwise, we always went to the outhouse, and we had to go about a quarter of a mile, and we had dug a well, and then we had to start a motor, which pumped the water about a half a mile up to a tank, a large holding tank, which then gravity fed it down to our house. So we did that for, actually, until the time we moved, I believe, at about 12 years old. We always had to do that, several, every couple days, we started the motor and pumped water. So, yeah, just a lot of things we could talk about, life growing up Amish. But it was a good, safe place to grow up for myself. For us, yeah. Yeah, it was. It's not for everybody. I know in some Amish communities, it's not. Yeah, the Amish range from very conservative to, you know, driving cars on the other end. So, you know, it's very different. And each community has its own set of rules and, you know, good things about it, and maybe not so good things about it. But here's the thing, we're all people, and we all struggle with the same issues everybody else struggles with. And so, yeah, there's a lot of difference. You know, it depends on how you grew up, but we had good lives growing up, I think. You know, it was a safe place. It was a good place. Yep. So, next time, we might make another video of how we met, and maybe our love story. You can leave a comment down below if you want us to do that. Yep, so we might not until you tell us to. So, yeah, if you wanna hear more about us, hope this was interesting to you. I'm not sure how interesting it is. It's old news to us, but yeah, we just wanted to give you a snapshot of our lives and tell you a little bit more about us. Bye.