http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish some of the pictures & text ============== http://lancasterpa.com/amish/ pictures =============== Amish Barn Raising & Frolic in Wesby, Wisconsin 2008 article in "Amish Communities" Originally published in Wesby Times, August 28, 2008 ==================== http://amishamerica.com/wisconsin-amish-barn-raising/ This recent barn-raising shot was sent in by a reader living near a Wisconsin Amish community. In the accompanying story in the Westby Times, an Amish old-timer explains some of the ins-and-outs of barn-raising, including this interesting technical detail: ‘Yoder added that it is customary for families involved in a barn raising to provide a dish to pass at lunch, but it is the responsibility of the family whose barn is being constructed to provide the majority of the food and beverages used throughout the day.’ Thanks to reader Eric Leum and Westby editor Dorothy Jasperson! ===================== http://amishamerica.com/what-happens-at-an-amish-barn-raising/ What happens at an Amish barn raising? The barn-raising symbolizes Amish values of community and hard work amish barn raisingA barn raising is an example of a frolic, a work event that combines socializing with a practical goal. The barn raising fulfills a practical need and also serves to tie the Amish community together, reinforcing Amish society through a very visible expression of the principle of mutual aid. The Barn raising as an example of Amish mutual aid Occasionally, there is a need for a new barn to be build in an Amish community. A farmer may be starting up farming. Sometimes disaster strikes and a barn will burn down. Amish society is based on a Christian belief in mutual aid. Amish church members are committed to helping one another, and put that belief into practice when putting up a barn. amish barn raising Amish men construct a barn in Wisconsin Barn raisings are synonymous with Amish life, and have become iconic of the people, often being featured in images of the Amish or portrayed on film in such movies as Witness. A barn raising is a showcase of Amish planning, organization, and manual labor. Amish tap into the social capital and goodwill in the community, mobilize labor and come together to erect a building which serves as a practical linchpin of their agriculturally-rooted communities. How is an Amish barn-raising organized? Barn raisings require organization, supplies, and labor. They are typically led by one or two master Amish “engineers”, who lay out plans for the barn and assure the materials are available. Supplies and livestock may be donated by fellow church members. All labor is contributed for free as well. Amish know they may be in need of the community’s help themselves one day. Typically the blocks and cement used in the foundation are laid before the day of the actual raising, allowing time to dry and set. The day of the barn raising, men arrive early. The master organizes men and instructs on jobs, overseeing the whole event. Amish traditionally build barns using wood-peg mortise and tenon joint construction, but may also use more modern materials and techniques. amish men barn Barn raisings involve the whole community. Amish men carry material as young boys look on Despite the common belief that Amish do the whole job in a single day, it may take a week or more from start to finish. There are typically a good bit of preparations to be done beforehand as well. However, the wood frame structure usually does go up in one day. Women help by preparing meals for the men. Youth and children participate as well. Hundreds typically attend, either as workers, support, or observers. Other work frolics A barn raising is the most well-known example of what the Amish call “frolics”. Amish take pleasure from participating in joint cooperative work projects—both from the social aspect as well as from the deeper sense of satisfaction in seeing tangible results of one’s labor. “We look forward to raisings,” said one Amishman. ”There are so many helping, no one has to work too hard. We get in a good visit” (“The Barn Raising”, Gene Logsdon). Amish also feel a deep sense of security in knowing that the community they are a part of will return the favor if they ever find themselves in need. barn raising amish A barn goes up on a new Amish farm in Indiana Besides the barn-raising, there are numerous other types of work frolics Amish typically participate in. Quilting bees get women together to do the painstaking work of stitching a quilt, and offer a venue to visit and share news at the same time. Canning, shucking corn and shelling peas are other, smaller-scale occasions when Amish may get together to tackle a task. Frolics for men may involve putting up new buildings other than barns, working on a roof, or other sizable tasks requiring many hands. Word may be put out at the Sunday service of the upcoming frolic, and community members will come as they are able. Barn raisings not as common today Despite their iconic nature, barn raisings are not as common today as they once were. This is due to the general decline in farming among Amish, due largely to high land prices. Still, accidents happen and barns burn down, and Amish stil do set up new farms. Thus there remain opportunities to both participate in and witness this definitive event of Amish life. For more information, see: “The Barn Raising”, Gene Logsdon, in Amish Roots: A Treasury of History, Wisdom, and Lore, ed. John A. Hostetler Amish Houses and Barns, Stephen Scott Photo credits: Wisconsin; young boys-Dorothy Jasperson, Westby Times. Indiana barn and thumbnail-Cindy Seigle ===================== http://www.welcome-to-lancaster-county.com/amish-barn.html ===================== http://amishamerica.com/the-amish-barn/ The Amish barn-raising Posted on December 3rd, 2007 in Amish Culture Nebraska_amish_barn_raising Nebraska Amish barn-raising photo: Randall Persing These don’t happen too often, but when they do, Amish photographers (erm, that is, photographers of the Amish) come out in droves. The Amish barn-raising. It’s one of the most-publicized images of the Plain People. Has anyone ever witnessed one? The frolic I attended in Ohio in September was more of a ‘shed-raising’, and in fact, most of it had been raised by the time we showed up to help. It really does take a day, or less. At least the bulk of what you end up seeing. Apparently the foundation-type stuff often gets put in beforehand. I always wondered about dropped hammers, though. Hard-hats are a no-no in Amish society. ======================== http://ezinearticles.com/?Amish-Barn-Raising&id=1611714 An Amish barn raising is a testament to brotherly love and community spirit. Like any big project, it doesn't happen overnight. The family who needs a new barn must first prepare and lay the foundation for the barn. They also need to plan and purchase the thousands of feet of lumber, nails, and other construction materials needed to build such a large structure. Once these tasks are completed the owner will then approach the Amish elders to ask for assistance with the barn raising. If the elders feel the project is worthy, they will then grant permission for the barn raiser. A date will be set and surrounding community families will be notified. Men from ages 16 and up will take part in the actual construction of the exterior of the barn. One man, usually an older man with years of experience, will serve as construction foreman and will direct the work. He will assign specific tasks to the men in order to make sure the project is done safely and efficiently. Younger boys usually don't help with the actual construction but will fetch tools, lumber and nails for the men doing the work. Eventually, as the young boys mature they will be given more and more responsibility until they, too, will be on the construction crew. Women and girls are equally as busy, preparing meals, watching the young children, cleaning up after dining, and running errands as needed. Usually the framing for the building is completed in the morning. After the noon meal is eaten the roof is built. A barn raising typically begins at dawn and is completed by dark. As you can image preparing large amounts of foods for such a crowd can be daunting. Most families that help with the barn raising will provide a dish, but it is up to the owner to provide the rest of the food and the beverages. As with planning the actual barn, it takes a lot of preparation to plan, prepare, or purchase the ingredients in order to feed hungry laborers a satisfying meal. In fitting with the barn raising theme, here's a recipe for an Amish Haystack that feeds twelve, but can be doubled, tripled, or whatever quantity is needed. Amish Haystack Ingredients: 2 pounds lean ground beef One 1/4-ounce package taco seasoning mix One 14-ounce jar organic pasta sauce 2 cups crushed saltines One nine-ounce bag tortilla chips, crushed 2 cups hot cooked rice 1 head iceberg lettuce, thinly sliced 2 cups tomatoes, diced 1 cup chopped carrots 1 cup chopped onions 1 cup sliced pitted ripe olives 1 cup diced green pepper 1 cup diced celery 1 1/2 cups shredded Cheddar cheese 1 cup crumbled cooked bacon 1 cup sunflower seeds One 11-ounce jar organic salsa DIRECTIONS: 1. In 12-inch skillet, brown ground beef with taco seasoning over medium-high heat. Add pasta sauce; heat to boiling. Reduce heat to low; simmer, uncovered, until most of the liquid evaporates. 2. Mix crushed crackers and tortilla chips in a bowl. Place ground-beef mixture, rice, and remaining ingredients into individual bowls. 3. The meal is served buffet style with guests preparing their own plate. Instruct them to layer the plate as follows: lettuce, crushed cracker and chips mix, meat, rice. The rest of the toppings can be added according to taste. Serves 12 Here's another hearty Amish recipe that feeds a crowd or two. Amish Stew Ingredients: 4 pounds beef roast, cubed 4-6 tablespoons butter or oil 2 large onions, chopped 1 large can stewed tomatoes 8 carrots, peeled and cut into large chunks 6 large potatoes, peeled and cut into 1 inch pieces ½ cup fresh or frozen peas 2 bay leaves Salt and pepper to taste Beef bouillon cubes, dissolved in water. Use a large, heavy pot to melt butter or oil over medium-high heat. Brown beef until nearly cooked through. Add onion and sauté until transparent. Add bay leaves and salt and pepper along with tomatoes and vegetables. Cover and cook on medium heat, stir occasionally. This will need to cook for about 4 hours. Check frequently. Add beef bouillon broth to the stew as needed if the stew becomes too thick. Remove bay leaves before serving. This stew can also be made into a beef dumpling dish by adding about 1-2 cups of water to the pot and bringing the stew to a boil. Stir, cover and reduce the heat. Drop spoonfuls of biscuit mix into the stew and cover until the biscuits are cooked. Feeds 12 Kurt Yordy Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/1611714 ================ http://www.motherearthnews.com/nature-and-environment/amish-barn-raising-zmaz78mjzhin.aspx#axzz3LtiMzp70 Amish Barn Raising: A Way of Life When will we learn that nothing compares to an old-fashioned Amish barn raising? By Helen Forrest McKee May/June 1978 ============ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsTB0HnM6WM YouTube video of Ohio barn raising in Share . Add to My MSN The Amish come together as a way of life to raise a barn for a member of their community in Lancaster County, Penn. PHOTO: PAULA GANSER Slideshow Content Tools Print Email Comments Related Content Finishing the Barndominium: Almost Ready to Move In After three years of trying to build the barndominium in three-week-per-year spurts, Jim has relocat... More Barnyard Animals at the MOTHER EARTH NEWS FAIR Check out these photos of some of the animals that attended the MOTHER EARTH NEWS FAIR. Countertop Water Filtration Growing In Popularity Try to get clean water and wanting simple bottling options with the purity. Most of the experts in w... Homesteading Defined When defining the term homesteading, consider the various options available. Standing there, you'd think the clock had been turned back a century. It is 7 a.m. and — in the gently rolling farmlands of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania — this country lane is filled with horse-drawn buggies. As the old-time vehicles pass, we can see that the men and boys inside are all clad exactly alike in simple roughspun shirts, black suits, and straw boaters, while the women and girls wear long, rather formal dresses and prim white caps. These people are Amish, and they're going to a party: A barn raising. One by one, the buggies pull in at the Eshe farm just down the road. There the women unload pans of roasting chicken and baskets of other food and lug the containers into the house, where they'll spend the rest of the morning cooking dinner. Meanwhile, the men and boys (although never removing their boaters) take off their jackets and fold them neatly on the buggy seats. Then, clutching hammers and saws, they head for the barn . . . or what will be the barn. (Right now the soon-to-be structure is still only a concrete-block foundation and stacks of weathered boards taken from an old barn in another town.) The men — gesturing and talking quietly — gather into little groups. After a few minutes, the small knots of laborers break up and everybody starts to work. The air is filled with the squalling protests of old nails being yanked out of planks as teenagers attack the piles of reclaimed lumber with reversed claw hammers. While some of the men begin to saw floor joists to length with raspy strokes, others hand the boards up to men already standing atop the foundation. Soon all the rest of the sounds are drowned out by the increasing rat-a-tat-tat of hammers toenailing joists into position. It is apparent — even to the casual observer — that these Amishmen know how to build barns! The Amish are a religious sect whose roots stretch all the way back to the Protestant Reformation. Their fundamentalist movement began in Switzerland in 1525, and later took the name "Mennonites." But in Germany during the late 1600's, a Mennonite named Jacob Amman decided that the religion was backsliding and started his own reform movement: The Amish. Then, beginning in 1698, his people emigrated from the Palatinate region of Bavaria to southeastern Pennsylvania and settled in what is now Lancaster County. The descendants of those early settlers have changed little during the intervening 280 years. The peace-loving Amish continue to live their religion, which emphasizes self-reliance. They reject welfare in all its forms, they do not participate actively in government, and they refuse to serve in the armed forces. (You get some inkling of Amish feelings about the military when you learn that the men still fasten their jackets and vests with hooks and eyes instead of buttons . . . solely because the military uniforms of the 1600's featured ornate buttons!) The Amish are highly advanced farmers. They were routinely practicing crop rotation long before there was any such a thing as a county agent in this country, and the yield per acre in Lancaster County is among the highest in the nation. Furthermore, in living their religion, the Amish stick close to the Bible . . . which says nothing at all about electricity or automobiles or tractors (much less television). For that reason, these conservative people avoid such things. One of their bishops has been quoted as saying, "A tractor gets the work done more quickly, but horses and the love of hard work keep us nearer to God." The Amish may handle their tasks the hard way, but they definitely do get them done. They make their own clothes, grow their own food and sell the surplus, pass along useful items such as furniture and harness from generation to generation, work hard, speak softly, and live very well. They like to work with wood, and they learn the niceties of barn-building at an early age. Today, at the Eshe farm, a hundred Amish families are donating their time to raise a barn. And the structure is going up fast. Look! It isn't even noon yet and, already, the main framing timbers are in place, with 50 men clinging to them like flies, nailing down rafters, and sawing off ragged ends. Older gentlemen on the ground make themselves useful by passing up a stream of boards to the more agile members of the crew. Inside the farmhouse the women gossip happily as they roast mountains of chicken, boil bushels of potatoes, and prepare the rest of the midday feast . . . Pennsylvania Dutch cooking at its best! As the steaming dishes come out of the kitchen, the young girls begin to shuttle huge plates of food out to the long table set up in the yard. Noon! Everything stops, and the men come trooping down the lane to the farmhouse. Laughing and joking, they pile their plates with chicken and potatoes and vegetables and seven sweets and seven sours and pies and cakes and an almost bewildering selection of side dishes. Between bites they swap stories about other barn raisin's, and livestock auctions, and who had a buggy wreck last week, and who's courting these days, and at the end of the hour, the men plunk down their empty plates, pat their bulging stomachs, and head back to the barn again. That's the signal for the women to gather up and start washing the acres of crockery, while the girls fill milk cans with fruit juices and load platters with cookies in preparation for a 4 p.m. "mid-afternoon" break. Small children play in a nearby sandpile . . . at times engrossed in their (homemade) toys, at other times making new friends among the horde surrounding them (Amish families average eight children each), and sometimes simply watching the huge barn almost magically take shape before their eyes. There is no fighting or crying and no need for an adult to supervise them. All too soon the day ends, and the sun slides down behind the horizon. In front of the farmhouse, Amish families regretfully wave goodbye, count children, and climb into their buggies. A stocky, bearded farmer clicks his tongue, flicks the reins, and the first horse-drawn vehicle moves off down the lane. Within minutes, the yard is empty. But — in just one day — the Eshe farm has gained a structure . . . a brand-new barn which stands silhouetted against the afterglow from the west as — if you will — a monument to the brother- and sisterhood of (Amish) humankind. And all it cost the Eshe family was a little money for a concrete block foundation and some used lumber. There are worse ways to live . . . as, unfortunately, far too many people know all too well. =================== http://www.core77.com/blog/architecture/amish_barn_raisings_are_awesome_especially_for_what_you_dont_see_in_the_video_27594.asp Amish Barn Raisings Are Awesome, Especially for What You Don't See in the Video Posted by hipstomp / Rain Noe | 8 Sep 2014 | Comments (3) 0amishbarnraising-001.jpg This amazing footage of an Amish barn raising has been making the blog rounds. As fascinating as it is, the things about this activity that you cannot see in the video are of equal interest. But before we get to that, let's see the vid: Ohio-based non-Amishman Scott Miller secured permission to record the activity, likely because he pitched in to help on the ten-hour job. And while all you see in the video are men, an Amish barn-raising is actually an all-hands-on-deck affair. Attendance is mandatory in the community, though the Amish don't view "mandatory" as the pejorative we selfish Americans do: "We enjoy barn raisings," an Amish farmer told writer Gene Logsdon in 1983. "So many come to work that no one has to work very hard. And we get in a good visit." 0amishbarnraising-005.jpg Photo by Eliza Waters That's because to the Amish, a barn-raising falls into the category of activity known as a "frolic," a combination of group labor and social mixing, which builds and solidifies the community as surely as it does the barn. All able-bodied members of the settlement are in attendance, meaning there can be more than a hundred families on hand, and with Amish families averaging eight children each, you can do the math. It's not difficult to see that what might take a conventional construction crew armed with cranes a month or more to complete this task, start to finish, is performed by the Amish in a week or so. 0amishbarnraising-002.jpg All have a role to play regardless of age and gender. The younger, more able-bodied men are the ones you see clambering up and down the structure. The older men whose climbing days are behind them stay down below, passing up supplies, and the most experienced serve as foremen. The entire building operation is "typically led by one or two master Amish 'engineers,' who lay out plans for the barn and assure the materials are available," according to Amish America. 0amishbarnraising-003.jpg The community's women are also on-site, preparing the gargantuan feast and snacks required to feed this mass gathering, while girls carry the plates out at mealtime, ferry juice jugs, and assist with the cleaning up. Boys not yet old enough to participate are put to lesser tasks like fetching tools or de-nailing old boards that will be re-used, while the youngest boys are on hand to watch and learn. By the time an Amish boy has grown to a man he has observed every stage of multiple barn-raisings, has learned the tools and now has the education needed to effectively pitch in. "They like to work with wood, and they learn the niceties of barn-building at an early age," wrote Helen Forrest McKee in a 1978 article on the phenomenon. And among the children "There is no fighting or crying and no need for an adult to supervise them." 0amishbarnraising-004.jpg In Lodgson's aforementioned article, he had encountered an Amish community in Ohio's Holmes County that had been devastated by a tornado. In twenty minutes the tornado had "sliced through Amish farmsteads, capriciously reducing barns to kindling" and "destroyed at least fifteen acres of mature forest a hundred years or more in the growing, and four barns that represented the collected architectural wisdom of several centuries of rural tradition." But what followed in the wake of the tornado during the next three weeks was just as awesome as the wind itself. In that time—three weeks—the forest devastation was sawed into lumber and transformed into four big new barns. No massive effort of bulldozers, cranes, semi-trucks, or the National Guard was involved. The surrounding Amish community rolled up its sleeves, hitched up its horses and did it all. Nor were the barns the quick-fix modern structures of sheet metal hung on posts stuck in the ground. They were massive three-story affairs of post-and-beam framing, held together with hundreds of hand-hewn mortises and tenons. A building contractor, walking through the last of the barns to be completed, could only shake his head in disbelief. Even with a beefed-up crew, it would have taken him most of the summer to build this barn alone and it would have cost the farmer $100,000, if in fact he could have found such huge girder beams at any price. The Amish farmer who was the recipient of this new barn smiled. The structure, complete with donated hay, grain, and animals to replace all that was destroyed by the storm, cost him "about thirty thousand dollars, out-of-pocket money"--most of that funded by his Amish Church's own internal insurance arrangement. "We give each other our labor," he said. "That's our way. In the giving, nothing is lost, though, and much is gained." Interestingly enough non-Amish reporter Tom Abate, who once participated in an Amish barn-raising, draws a parallel between that activity and the communal websites Wikipedia, YouTube, Digg and Flickr: "In each instance," he writes, "the groundwork for success was laid in advance by smaller teams that created the structures that could scale as more people show up." ============ http://www.motherearthnews.com/nature-and-environment/amish-barn-raising-zmaz78mjzhin.aspx A way of life. ============