The Amish men that are building America's RVs

2017-07-25T13:38:00-04:00

When most Amish men were farmers, it was common for them to work seasonally with non-Amish in town, on more traditional things like cabinet making or carpentry, or even making cigar boxes, boats and band instruments. Nolt, who conducted interviews in the late ‘90s with Amish workers in the boat-making industry, said interviewees pointed to the fact that making the wooden boats was similar to wood working.

According to Steve Nolt, Senior Scholar at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, most of the Amish men under 65 work in factories. The majority of these manufacturing plants either assemble RVS or supply parts such as cabinets or windows.

Such increased involvement of the Amish in the non-Amish workplaces has had significant and transformative consequences on their community. Northern Indiana Amish, in particular, have always had some relationship to the outside world. According to Nolt's date, 56.3 percent of men in the Nappanee settlement and 53 percent in the Elkhart-LaGrange settlement are now employed by the RV industry. How did their working patterns shift so dramatically?

The big reason, says Nolt, is what he called an “economic squeeze and demographic crisis,” a shift in the 1980s that pushed the Amish (and other farmers across the country) from the farms into the factory. By the time the 1980s Farm Crisis hit, Amish families had alre...

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The Amish men that are building America's RVs