GORDONVILLE, Pa. — A few hundred used buggies (not including horses) were lined up and ready for the auctioneer’s hammer last weekend as the day began at the mud sale in Gordonville, a local Amish tradition dating back to the 1960s.
The mud sale is a nationwide auction to benefit volunteer fire departments in what the Amish community calls the Lancaster settlement, located about 70 miles (113 kilometers) west of Philadelphia, where the devout Christian group began settling about 300 years ago.
They don’t sell mud, although a cold rain has brought plenty of it. The name refers to early spring, when wet fields begin to thaw but may not be ready for the plow. The Gordonville mud sale, one of at least a dozen held in the region this spring, drew thousands of bidders and was expected to net the fire department about $100,000, about 10% of the total proceeds.
Amish people make and donate much of the food and merchandise for sale and are the buyers of most of the buggies and the range of horse-drawn farm implements. They organize and run sales, often as auctioneers.
Michael and Kristen Dean, a couple from Oxford, Pennsylvania, said Saturday they enjoyed a fun day of meeting Amish people in hopes of finding a bargain on used fencing. The Deans are regulars at the Lancaster County mud sale and had purchased a greenhouse a week earlier at the Bart Township Fire Company mud sale in Quarryville.
“It’s bigger than you think when you try to get it on a truck bed,” Kristen Dean said.
George Olivio drove about 90 minutes from his home in Rosenhayn, New Jersey, to make deals on the tools and hunting equipment. As he carried chicken corn soup, horseradish and shoofly pie to his car, Olivio recalled how the Amish people seemed less hospitable at his first sale in Gordonville about 40 years ago.
“When I first came, they were very distant. Now most of them are quite dog friendly,” Olivio said.
Gideon Fisher, chairman of the Gordonville mud sales committee, said as more Amish people have sought work off the farm, there has been a shift in interactions with others. He sees it as a good thing.
“You know, fifty or a hundred years ago, most Amish were probably farmers. And now a lot of them are going out today: roofing, construction and all kinds of jobs,” Fisher said. “It’s becoming more and more common: we’re mingling.”
The first mud sale was apparently held in 1965 by the Bart Township Fire Company, about 6 miles south of Gordonville, according to Steve Nolt, director of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at nearby Elizabethtown College. Within about a decade, similar sales had sprung up in Gordonville, Farmersville, Strasbourg and Gap.
The social aspect of the event is undeniable: Amish adults warmly greet old friends and discuss the price of milk and the relative merits of used scooters, rusty wagon parts and fresh donuts. Groups of children wander the grounds, some pulling carts to help shoppers carry heavy goods to their cars, others swarming stands selling candy and baseball cards.
From a trailer built by her bishop, with the title of local Amish church leaders, Sadie S. King’s wares included scrap metal, homemade bologna, and six gallons of her own horseradish. She lives about a mile from the fire station and has plenty of reasons to support the cause: Gordonville firefighters have helped put out her own barn fires.
A hand-drawn sign advertised catnip for $1 per bag. “Oh yeah, I sell a lot of that,” King said.
Among the bidders on Saturday, Amish buyers were concentrated in the open field, where some of the used buggies that can cost as much as $16,000 new were going for a few thousand dollars. Amish people from Wisconsin bought 15 buggies and on Monday removed the wheels as they loaded them and other purchases into a tractor-trailer for transport home.
A more mixed crowd of Amish and non-Amish bidders were jammed into tents selling tools and other agricultural items, with prices ranging from about $200 for a leather harness and $10 for an old pitchfork. Items for sale included a row of twelve forklifts, industrial air compressors, a small sea of outdoor furniture and, in the craft tent, handmade wooden birdhouses of every size and description.
Near the fire hall were auctions of antiques, used furniture and plants – and mostly non-Amish bidders. About 400 quilts and a variety of books were auctioned off in the main fire department vehicle area. Down in the basement, Amish women were doing a brisk business with two-dollar hot dogs, four-dollar breakfast sandwiches and seemingly every flavor of pie.
In recent years, sales of Gordonville have raised more than a million dollars.
Used firearms are no longer sold, and the sale of horses and other animals came to an end during the COVID-19 pandemic. Organizers also needed more parking, so they pulled the plug on the cornerball game, a dodgeball-like sport enjoyed by Amish boys known in Pennsylvania Dutch as Eck balle.
In booming Lancaster, one of Pennsylvania’s fastest-growing counties, large Amish families and the cost of farmland have put pressure on the traditional lives they prefer. Weak milk prices also force change.
Penn State Extension educator Jeff Stoltzfus said some Amish farmers in Lancaster have traded away dairy farming over the past 15 years to focus on vegetable production.
“I would say that of our commercial vegetable growers in the state, probably 60 to 70% will be regular community people,” he said.
There are signs that the Amish in Lancaster are determined to remain among their half-million neighbors in Lancaster County. The settlement of Lancaster extends into neighboring Chester County with smaller numbers in Berks and Dauphin counties in Pennsylvania and Cecil County, Maryland. It has grown from 95 church districts and more than 16,000 people in 1990 to 257 districts and 44,000 last year, Nolt said.
The rules governing the Amish’s lives and interactions with the wider world vary from group to group, although wearing plain dark clothing and using horse-drawn transport are widely observed. There are now Amish people in 32 states and Canada, with a total population of nearly 400,000, with the majority living in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana.
Nolt said that in recent years, four clusters of Amish groups from the Lancaster settlement have settled in Bedford County and Littlestown, Pennsylvania; Points, West Virginia; and Farmville, Va. Together they may have totaled about 500 people, at a time when the Lancaster settlement grew by about 8,000.
The modest changes, Nolt said, show that “out-migration is not the main demographic story here, but most Amish remain in the Lancaster settlement.”