The Amish of Wilmot Township

Until now, on this website, I have dealt primarily with the Swiss Mennonites who came to Waterloo County, via Pennsylvania, from the Palatinate region of Germany. I have mentioned, in passing, the Russian Mennonites who immigrated directly to Waterloo in the 1920s, but only in the context of the Hawkesville Gospel Mission, where the (Russian) Mennonite Brethren preacher Henry Janzen was a key influence.

There is another group of Anabaptists, however, who arrived in Waterloo County directly from Europe very early on: a bunch of Amish families immigrated from Bavaria and Alsace-Lorraine in the 1820s and settled in the Baden-New Hamburg area of Wilmot Township. There had been Amish communities in Pennsylvania from the early 1700s, but these were the first to come to Canada.

I don’t have any ancestors or close relatives among these Amish immigrants, although there have been some family friends over the years who were from that tradition. I only became more interested in the Amish community recently, when I discovered that my friend Andy Martin’s wife Colleen’s maiden name is Kuepfer, and she comes from that lineage. More recently, I discovered that our neighbour at the cottage, Tim Kennel, is also descended from the Wilmot Amish.

I’ve written in various places about the Amish-Mennonite schism of 1693, and I don’t want to go into that history or into the differences between the Amish and the Mennonites here. This is partly because I don’t really understand it all, but mostly because I don’t want to get The Drunken Mennonite on my case.

In 1822, just after the first Martins arrived in Waterloo Township, Christian Nafziger, an Amish guy from Bavaria, showed up in the community looking for land to start a settlement. He’d travelled via Amsterdam, New Orleans, and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where he’d been told that the best place to find cheap land was Upper Canada and given a horse, provisions, and directions to Waterloo Township.

The Mennonites in Waterloo helped Nafziger get a government promise of 50 acres of free land for each immigrant family, with the option of purchasing 150 more after 7 years of residence. They set up a committee to help plan the new settlement to the west of Block 2, in what is now Wilmot Township. Nafziger went back to Germany, via Pennsylania and London (where he delivered letters to the colonial office from Lietenant-Governor Maitland), and promoted the new settlement amongst the Amish of Bavaria and Alsace-Lorraine.

Nafziger returned with his family in 1826 (with financial aid from Waterloo Mennonites) and started clearing his land at lot 6 Bleams Road North. It is unclear how many Amish families settled in Wilmot in the 1820s and ’30s, but there are several dozen distinctive surnames in the community (including Roth, Schwartzentruber, Jantzi, Gascho, Steinman, Wagler, Zehr, Bechtel, Kuepfer, Albrecht, and Kennel), and they quickly spread up into Wellesley Township and Perth County. In the late 1840s, a number of families migrated to the area around Zurich, in Huron County, and formed a settlement there.

Early on, Amish Bishop John Stoltzfus and Minister Christian Koenig were sent from Pennsylvania to organize the new immigrants into a congregation. Two ministers and a deacon were ordained in Wilmot as early as 1824. For sixty years, the Wilmot and Zurich Amish congregations met in homes, as is the Amish tradition.

Historical Plaque across from the Steinmann Mennonite Church, Baden

In the early 1880s, there was a division in the group, and the more progressive branch, calling themselves Amish-Mennonites, built a meeting house at the corner of Snyder’s Road West and Nafziger Road, just west of Baden (now Steinmann Mennonite Church). A year later, this group built a second meeting house on Erb’s Road west of St Agatha. About the same time, the Zurich congregation also built a meeting house.

In 1925, these progressive Amish-Mennonites formed the Ontario Amish Mennonite Conference. By 1957, the conference had 12 congregations, with 2,440 members, 7 bishops, 17 ministers, and 6 deacons. In 1963, they renamed themselves the Western Ontario Mennonite Conference (disassociating themselves from the Amish), and in 1988 the conference was disbanded and the congregations affiliated with the Mennonite Conference of Eastern Canada.

In the meantime, following the 1884 split, the more conservative branch of the Ontario Amish came to be known as the Old Order Amish (as they were in the USA). Centred primarily around Milverton and Millbank in Perth County, they continue to meet in homes, wear plain dress, shun modern technologies, and (I believe) practise the fine art of shunning excommunicants.

During the 20th century, a large number of Old Order Amish families have immigrated to Ontario from the USA. Besides the Milverton community, there are now Amish congregations around St Marys, Aylmer, Norwich, Mt Elgin, Harriston, Lucknow, Tiverton, Chesley, Gore Bay, and Iron Bridge. Amish from Ontario have also migrated to Manitoba and Prince Edward Island.

But don’t ask me how these Old Orders differ from my Old Orders, or how you can tell whether a family in a buggy is Amish or Mennonite. I have no idea.

I have noticed, however, that the more progressive Amish groups, which have pretty well assimilated into the mainstream Conference Mennonite churches all over North America, seem to refer to themselves and their traditional progenitors before the 1880s split as “Amish-Mennonites,” reserving the bare term “Amish” only for the conservative (Old Order) branch. It’s mostly branding for them, it seems, so I’m not going to worry about it.

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Sources:

Gingerich, Orland and Alvin Gingerich. “Steinmann Mennonite Church (Baden, Ontario, Canada).” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. December 2013. Web. 9 Aug 2020. https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Steinmann_Mennonite_Church_(Baden,_Ontario,_Canada)&oldid=155760

Gingerich, Orland. “Ontario Amish Mennonite Conference (Mennonite Church).” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. 1959. Web. 9 Aug 2020. https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Ontario_Amish_Mennonite_Conference_(Mennonite_Church)&oldid=123669

Roth, Lorraine. “Nafziger, Christian (1776/78-1836).” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. April 2002. Web. 9 Aug 2020. https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Nafziger,_Christian_(1776/78-1836)&oldid=113541

Steiner, Samuel J. “Kingsfield-Zurich Mennonite Church (Zurich, Ontario, Canada).” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. March 2020. Web. 9 Aug 2020. https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Kingsfield-Zurich_Mennonite_Church_(Zurich,_Ontario,_Canada)&oldid=168016

Steiner, Sam. “Old Order Amish districts in Ontario.” In Search of Promised Lands. August 2018. Web. 9 Aug 2020. https://ontariomennonitehistory.org/2018/08/20/old-order-amish-districts-in-ontario/