The Old Order Amish and Mennonite people of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, have always believed in isolation from the evils of the world and have thus eschewed modern conveniences, relying instead on simple mechanical tools and face-to-face communication. When the telephone appeared, it created a crisis among them.

These “plain people”—so called because of their simple clothing—have a common heritage as descendants of the Swiss Anabaptists, and their settlements in the area date back as far as the late seventeenth century. Bell Telephone service began to reach Lancaster in the late 1870s and was supplemented by hundreds of farmers’ cooperative lines by the 1880s. By 1910 the telephone had helped split the Amish church and created conflict for the Mennonites.

The Old Order Amish—the most conservative Amish group—keep few written records, but today’s Old Order Amish remember the telephone as a principal issue behind the 1910 division of the church that resulted in the loss of one-fifth of its membership. Before 1910 some Amish families kept party-line phones in their homes, connected to neighboring farms. Then, according to an Old Order man who made one of the few written accounts of what happened: “About 1910 the phone lines were put up thru the country and our Amish people at least some got them in and … then a couple women got to talking about another woman over the phone and this woman also had the phone in and had the receiver down and heard what they said, this made quite a stink and at last came into the gma [church] to get it straightened out, then the Bishops and ministers made out if that is the way they are going to be used we would better not have them. Some were willing to put them away and others were not so that is when the King gma [a splinter group] started, the telephone was one of the issues but I suppose there were some more.”

The Amish leaders opposed the telephone on a number of grounds. It was not a necessity. It was of “the world” and led to association with outsiders. It encouraged individualism and pride rather than humility. Women were tempted to use it for gossip, which disrupted social harmony.

The group that split from the Amish church became known as the Beachy Amish. The Beachys attribute the split more to their unwillingness to practice shunning—avoidance of church outcasts—than to the telephone. Unlike the Old Order Amish, the Beachys have since adopted the tractor, electricity, and automobiles. For the Old Order Amish, the Beachys represent what happens when worldliness is allowed to creep in.

The Old Order Mennonite telephone crisis is better documented, thanks to the surviving letters of Jonas Martin, a Lancaster County bishop who led the group and who corresponded widely. By 1906 some Old Order Mennonites—from Ontario to Virginia as well as in Pennsylvania—had phones in their homes and owned stock in telephone companies. Some leaders accepted the telephone on the grounds that it was not worth splitting the church over; others saw it as a threat, and Bishop Martin preached against ownership from the pulpit.

Martin decreed in August 1905 that church members should not own telephone-company stock, but he did not order them to give up their telephones. Then, in 1907, he made a clear formal concession, after the eldest and most conservative deacon in his district pleaded with him to avoid a church split. The resulting ruling stated that “they that want to telephone can go and telephone and pay for it.” The ruling banned phones for clergy but not for lay people. Leaders in the other Mennonite districts eventually made their own decisions: Ohio and Indiana groups suffered a major division; Ontario restricted phone use to businesses.

As the outside world surged forward into the century of high tech, the Old Order Mennonites and Amish of Lancaster County debated and then declared they would go no further. Their experience may seem extreme, but perhaps it represents something we all go through—at least on some subtle level—when encountering new technology that may change the pattern of our lives.

In the Amish country today, you can see small outhouse-like buildings out between the farmhouses. These are community telephones, isolated, shared, and for emergencies only. That concession the Old Order Amish have made, and on their own terms.