Preface
Picturing the Invisible |
| Shortly after my book After the Fire: The Destruction of the Lancaster County Amish was published, I received a telephone call from a man who said he had read and been moved by the book. He also said he'd been doing some photography in Lancaster County and wondered if he might show me some of his work. Having met several of Pennsylvania's most notorious photographers of the Amish, I was doubtful at first. In the voice on the other end of the line I heard something that struck a chord, and we ended up talking for almost an hour. Finally, out of sheer curiosity I asked, "How did you get my telephone number?" and the voice replied, "I called your parents in Phoenixville, since your book says that's where they live. After your mother and I talked awhile, she said, 'You seem all right to me,' and gave me your number." |
| The summer of 1993 marked the three hundredth birthday of Amish society. It also marked the escalation of a battle over the future of Mill Creek Valley in eastern Lancaster County, a battle fought on one side by Lancaster Conference Mennonite businessmen and local township officials attempting to build a huge retirement village and on the other by a coalition of Earl Township residentsOld Order Mennonites, Old Order Amish, and "English" (that is, non-Amish)determined that it be built elsewhere. |
| I had spent time in Mill Creek Valley and knew its extraordinary countryside well, so at the end of the telephone call I suggested that we meet and look over the valley. In July, after I gave a talk at Elizabethtown College, a tall, gawky man in spectacles, with a wide yellow-and-black Kodak print box under his long arm, stood waiting as I left the podium. His name was Ed Worteck. I looked over the box of photographs and was impressed by what Ed saw. I said, "Let's head over to Mill Creek Valley." We drove past farmhouses whose occupants still hold the original deed granted their forebears by William Penn, past the homes of ordinary people who suddenly found themselves meeting in a tobacco shed late into the evenings. And every now and then Ed would say in his unassumingly polite, Maryland-tinged voice, "Do you mind if I pull over and take a photograph of this?" |
| Bringing a camera into Lancaster County is like walking around with a cocked rifle. Many Plain People are afraid of what they know will hap- |
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