It is 6 a.m. on a day in early spring. Dawn creases the horizon; roosters crow. But at the oldest continuously operating farmers market in the country, shoppers already are lining up, most of them with trademark wicker baskets, just as they have for 95 years.
From 6 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. every Tuesday and Friday and from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. every Sunday, they crowd through 13 tall double doors at the huge Central Market to buy meat, fish, produce fresh from the fields and baked goods still warm from the oven.
There are flowers, cut and potted, spices, home-canned sauces and condiments, succulent sausages and creamy cheeses, all for less than they would bring in big-city supermarkets.
Marketmaster Donald L. Horn, along with more than 80 stallholders, has been up since 1:30 a.m. preparing for the day.
“This is one of the few businesses anywhere where you have one-on-one contact with people,” he says as he surveys the bustle on the market floor from his office balcony. “You go into a supermarket and the only employees you’re going to run into are a stockboy if you can’t find something and a cashier. Here, some stallholders and customers are in their fourth generation of doing business with each other. That’s what makes this market unique.”
But then all of Lancaster County is unique. Amid rolling fields, dotted by immaculate white farm buildings straight from a Currier and Ives print, it lies in the heart of Amish and Mennonite country. Here, some of the richest farmland on Earth, worked by some of the best farmers on Earth, produces a cornucopia of foodstuffs, in and out of the growing season.
In summer and autumn, vegetables pour out of field and kitchen through hundreds of roadside stands and farmers markets.
Through winter, hams are smoked, sausages are stuffed and homemade preserves, jams and jellies and condiments are packed. In spring, string beans and asparagus are as common as dandelions, which also are being sold as greens.
Only the cheeses generally are not produced locally, but many are imports from Amish and Mennonite dairy farmers in Ohio, so they remain authentic and delicious.
But the bounty is more than just a product-to-market phenomenon; it is a way of life, unique even in the American tableau of diversity.
The Amish, who dominate the scene with their beards or bonnets and their briskly trotting cart-horses, eschew all things modern. They have no electricity in their homes, hence no televisions, microwave ovens or other distractions from the faith they live. No automobiles or tractors rumble at dawn on their farms. They till the soil with horse-drawn plows and combines, and the dress of men and women alike is solemn and unadorned.
The Mennonites, spiritual cousins to the Amish whose doctrine sprang from theirs, are more liberal, but both sects have one thing in common: They live with the earth, and the earth produces for them as for no one else.
Most of what they grow, bake or preserve is sold at the Central Market, which was founded as an open-air affair by Alexander Hamilton in 1730, about the time the first Amish families arrived from Germany and Switzerland. Over the years, Hamilton’s market, little more than a field for carts and wagons, expanded to permanent stalls and was finalized in 1898 when the present Romanesque Revival structure was completed at the then-staggering cost of $26,500.
Stalls in the market are leased from the city and can be inherited by the leaseholders’ children, so there is little turnover. Only when a lease is abandoned is it auctioned off, and there is always a line waiting to bid.
Horn, who is employed by the city, oversees the leaseholders, monitors maintenance and cleanliness and serves as ombudsman for sellers and shoppers. He says his primary mission is to keep the market as pristine as possible, even as times change.
Amish and Mennonites still are in evidence, but the market now boasts stalls selling an eclectic mix of Jewish, German, Italian, Greek and even soul food delicacies. Bill Skirboll, a self-described “Yuppie-Among-the-Amish,” waited 10 years for a stall to open up at auction so he could get his family into the business, selling a line of exotic coffees and cocoas.
“I’ve seen this as an opportunity for years,” Skirboll says, “but it’s not easy to get in since a lot of the stalls are handed down to the families’ children.”
It is not ethnic diversity, however, that bothers Horn. It is the developers who have turned the main highway to Lancaster into a stringtown of gas stations, motels, tourist attractions, factory outlets and fast-food restaurants.
“That used to be nothing but prime farmland,” he says. “Now it’s all macadam, and that’s a shame. We’re keeping this as close to a farmers market as we possibly can. We don’t want a lot of flea market stands. We’re not interested in antiques, leather goods, jewelry and that type of thing.”
Though Horn will not articulate it, the Green Dragon, the county’s other major farmers market at Ephrata, a few miles away, presents a concrete example of his fear. It has a colorful history. Started as a garage in the early 1900s, it successively became a restaurant, a roadhouse, a Prohibition speakeasy and finally what it is today.
The Green Dragon now features auctions of hay, feed, farm equipment and dry goods, and it boasts a market fit to compete with Horn’s city operation-if you can find it. The market, accessible only by a narrow two-way street, strangles on traffic and lies engulfed in a tacky flea market where T-shirts, tools, comic books, clothing and doodads are hawked like attractions on a carnival midway.
Though the Amish are growing-the bi-monthly Amish Country News says congregations now flourish in 22 states and Canada, and that 444 church districts in 1974 had grown to more than 900 last year-commercialization may be outgrowing them in Lancaster County.
Land prices have skyrocketed, and to the Amish and Mennonites, who have become affluent despite their commitment to simplicity and non-materialism, the dwindling availability of land threatens their way of life.
Traditionally, the heads of Amish families-and Amish families have lots of children-buy adjoining farms for their sons so that the agrarian tradition can be maintained. If there is no land, or if it becomes too expensive, the system is short-circuited. Amishman John Riehl already is feeling the pinch.
Riehl isn’t selling farm produce, but elegantly handcrafted wooden kitchen items and doll furniture at the outdoor Millcreek Market in Bird-in-Hand, about 5 miles northeast of Lancaster.
“Quite a few of us don’t farm anymore,” Riehl says. “There are too many people and too little land. We have to do something else to make a living.”
Back at the Central Market, one of Riehl’s fellow Amishmen, Daniel Stoltzfus, is doing a brisk business in baked goods, but he, too, is worried.
Stoltzfus, part of the third generation of his family with a stall at the market, says he is a relative newcomer, but his family has worked the land in Lancaster County for four generations. Like Riehl, the soft-spoken Stoltzfus displays a traditional suspicion of technology.
Because of the Old Testament prohibition against “graven images,” Amish people do not like to have their pictures taken, and initially, Stoltzfus is taken aback by a reporter’s tape recorder.
“What is it?” he asks when asked if he objects to its use. Finally, he shrugs and acquiesces.
“A lot of us are moving out of Lancaster County,” he says. “You can’t possibly farm the ground and make money for what you’re paying for it. It has to be handed down from generation to generation; nobody can start from scratch now.”
But if times are changing, it is not yet evident in the countryside. Immaculate farms still dominate the horizon and the culinary ways of hard-working Amish and Mennonite farmers spill into restaurants for adventuresome tourists.
About 30 such, in family groups who were strangers until now, sit elbow-to-elbow at an enormous banquet table at the Good `n Plenty restaurant, somewhat stunned at what is happening to them.
They have paid $12.95 each ($5.95 for children) and they are getting their money’s worth.
The menu this evening consists of roast beef, juicy sausages, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, dried corn cooked in milk and butter, golden egg noodles, mixed vegetables, chowchow, coleslaw, cottage cheese and home-baked bread, slathered with apple butter.
For dessert, there is cherry pie, ice cream, chocolate pudding and shoofly pie-a concoction made from weapons-grade molasses. This is not a selection; diners get it all, served in huge bowls and platters that are refilled the instant they become empty.
Waitresses, dressed in traditional Mennonite garb of aprons and starched white mini-bonnets, make it gently clear that to refuse anything would be a gross breach of etiquette.
“Eat, eat, enjoy!” they keep saying.
In this gourmand’s paradise, where food is a holy grail, there could be no more fitting motto.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
For information on the markets and restaurants in Lancaster County, Pa., write for the free Pennsylvania Dutch Country Lancaster County Map and a Visitors Guide. The guide includes information on events, tours, shops, inns and campgrounds.
Write to the Pennsylvania Dutch Convention and Visitors Bureau, Dept. 2201, 501 Greenfield Rd., Lancaster, Pa. 17601, or call 800-735-2629, ext. 2201.
