MWR : The horse-and-buggy way

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Oct. 20, 2008 issue

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The horse-and-buggy way

By For Mennonite Weekly Review

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An international research team has begun an oral history project on the anti-modern lifestyles of the “horse-and-buggy” Mennonites of Canada and Latin America.

Old Colony Mennonite girls pose for a photo at El Palmar Colony in Bolivia. An international research team has begun an oral history project on “horse-and-buggy” Mennonites, including Old Order and Old Colony communities in Canada, Mexico, Belize, Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina. — Kennert Giesbrecht/Die Mennonitische Post

“They are a unique people from whom we as modern Mennonites could learn a lot,” said Royden Loewen, chair of Mennonite studies at the University of Winnipeg.

The horse-and-buggy groups include 4,000 Old Order Mennonites in Ontario and 60,000 Old Colony Mennonites, originally from Manitoba and Saskatchewan, who live in Central and South America.

The more than 20,000 Old Order Mennonites in the United States, some of whom drive cars, will not be part of the study.

“The main interest is how they have resisted and declined the wider world’s middle-class values of ever-increasing wealth, higher education, new technologies and nationalism or patriotism,” said Loewen, whose Mennonite studies department is sponsoring the research team.

Unlike people who have been denied modern conveniences due to poverty or other circumstances, these groups “have had the opportunity to accept modernity and have rejected it,” he said.

Sociologists Donald B. Kraybill and Carl F. Bowman call horse-and-buggy Mennonites “double conservatives.” They “affirmed traditional ways first in the 1890s when other Mennonites were acculturating and then again in the 1920s and 1930s when some Old Orders began driving automobiles,” wrote Kraybill and Bowman in On the Backroad to Heaven (Johns Hopkins, 2001).

The horse-and-buggy culture is often misinterpreted and even maligned. Yet the research project will describe “a faith-based decision to deny those things that most of us take for granted,” Loewen said.

The Old Order and Old Colony groups share a skepticism of technology and higher education and have similar dress requirements for their members.

“They are constantly seeking new isolated sites to maintain a simpler life,” Loewen said.

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Comments

i love you mennonites you girls are cool

- nolan (aug 28 at 8:17 a.m.)
could you tell me where i could buy a buggy like the one you use,the open style is the one that i like the most are they available in canada. thank you for your attention Rejean

- rejean (nov 6 at 7:53 p.m.)
I have lived among these kind peoples and have taken many pictures to remind me of what a pleasant time I had in Paraguay. What bothers me though is having lost contact and not having been able to find my friend's sister in Canada to pay, by appreciation,part of her brother, Abram and his family did for me. I will be grateful if someone helps me find her. I will provide the information if I receive a mail and a name from a helping person. My e-mail is nassyf@yahoo.com

- Nassy Fesharaki (mar 16 at 11:58 p.m.)
Thank you for writting an article on the mennonites. Further articles of this kind and their ways and beliefs would be most welcome. I have admired the mennonite people and their lifestyle for most of my life,and envy their way of life. I want to know how I can join them, or if they would let me. Though I now live in the city, I have been trying to get out, but don't know where to go. I want to join them. The city is getting worse and worse in evil ways, none of which people here seem to care, or even notice. This is not the country of my birth. It has changed drastically and is only headed further down the wrong path. Can you help me? Thank you for your attention and I look forward to your reply.

- susan (aug 28 at 9:11 a.m.)

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