Garden Spot

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the Old Order Amish, and the Selling of Rural America

by David J. Walbert

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, has been known since the eighteenth century as the Garden Spot of America. Today it is synonymous in American popular culture with Amish country, a place of peace, prosperity, and traditional values that has somehow survived unscathed the upheavals of the twentieth century. Yet Lancaster is also a rapidly growing and diverse population center with progressive farmers and booming industry. Garden Spot is about the ways Lancaster Countians have struggled to define their present and future in a time when their home — and rurality in general — is increasingly identified with the past. Underneath their struggles lies a pair of vital questions: Is there a future for rural America? And if there is to be a rural future, how can ruralites take charge of it?

Garden Spot is published by Oxford University Press (2002).