(1809)
OHIO AMISH: HARVESTING THE SUN
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Harvesting the Sun: Solar Power among Ohio's Amish
As a resident of Columbus, Ohio, I’ve long had a certain idea of who the Amish are: a rural, traditional Christian people who live not far from me, yet a world away, deliberately separate from modern American society and its technologies.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I visited Ohio Amish Country for the first time in the spring of 2021 and saw nearly everyone riding electric bicycles.
Out the car window, I watched men with beards and brimmed straw hats whiz around on motorized bikes in all directions, navigating the area’s rolling hills with ease. Women in bonnets and muted pastel dresses joined them, some with children or groceries in tow. There was hardly a horse-drawn buggy in sight.
My assumptions about the community disappeared more quickly than the cream-filled donut I’d purchased from an Amish bakery that morning.
But even more surprising was what I learned when I returned to northeastern Ohio several months later as a journalist, eager to work on a story: Many Amish here powered their bicycles, and the rest of their daily lives, using solar panels. In fact, historically speaking, the Amish have been some of the most enthusiastic adopters of solar electricity in the state. In the early 2000s, they even achieved Ohio’s highest per capita solar power use, authors Charles Hurst and David McConnell note in An Amish Paradox.
Settled by the Amish in 1809 as part of their westward expansion from Pennsylvania, the greater Holmes County region is now home to the second largest Amish community in the world, with some 40,000 residents. With its abundance of green technology, it is also a place of irony and striking juxtapositions that shed light on an unexpectedly complex culture—one that is, in many respects, quite contemporary and innovative.
The contrast between the old-fashioned Amish I thought I knew and the modernized community I actually met was enough to draw me back to the area, equipped with my camera and curiosity. How did solar energy fit into the lives of the so-called “plain” people—who, I had long assumed, did not even use electricity?
In all honesty, I hoped it had something to do with environmentalism.
In my more than 15 years as a writer and documentary photographer, I have often been drawn to stories about the ways people interact with nature, particularly through religious practice. In the process, I’ve consumed many a doom-and-gloom narrative about environmental destruction and the current climate crisis—and fairly or not, conservative Christianity today has been linked with a certain apathy toward the natural world.
SOURCES & FURTHER READINGS
My host in Savannah, B.H. Levy Jr., has recently published a short memoir: “Rebraiding Southern Jewish Identity: The Savannah Memoir of B.H. Levy Jr.,” edited by Lance J. Sussman, Lynda Barness, and Karen Franklin. His father, B.H. Levy, authored, “Savannah’s Old Jewish Community Cemeteries,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly Vol. 66, No.1 (Spring, 1982), 1–20. ___ Congregation Mickve Israel has sponsored two community histories: • Saul J. Rubin, Third to None: The Saga of Savannah Jewry, 1733–1983 (Savannah: Congregation Mickve Israel, 1 983). • Ann Woolner, The Jews of Savannah: An Escape, A Voyage, A Home (Savannah: Congregation Mickve Israel, 2025). ___ Malcolm H. Stern produced important work on Jewish Savannah in the 1960s (especially his transcription of the “Sheftall Diaries”), as did Mark I. Greenberg in late 1990s, Holly Snyder in the early 2000s, and, more recently, Mark Bauman. Also significant is Aviv Ben-Ur, “Jewish Savannah in Atlantic Perspective: A Reconsideration of North America’s First Intention Jewish Community,” in The Sephardic Atlantic, edited by S. Rauschenbach and J. Schorsch (Berkeley, 2017). I discuss Savannah Jewish history in some depth in The Jewish South: An American History (Princeton, 2025). ___ On early Georgia, see Noelen McIlvenna, The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South (Chapel Hill, 2015). ___ On Jews in colonial America and the Atlantic world, see: • Adam Jortner, A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom (New York, 2024). • William Pencak, Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654–1800 (Ann Arbor, 2005). • Laura A. Leibman, Messianism, Mysticism, and Secrecy: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (Portland, OR, 2012).
Shari Rabin
is Professor of Jewish studies, religion, and history and chair of Jewish studies at Oberlin College. She is the author of Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-century America (NYU Press, 2017), which won the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies, and The Jewish South: An American History (Princeton University Press, 2025), which was a finalist for the same award. She currently serves as Vice President of the Southern Jewish Historical Society.
