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Amish refer to non-Amish as "the English" or "Yankees". And, yes, they were a major part of the Underground Railroad that hid so many runaway slaves. I wasn't aware that they enlisted in the Army though. I thought that would get them tossed out of the church.

They do a lot of things. Being Amish is a lot like Judaism. More are born to it than stay with it.

When I was in grade school I had a teacher who had spent a number of years in the Amish country (it's not far away). She used to love to tell stories of her young Amish students who would keep a chevy parked in the woolds somewhere.

As for the Kitchen makers, I only know them from doing business with them on several occasions. I used to sell kitcnen refacing at between 8 and 12 thousand up here for an average kitchen. $40,000 is a nice kitchen, but it's not out of line in a house worth 750,000 or so. Obviously you haven't heard of Johnny Grey. He does kitchens with antiques and custom metal work that seldom go below $100,000.

It's not all that surprising to see some rule bending here and there. I know another Amish business where they had gotten computers but were told they couldn't keep them. It's a saddlery shop, and they do a lot of business in all around, so they really couldn't do without the compurers. Solution? Move the computers to a house down the road. They still use though, they just aren't as convenient as they once were.

English? Yankees? Never heard in Lancaster county. We have a lot of folks besides just the Amish htough. Some Quakers that kept the faith, as well as Menonites etc. The number of runaway slaves is another great myth. Between 1850 and 1860, the number of Americans of African heritage in the northern states didn't even increase. Two factors in this though, and one was that under the Fugitive Slave Act, any freeman in tha Northern state could be legally re-enslaved. At first this caused near riots in the north, and the state courts in most state chose to ignore the Federal law. This then reduced those who could be re-enslaved to only those who could be abducted. Even if you were legal, why advertise yourself as a target in the census?

The second reason was that all during the 1850's, partolism in the south intensifiec significantly. It became exceedingly difficult for a runaway to run away. Non slave owning citizens were all required to danate one or two nights a week to riding slave partrols on the roads all night. It was this patrol system that made the south so easy to control under martial law to enable the start of the war, and also made it a natural for the formation of the post war KKK.

Naturally, any black seen on the road in the daylight was bound to be intercepted, and if not with papers or know locally, he was soon on the block.