From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Amish/Orland Gingerich
The first Amish settlements in North America were established in Pennsylvania in the 1720s. Immigration to British North America did not begin until a hundred years later when Christian Nafziger, who arrived in Pennsylvania in 1822, was advised to settle in Upper Canada (Ontario) because land was cheaper there. With the assistance of Mennonites already in what is now Waterloo County, he applied to Lieutenant Governor Sir Peregrine Maitland for land immediately west of the Mennonite settlement. Having received a favourable response from the Executive Council, Nafziger then returned to Europe. The Amish began arriving in 1824. In that year the German Block, as it became known, in the centre of Wilmot Township was surveyed by John Goessman. Each family received twenty hectares of free land, provided that a house was built and land cleared for a roadway fronting the property. The remaining sixty hectares of the original lot could be purchased later. According to a report by surveyor Samuel Street Wilmot, all the lots had been assigned by 1830. The early settlers were not exclusively Amish. Catholics, Lutherans, and some Methodists also took up land in the area. But all were from the same part of Europe and spoke the same German dialect.
Amish also settled in Perth and Oxford counties to the west, and by the 1850s they had begun pioneering in Huron County. After Wellesley Township in northwest Waterloo County was opened to settlers in the early 1850s, some Amish took up land there. In the following decade others moved to Mornington Township in northern Perth County. Some Amish eventually left Canada for Ohio and Indiana, although not in significant numbers. No accurate figures are available, but Amish immigrants numbered in the hundreds by 1870. Few if any arrived from Europe after that time. In the 1950s, however, Old Order Amish emigrated from the United States to Ontario because of harassment over school attendance and social security programs.
Most of the early settlers were farmers, but they also included craftsmen such as wagon makers, millers, and sawmill operators. An exception was a Peter Zehr, a medical doctor who arrived in the mid-1830s. Although he began to practise immediately, he did not obtain a licence from the College of Physicians and Surgeons until the 1870s. During the early twentieth century, another Amish man owned and operated a factory that produced self-feeders for threshing machines sold across the United States and Canada. Though some Amish adopted such modern technology in their farming, others shunned the use of automobiles, telephones, and electricity.
Currently, there are seven Old Order settlements in Ontario, organized into seventeen congregations. Although the number of settlements has decreased, the overall population has actually increased. Old Order Amish are growing at a faster rate than their more acculturated kin, with adult membership totalling approximately one thousand. Since families are generally large, the population would probably be two or three times the membership figure. Other Amish, forming the Ontario Amish Mennonite Conference, were grouped into five congregations with an approximate adult membership of fifteen hundred in 1923, the year of the conference’s creation. By 1988, when the conference was dissolved, there were sixteen congregations and the numbers had more than doubled. There also exists an intermediately acculturated group known as the Beachy Amish, with a membership of five hundred in six congregations.
