Lancaster County - Pennsylvania Dutch Country: Touring Pennsylvania Dutch Country
Though useful for a general overview and historical insight, the attractions that interpret Amish culture tend toward overkill. It's far more satisfying just to explore the countryside for yourself. Here, among the streams with their covered bridges and fields striped with corn, alfalfa and tobacco, the reality hits you - these aren't actors re-creating an ancient lifestyle, but a living, working community. There's no guarantee as to what you'll see: on Sunday, for example, there are no quilt sales or bake shops, and the farmers don't work the fields, but there may well be a large gathering of buggies outside one of the farms, indicating an Amish church service (in High German) or a "visiting day."Among the widely spread formal "attractions," the Ephrata Cloister , 632 W Main St, Ephrata (on US-272 and 322), re-creates the eighteenth-century settlement of German Protestant celibates that acted, amongst other things, as an early publishing and printing center (April-Oct Mon-Sat 9am-5pm, Sun noon-5pm; $6; tel 717/733-6600). Further south, about three miles northeast of Lancaster City, the Landis Valley Museum , 2451 Kissell Hill Rd, is a living history museum of rural life, with demonstrations of local crafts and the like (Tues-Sat 9am-5pm, Sun noon-5pm; $7; tel 717/569-0401).
In Lancaster City itself, a stolid redbrick town with tree-lined avenues, the Heritage Center Museum , in Penn Square (Tues-Sat 10am-4pm; free; tel 717/299-6440), exhibits Lancaster master crafts, including wagons and rifles, ancient Amish calligraphy known as fraktur, clocks, wooden toys, weathervanes and quilts. At Strasburg , a mixture of tourist kitsch and historical authenticity southeast of Lancaster City on US-896, the Strasburg Railroad gives 45-minute round-trip rides in original steam trains through patchwork farmland to Paradise (daily, hours vary, call for updated schedule; $8.50; tel 717/687-7522, ). Disappointingly, Paradise holds no heavenly delights, but there are some good views on the way (if little that couldn't be seen by bike or car), and the train makes regular picnic stops. The oldest building in the county, the Hans Herr House , 1849 Hans Herr Drive, five miles south of downtown Lancaster City off US-222, is a 1719 Mennonite church with a pretty garden and orchard, a medieval German facade and exhibits on early farm life (April-Dec Mon-Sat 9am-4pm; $4; tel 717/464-4438).
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