Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [38]
‘We’ve got a phone that we use to take orders,’ he said. ‘We’re not allowed to have phones for ourselves, but they’re all on the outside of the building.’ He indicated something that looked like a payphone, bolted to the side of his office. As an Amish businessman, he can receive calls from people who have no other way to contact him, but he can’t phone out, except in an emergency. ‘More and more of them have their own phones,’ said Mervin, referring to the other Amish residents of Arthur, ‘since more of them run businesses in the area.’
In my ignorance, I’d always thought that Amish communities didn’t extend any further than Pennsylvania, but Mervin explained that they had spread across large parts of the United States. Originating in Switzerland, the Amish are a Christian group who migrated to America in the early eighteenth century in search of freedom to practise their religion as they pleased. Although I was right in thinking that they initially settled in Pennsylvania, which is still home to one of the largest Amish communities in the world, some families eventually travelled further west in search of more land.
For years, the Amish lived very enclosed lives, almost entirely self-sufficient and spurning contact with the outside world. But times have changed, and Amish furniture-makers, renowned for their old-fashioned, high-quality woodworking skills, now sell their goods outside the community in order to survive. Mervin showed me how his team of cabinetmakers made every piece by hand in a large joinery workshop that he’d set up in 1996 after working for another Amish carpenter. Surprised to see some power tools in the workshop, I asked Mervin whether the Amish way of life allowed him to use electrical machinery.
‘No, all the tools in the shop are run off hydraulics and air,’ he said. For instance, Mervin’s saws and sanders were hydraulic, rather than electric. ‘We’ve got some electric lights and appliances. We’re allowed to have some electrical power, but we run it off diesel generators. We’re not allowed to have it come off the line, so we produce it ourselves.’
‘Why’s that?’ I asked. ‘Because it would connect you to the outside world?’
‘Not just that,’ he said. ‘Mostly it’s to stay away from as much modern stuff as we can.’
‘It seems to be working well for you. You seem to be managing pretty well without it.’
‘Yeah.’
Mervin asked if I would like to have a go at putting a cabinet together, but I turned down his kind offer. ‘I’m too clumsy,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to waste one.’
The wood is mostly imported from Canada, although a small amount comes from the northeastern US states and the South. Mervin said the most important member of the team was the man who cut the wood. ‘If he doesn’t get it right,’ he said, ‘then it’s real difficult for the guys who put it all together.’ Clearly, the man who cut the wood was doing his job extremely well, because the finished products were all beautiful, with an astonishingly smooth finish. Such well-made pieces of furniture are surely destined to become the antiques of tomorrow.
In his showroom, Mervin showed me an entire kitchen that had been constructed in his workshop. With excellent craftsmanship and fantastic attention to detail, it was splendid, top-of-the-line stuff – the kind of furniture you buy only once, because it lasts a lifetime. I’d dearly love to have something like it in my house.
Mervin had a charming, very practical, down-to-earth attitude to making furniture. ‘Who designed this?’ I asked, pointing at one of the kitchen cabinets.
‘We see it,’ he said, ‘and then we just make it.’
It was at this point that Mervin suggested we should go for a ride in his horse-drawn