Holmes County the Right Way

I’ve been nosing around Holmes County, Ohio for over thirty years, looking for those little insights and memories that so often go into one of my Amish-Country Mysteries.  Amish culture is more popular than ever these days, and Holmes County has become a favorite destination for day trippers in Ohio.  In my own travels, I learned long ago to get off the blacktop roads onto the lesser-traveled gravel lanes, and unlike the average tourist, I have learned how to find those special little gems of culture and lifestyle that are necessary to my stories.

That’s how I got this photograph of new buggy wheels stacked against a wall in a wheel shop west of the little town of Benton, Ohio.  The young Amish lads who worked there were taking a lunch break when I arrived, and none of them got up to talk to me.  Plainly they could see that an English tourist like me was not going to buy a wheel.  If they ignored me, maybe I’d go away.  After all, it was their lunch time, and I was just a nosy tourist with my camera.  But there against the wall was this stack of unfinished buggy wheels, and for my own satisfaction, I grabbed a shot of it before I backed out the door and went on my way. 

I’ve been saving that memory for one of my stories.  I’ll send Professor Branden into the shop to interview an Amish boy about a murder of some English miscreant, and they’ll have a chat while standing beside those buggy wheels.  I’ll make the lads in the shop mildly disdainful of the Professor’s intrusion, and it’ll all tie in nicely with the theme of the story – maybe something about a local fellow who grew weary of the tourists.  Maybe it will even be a tourist who ends up murdered, with an Amish lad who is suspected of doing it. 

In the meantime, I’ll stay off the blacktop roads when I go to Holmes County.  I’ll travel those narrow gravel lanes that stretch out over a hilltop meadow, or run into a stand of timber.  That’s where you’ll find the most authentic Amish insights and memories, anyway.  If you go to Holmes County, I suggest you do the same.  Maybe you’ll find that wheel shop.  Maybe those lads there will have learned that tourists really do like to buy authentic Amish goods.  You could put the buggy wheel in your garden, and you could park your memory of the purchase in that special, authentic place in your mind, where you tell yourself that you explored Holmes County the right way.