When the buggies started arriving at the accident scene, Cumberland County Sheriff Darrell Hodges feared that a confrontation was about to erupt.
Hodges had been called to the site of a horrible traffic crash on Cumberland Road in the early evening hours of July 14, 2024. A horse-drawn carriage that carried an Amish family of two adults and five children had been struck from behind by a pickup truck. All seven people were ejected from the carriage.
An 8-year-old girl died at the scene. Her parents, as well as two brothers, ages 9 and 2, and two sisters, 6 and 4, were taken to the hospital with injuries.
As Hodges and other emergency personnel collected evidence and treated the injured, other Amish buggies began to arrive at the site. The drivers, men with long beards and hats, told the sheriff that they wanted to speak with the man who had driven the truck that struck the buggy.
“No, you can’t,” Hodges told them. The truck driver was sitting in the passenger seat of Hodges’ vehicle.
The sheriff returned to his heartbreaking duty at the frantic, noisy scene. A helicopter soared over the crash site. Ambulance sirens blared as they carried away the injured. A few minutes later, Hodges looked back to his vehicle, and he saw that the Amish men were speaking to the pickup truck driver.
“I looked around, and I saw that he was completely surrounded by the Amish,” Hodges said. “I could see that they were talking to him. I immediately ran over. I expected to find a confrontational scene.”
What he actually found stunned him.
“They were telling him that it wasn’t his fault,” Hodges said. “They were forgiving him.”
The Amish, bound by their belief that events, whether tragic or joyful, are controlled by a supreme God, were determined to forgive. In his 18 years as Cumberland County sheriff, Hodges said he had never witnessed such an encounter.
He also said that he never wants to work another crash scene like the one that took the little girl’s life.
As more Amish families have moved into rural communities in Central and Southern Virginia in the past decade, the number of crashes that involve horse-drawn buggies and motor vehicles has increased, according to local law enforcement agencies. In 2021, eight Amish children were orphaned after a Toyota Tundra rear-ended the family’s carriage, a wreck that killed both parents and injured all the children. That accident happened barely a half-mile from where the little girl was killed last year. A 2019 crash in Buckingham County took the life of an Amish mother and injured four children. A year earlier, a wreck on U.S. 15 in Buckingham County killed a horse and injured four Amish people. Numerous other wrecks between buggies and vehicles have occurred near Farmville.
A bill introduced by Virginia Sen. Mark Peake, R-Lynchburg, that would have built upon existing law and increased the number of safety features and lights on Amish buggies failed during this year’s General Assembly session. The bill was left in the state senate’s Transportation Committee after some lawmakers said that they wanted more input from the Amish communities that would bear most of the impacts of the bill, including the possible infringement upon the group’s religious freedoms.
Therein lies a problem for legislators. The Amish are not monolithic. Although most Amish shun many modern conveniences, such as motorized vehicles and some electronic devices, the levels of technological acceptance vary by community. Many Amish who moved from Pennsylvania and settled in Central Virginia in recent years say that they are not opposed to adding more lights and safety features to their buggies. Other communities, such as an Amish settlement near the community of Gladys in Campbell County, which is located within the 8th Senate District represented by Peake, have more restrictive religious views that they say prevent them from using even basic safety technologies such as flashing lights.
“They’re adamantly opposed,” Peake said.
The senator said he has conferred with Hodges, Campbell County Sheriff Whit Clark, Del. Tom Garrett, R-Louisa County, and others as he works toward introducing a revised version next year. The senator said that some Campbell County businesses, which include a fuel company, a logging business and others that rely on hauling by heavy trucks, worry that their drivers will strike slow-moving buggies on rural roads.
“They’re just petrified that they’re going to kill somebody in one of these accidents,” Peake said.
Seeking cheaper land in a new state
Aaron Beiler doesn’t always feel safe when he travels with his family on the country roads near the town of Dillwyn in Buckingham County, about 20 miles north of Farmville.
He has good reason to be fearful. In July 2018, about five months after he moved to Virginia from Pennsylvania with his wife and five children, the Amish sawmill owner’s buggy was rear-ended by a vehicle. His then-10-year-old son suffered a broken collarbone, and his wife sustained minor injuries that still bother her more than six years later, he said.
“It kind of stays with you,” he said of the worries about driving a slow-moving carriage on a rural road where people might blow past at 60 mph.
Beiler’s family is part of a sizable influx of Amish into Central and Southern Virginia in the past 10 years. The settlement in the Farmville area, which also includes neighboring Cumberland and Buckingham counties, was established in 2016 and is home to about 270 people, according to data from the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown (Pennsylvania) College, which researches Amish communities.
Amish first settled in Campbell County in 2020, a community that now numbers nearly 100 people. Smaller communities settled in Mecklenburg (2024) and Pittsylvania (three communities in 2013, 2019 and 2024) counties. One of the larger Amish settlements is a 435-person Halifax County community that first arrived in 2005.
Amish settlements stretch into Southwest Virginia, where a community was established near Meadows of Dan in Carroll and Patrick counties in 2021 and another in Craig County the same year. Amish families began settling in Lee County in 2020. The oldest existing Amish community in Virginia is a 165-person settlement that has been in Giles County since 1993.
“Virginia along with West Virginia are the fastest-growing Amish areas in the country,” said Steven Nolt, director of the Young Center at Elizabethtown College. “Percentage-wise, they are still a small slice of the population, but there certainly are a number of new settlements the last four to five years.”
Amish families are moving to Virginia for a simple reason: Farmland is cheaper here than in the area around Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where Amish people have lived since the 1700s and where many of these families are coming from. Younger families looking to buy land have been fanning out across the country in recent years.
In Pennsylvania, “it’s getting really crowded,” said John King, an Amish storeowner who moved with his family to Buckingham County six years ago.
“I was looking for, in plain words, cheaper land. To give you an example, a 100-acre farm [near Lancaster] compared to here would be double or triple the price in today’s market.”
According to the online real estate site Realtor.com, land prices in Lancaster County range from $20,000 to more than $40,000 an acre for potential farm properties. Parcels nearer to subdivisions or other developments are listed for hundreds of thousands of dollars per acre.
By comparison, farmland in Cumberland and Buckingham counties sells for a fraction of those prices, with listings ranging in the $4,700 to $10,000 per acre range.
“That’s why they are moving here, they can’t afford it” in Pennsylvania, said Jason Meeks, a real estate agent in Buckingham County who has worked with a number of Amish families who have moved to the area. “Here, you could get land around $4,500 [per acre], give or take. Good tillable land might go up a little bit.”
Even those prices are higher than they were a decade ago because more people have been moving to the Farmville area since the pandemic, pushing up land values and putting housing pressures on rural counties.
“Land is getting to be a premium,” he said. “It’s doubled the last 10 years.”
Affordable real estate was one of the reasons Beiler left Pennsylvania for Virginia, even though he does not farm. He operates a sawmill.
“Not everybody’s farming,” said Beiler, 42. “There have been a number of our community in construction, homebuilding, agriculture, remodeling, roofing … many different types of work.”
Generalizing about the Amish is a mistake, said Erik Wesner, who has studied and written about Amish communities in the United States for more than 20 years.
“One of the most common mistakes people make is putting the Amish into one bucket,” said Wesner, whose writings can be found on his website, Amish America.
“There are close to 700 communities across the country with different backgrounds. Some are more progressive, some are more conservative, even in Virginia.”
Those differences could make it difficult for lawmakers to create a traffic safety bill that would be acceptable to all Amish communities.
Lights on buggies: ‘We’ve gone about as far as we can go’
Beiler said he understands that automobile drivers in rural communities are not accustomed to seeing horse-drawn buggies on country roads and highways.
“We obviously moved into their backyard,” he said. An automobile driver might be “traveling on the road, and all of sudden there’s a buggy, and they’re not used to it.”
He said that in Pennsylvania, where Amish have lived for generations, local drivers are more aware of buggy traffic. Many roads have dedicated lanes or wide shoulders to accommodate buggies. That’s not the case in rural Virginia, where widening roads to add buggy lanes does not appear financially feasible for state or local governments, according to some law enforcement and government officials.
Beiler said that buggy drivers in the Farmville area are open to safety features for their carriages, although he doubts that adding more lights or mirrors will reduce the number of crashes.
Most buggies are already equipped with flashing yellow lights and red reflectors on the rear, headlights on the front, side mirrors and the familiar bright orange triangle on the rear that indicates the carriage is a slow-moving vehicle.
A Virginia law passed in 2023, introduced by the late Sen. Frank Ruff Jr., already requires horse-drawn vehicles to display white lights in the front and red lights or reflectors in the rear. Peake’s bill would have gone further, strengthening requirements for brakes, wheels, headlamps, horns and other safety features.
Hodges, the Cumberland County sheriff, visited Richmond in late January with his own suggested additions to Peake’s bill. Hodges recommended requiring buggies be equipped with radio-frequency identification transmitters, small devices that send signals to radio receivers that can be affixed to highway road signs. The transmitter from a passing buggy would trigger flashing lights on a warning sign telling drivers that a slow-moving carriage is ahead.
Hodges said some of the Amish residents he spoke to were receptive to the technology, as well as to the use of reflective paint for buggies.
“I think we can do things that don’t conflict with people’s religious beliefs,” Hodges said.
Beiler, who is part of a three-person Amish safety committee in his community, is skeptical that more lights will make buggies more visible.
“We’ve gone about as far as we can go, as far as putting lights on a buggy,” he said. “In the last 20 years, lights have come a long way, especially LED lights. We started with lights after the first fatality. That change was well-received with our community and with the English” — a term often used by the Amish to refer to non-Amish people.
Like Beiler, King thinks his Amish community has done all it can do to make their buggies safer.
“My honest opinion, if a buggy has proper lighting that is working correctly, I don’t think any more lights are going to help,” King said. If a vehicle driver “can’t see those lights, they won’t see any lights.”
Mark DeWalt, a professor emeritus at Winthrop University who has studied Amish settlements for nearly 50 years, has produced research that concurs with King’s sentiments about the futility of making buggies safer by adding more lighting.
“Most Amish accidents are in broad daylight, on straight roads, where somebody ran into their back ends,” DeWalt said. “People driving large vehicles or trucks are not paying attention. A person looking at their cell phone while driving 60 is still going to hit them. More lights wouldn’t matter. It might help to an extent, but not as much as we think.”
Along with West Virginia University professor Rachel Stein, DeWalt has produced research that determined that educating drivers about sharing roads with buggies might be more effective at curbing accidents.
“We need to do a better job of educating the public driving these roads what they should do,” he said.
He said local officials and legislators must work closely with Amish residents to develop workable rules for the roads.
“They like to have input, like everybody else,” he said. “And they don’t like to be told what to do, like everybody else.”
Amish businesses a boon for local economies
The Amish have embraced simplicity for more than three centuries.
The Amish church formed in Switzerland in 1693, when a religious leader named Jakob Amman split his group from the larger Anabaptist church that had risen during the Protestant Reformation. Amman’s followers strictly interpreted Biblical verses, and they became known as Amish, named for Amman, which was initially used by their opponents as a derogatory term.
Amish immigrants arrived in North America in the mid-1700s and eventually formed a large settlement near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, around 1760. Community is at the heart of Amish religious beliefs and is a core reason for their resistance to technological advances, said Nolt, the Elizabethtown professor who has written 15 books about Amish and Mennonite cultures.
“They have a strong emphasis on community over the individual,” Nolt said. “That expresses itself by limiting the uses of technology that promote individual autonomy.”
The Amish did not remain static in their rejection of technology. Over several decades and generations, many Amish communities embraced some modern conveniences, such as electricity, telephones and flashing lights on buggies.
“All Amish change over time,” said Wesner, a longtime researcher, “just at different speeds.”
The arrival of Amish residents often stimulates local economies, researchers say. Amish residents open stores, farms and other businesses that benefit small towns and rural areas that could use an economic boost.
“The Amish people are very entrepreneurial,” Nolt said. “It often surprises people in places where Amish set up, where the local people think they’ll just stay on the farm. But they set up new businesses … a bulk food store, a hardware store, shoe store. They’ll be involved in construction trades or landscaping or bricklayers. They’re not just selling milk and raising sheep.”
Pineview Bulk Food and Deli near Farmville is an example of a new business that serves not only Amish families but other residents as well. The store sells groceries, often in large containers (which is why it’s called “bulk food”), produce, baked goods and Amish-made jellies and boasts a busy delicatessen where employees make custom-ordered sandwiches for lunchtime diners.
King runs a similar store and deli near Dillwyn called Spring Hollow Market, which opened in 2023 and is part of a small strip of Amish-owned businesses that include a produce auction, a furniture builder and a hardware store. The market even has a Facebook page, although King said the page is managed by a friend who is not Amish.
King rides a three-person, horse-drawn taxi to work along busy Virginia 60 and uses a buggy to take his family to church on Sundays. When it comes to traffic safety, King said he is “open to suggestions,” but he thinks some people will be reluctant to add more lights.
“If it’s a simple solution, nobody will mind,” he said. “We’re all people. Some people don’t like regulations and some will say it costs too much money.”
And then there are the Swartzentruber Amish, who might be opposed to adding any safety equipment on their buggies at all.
State laws run up against ‘God’s will’
The Amish settlement in Campbell County is composed of people who primarily moved from Ohio, which was home to a much more conservative group known as Swartzentruber Amish. Members of the Swartzentruber group are forbidden from using mainstream conveniences that include indoor running water, riding in motorized vehicles (except in some emergencies) and using electric refrigerators.
In Campbell County, Amish buggy drivers have been resistant to placing even the slow-moving-vehicle warning triangles on their carriages, said Capt. Jeff Rater of the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office, who acts as the liaison between local law enforcement and the Amish.
Rater was already familiar with Amish communities, having lived near them while growing up on a dairy farm in upstate New York. He called the Campbell County Amish devout Christians who are “good people, who can look at the same Bible verses differently and take it to heart.”
He said his office has written a few traffic citations to buggy drivers who don’t comply with current law, but the tickets have little impact on changing the buggy drivers’ minds about adding lights to their carriages.
“They don’t want to budge,” he said. “They have a set of rules from their elders in Ohio. If the elders tell them not to do it, they’re not going to. They will pay the fines. They would rather get a ticket from an officer than be shunned by their community.”
In Ohio, Swartzentruber Amish have frequently found themselves in conflict with law enforcement, municipalities and even the state government. Earlier this month, Amish who refused to comply with a new state law recently won a victory in court, with help from students at Harvard Law School’s Religious Freedom Clinic. A judge temporarily blocked Ohio’s law, which would have required lights on Amish buggies, by agreeing with the Harvard law students’ argument that it conflicted with the Amish community’s religious rights.
Peake’s bill ran out of gas at this same intersection between public safety and religious freedom.
In a Senate Transportation Committee hearing last month, Peake said that the Campbell County Amish settlement believes it to be “God’s will” if an accident happens, “but the people who hit them really get upset if they kill someone.”
Even some progressive-minded Amish residents have similar beliefs when it comes to “God’s will.” King, who uses QuickBooks accounting software to run his grocery store and deli and who isn’t opposed to safety equipment, said that ultimately his fate is not his to decide.
“If somebody should die, maybe we come to the conclusion that God was ready to call them home,” he said. “Maybe it is a test for the people left behind to motivate them to reach out and bring people together.”
Peake said he hopes to come up with a bill next year that will alleviate religious freedom concerns and keep Amish families safe.
“It’s never a headache to try to keep our citizens safe,” he said. “Nobody wants anybody to get hurt.”
Hodges, the Cumberland County sheriff, said he will work closely with legislators on improving safety, and then he will make sure any future law is enforced.
“I have picked up the last child out of a ditch that I am going to on this issue,” the sheriff said.