In Pennsylvania the Amish, along with some Mennonites live mostly in Lancaster County. Amish also live in Ohio and Illinois. The Amish trace their religious heritage back to the Swiss Anabaptists of sixteenth-century Europe. Disgruntled with the faith and practice of the Catholic church in Europe, Martin Luther led a protest in 1517. His revolt inaugurated the Protestant Reformation, making Protestantism a permanent branch within Christendom. A few years later in Zurich, students of the Protestant pastor Ulrich Zwingli became impatient with the slow pace of the Protestant Reformation. These young upstarts criticized Pastor Zwingli and the Zurich City Council for continuing to baptize infants and conduct the Mass. After several heated consultations with the city council, the dissidents illegally re-baptized one another in a secret meeting on 21 January 1525. This simple service in a home initiated a new movement that soon became an offshoot of the Protestant Reformation. The religious renegades believed that baptism should only be conferred on adults who were willing to live a life of radical obedience to the teachings of Jesus Christ. The young reformers were nicknamed Anabaptists, meaning 're-baptizers', because they had already been baptized as infants in the Catholic church. Because of this radical movement against both the Catholic and Protestant authorities they were killed for sedition. Thousands of Anabaptists were executed by civil and religious authorities over the next two centuries. Anabaptist hunters were commissioned to torture, brand, burn, drown, imprison, dismember, and harass the religious heretics. As the persecution waxed and waned, Anabaptists found refuge in Moravia, Alsace, the Palatinate, the Netherlands and eventually in North America. In the Netherlands, Menno Simons emerged as an influential proponent of Anabaptism. Ordained as a Catholic priest in 1524, Simons soon found himself caught between the authority of the Catholic church and the interpretation of the Scripture. By 1531 he opted for the Anabaptist view of Scripture, and he became so influential that many Anabaptists were eventually called Mennonists, or Mennonites. The Amish take their name from their founder Jacob Ammann, a young Anabaptist leader in Alsace. In the 1690s, Ammann began some innovative religious practices. War, social upheaval, political turmoils, and intermittent persecution prompted the Amish and Mennonites to leave their homelands in the Palatinate and Alsace. A few Mennonites had arrived in the new World and established a settlement near Philadelphia in 1683, ten years before the Amish-Mennonite division. Today, Amish and Mennonites live mostly in Lancaster County in Pennsylvania, but have also move to Ohio and Illinois. To the tourist or casual observer it is almost impossible to distinguish one from the other. But there are differences, basically the Amish are more conservative. While Mennonites use electricity provided by a power company, the Amish do not. Mennonites my own and drive automobiles, be that they are without adornments, the Amish do not. There are also subtle difference in dress, grooming and and procedures. The Amish may use electricity provided by batteries, or generated by diesel engines to perform certain chores on the farm, yet use oil lamps to provide lighting. They may not have a telephone in the house, but it is acceptable to have the telephone at the end of a driveway. They may use tractors for certain functions, yet never for plowing fields, yet they may use a small tractor to mow the grass with a manual lawnmower. The Amish don't believe in rubber tires nor bicycles. Over the last century they have had many disagreement with State and Federal authorities to protect their way of life. They were exempted from serving in the military during World War II and they don't pay Social Security, yet they pay taxes and comply with state regulations for their buggies to make them road worthy. In education, they insist on one-room schools within walking distance of their home. Teachers are usually young single Amish women. They vehemently oppose school busing to middle or high schools for fear of outside influences on their children. Yet, ironically young men, before their baptism, may own automobiles, but usually revert back to the fold once they are baptized. The rules and regulations governing their lives are in constant flux. Because of their agricultural lifestyle, generating produce and many Amish articles, they attract many tourists bringing millions of dollars into the local economy, which the state considers when granting them exceptions to many rules and regulations (Source: 'The RIDDLE of AMISH CULTURE' by Donald B. Kraybill, third printing 1991). This picture was taken on 4 June 2016, Sig... fo