Long viewed as tech-averse, the Amish have become enthusiastic users of electric bicycles, so much so that one Ohio community has become a testing ground for new models.
By Alan Ohnsman, Forbes Staff
For decades, driving the two-lane country roads that run through Holmes County, Ohio’s leafy green hills, meant sharing the road with small black, horse-drawn buggies — iconic transportation for the area’s Amish community, the second-largest in the world. But today, as you pass fields tilled by horse-drawn plows, dairies and sawmills, something else might grab your attention: hordes of locals, dressed in the plain, 19th-century fashions favored by the Amish, whizzing by on electric bicycles.
Typically thought to be tech-averse, eschewing cars, computers and smartphones, Amish communities are increasingly making an exception for electric bikes, and the solar panels and batteries that keep them powered up. Though it’s a rural region, Ohio’s Amish country in the eastern portion of the Buckeye State has become a bigger, more mature market for e-bikes — which retail for between $1,500 and $2,000 — than cities like Cleveland, Columbus and even New York.
“We’ve sold in the range of 10,000 e-bikes over the last 10 years in Holmes County,” Jesse Lapin, cofounder and COO of Magnum, the top brand in the area, told Forbes. “The adoption rate there is so much higher. People, even six or eight years ago, were much more likely to know about, own and ride e-bikes in Holmes County, Ohio, than they were in Manhattan.” Lapin said the company sells thousands of bikes a year through Amish distributors in the community. And the market there is so enthusiastic, it’s become a testing ground for new models
Magnum’s not alone in targeting Holmes County’s Amish. “It’s wild the success of the e-bike in that community,” said Levi Conlow, cofounder and CEO of Lectric eBikes, whose Lectric XP 3.0 was likely the top-selling model in the U.S. last year. (While the Phoenix-based company doesn’t directly market to the Amish, it promotes its e-bikes by sponsoring “The Mennonite Mom,” a YouTube influencer who posts videos about her farm family that adheres to related religious views).
Salt Lake City-based Magnum is also mindful of local preferences.
“Nobody wants a bright shiny bike that sticks out. So black, low-step commuter bikes ended up being the bike there,” he said.
And on a recent summer afternoon, hundreds of those bikes buzz through the streets of Berlin and Millersburg, tourist hubs packed with shops selling wooden furniture, crafts, cheese and baked goods from Amish artisans, and Behalt, home to the Amish & Mennonite Heritage Center (and a sprawling 360-degree painting by a German folk artist depicting centuries of their history). Horses and buggies still make their rounds so hitching posts remain as common as bike racks. Some riders, particularly older ones, wear traditional straw hats and bonnets, but many younger ones have helmets and bright reflective safety vests over their muted gray or blue dresses or long-sleeved shirts and suspenders.
E-bike sales aren’t tracked as closely as cars and trucks, though they’ve grown rapidly in recent years. In 2022, U.S. electric bike ownership hit a record 1.1 million units, four times the volume sold in 2019, according to an Energy Department report from late last year. Globally, the e-bike market was likely worth $44.9 billion last year and could hit $77.6 billion by the end of 2028, according to an estimate by BCC Research.
The surging popularity of this very modern form of transportation in Amish communities has been building for at least a decade, according to Lapin and David Mullet, founder of E-Bikes of Holmes County, the region’s biggest retailer, and a member of an Old Order Amish church. While e-bikes can be found in communities in northern Indiana and the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, region – home to the largest Amish population – Holmes County’s hilly geography makes them particularly appealing to people who need to commute to work.
“They came in with the working Amish who work maybe five to 10 miles away from their home, in a woodworking shop or wherever,” said David Kline, a retired dairy farmer and writer who’s also bishop of an Old Order church near Mount Hope, Ohio, that permits its members to use e-bikes. “The owners of those businesses bought e-bikes for their employees because it was a lot more cost-efficient than hiring somebody to pick them up in a car. That’s sort of how they slipped in the backdoor before we were aware of it.”
Over a century ago, as the Ford Model T became the first mass-market automobile, most Amish decided personal car ownership wasn’t for them.
“It’s a no-no; it disturbs gemeinde,” Kline said, using the German word for community that’s central to Amish religious beliefs. “We’re fairly open to technology. We use modern medicine. We go to the dentist. We donate blood. The car was really the first piece of technology that the Amish said: ‘Whoa. What will it do to the community?’ And as we know, Henry Ford’s Model T destroyed thousands of small communities.”
Though e-bikes allow riders to travel greater distances and at higher speeds than buggies or traditional bikes, they aren’t as generally disruptive to the community as cars, he said.
“They really picked up with working people, as an easier way to get to jobs. But this time of year, you’ve got the whole family going on them – little guys, big guys, mama with a trailer behind with maybe a baby in there,” said Kline. “And all the major roads around here have buggy lanes, which are also perfect as bike lanes.”
The Most Amish County
Holmes County was first settled by the Amish in the early 19th century and they account for about 45% of its population now. “It’s the most Amish county in the country,” said Joseph Donnermeyer, a professor emeritus at Ohio State University who’s studied Amish communities for decades.
Though they don’t embrace many types of modern conveniences and typically aren’t connected to utility grids, landline telephones or the internet, the Amish are not anti-technology. Views on what’s acceptable are determined gradually, with an eye toward upholding religious tenets that emphasize a need for some separation from non-Amish communities, said Donnermeyer, citing 2 Corinthians 6:14 as a foundational Biblical passage for Anabaptist religious groups (which include the Amish, Mennonites and Hutterites). “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?”
“What it boils down to is they interpret the symbolism of that. So we can have a solar panel that charges a battery that runs the electric bike, but we’re not connected to the electric grid,” he said. “The Amish concern over technology, it’s not technology per se but its effect on the community.”
While electric bikes recharged by the sun are acceptable to a majority of the Holmes County Amish community, the same wouldn’t be true of a solar-powered car, if one existed, according to Kline.
“No. The car lets people travel too far, and in an enclosed environment with a heater and air conditioning, which allows you to ignore weather conditions. With a bike, you’re very subject to the weather. It also has a more limited range,” he said. “Once you have a car, there are no boundaries.”
‘More Green Than Anybody’
Long before the e-bike boom, Amish in Holmes County were also early adopters of solar and battery systems and the region likely has the highest rate of residential solar power generation in Ohio, according to Donnermeyer and Jacob Hershberger, founder of Trail Battery and Solar in Millersburg, an Amish businessman who’s sold the systems to his neighbors for more than a decade.
“It started about 20 years ago,” Hershberger said. “About nine out of every 10 homes have something, anywhere from three to 15 to 18 solar panels. An average installation is about a 4-kilowatt system. Battery systems are normally up to 10 kilowatt-hours.”
The Amish use far less electricity than average American homes, so in addition to charging e-bikes, solar and battery systems help power things like household lighting, small appliances and water pumps, according to Hershberg. “We’re probably more green than anybody.” (During Ohio’s months of gray autumn and winter skies, locals augment their solar systems with small generators, Hershberger said.)
Still, Holmes County is something of an anomaly among Amish communities, as e-bikes aren’t yet as prevalent in other North American communities.
“In Lancaster County, with a very large Amish population, very few Amish ride bikes,” said Steve Nolt, a professor of history and Anabaptist studies at Elizabethtown College, in the heart of Pennsylvania’s Amish region. “At one point, 10 or 15 years ago, I could have safely said that none of the Amish here ride bikes, even just the pedal variety. That’s not true anymore. Some do, but riding bicycles here has always been one of those symbolic separators.”
Traditional bicycles are generally popular in northern Indiana, home to another large number of Amish churches and communities, said Nolt. But e-bike sales in that region don’t rival those of Holmes County, according to Magnum’s Lapin.
And it’s not just the sales. Amish e-bikers use their rides so heavily, with some racking up thousands of miles a year, that Holmes County is a key test market for Magnum.
“They’re kind of ground zero for us to test. We hear from our community of riders there about how our bikes stand up when we release new products or new technology, new batteries,” Lapin said. “They tell us whether we need to increase power or consider different components. They’re excellent partners of ours and the bike dealers because they give such valuable feedback.”
‘Totally Different Lifestyle’
There’s no hard data, but locals and researchers like Donnermeyer estimate that e-bikes are now accepted by about two-thirds of local Amish churches (each of which decides the rules for its members). But more conservative sects, such as the Schwartzentruber Amish and Andy Weaver Amish, are among those that don’t. Even among Old Order Amish, the largest group, traditionalists like Mart Miller remain strongly opposed to battery-powered bicycles.
“My biggest concern is they are exchanging the Amish mode of travel for higher-speed transportation that will eventually lead to the car,” said Miller, a retired farmer and bishop of an Old Order Amish church near Mount Hope, Ohio. “We have a lot of people out there where the parents do not own a horse and buggy anymore, so the children will not learn how to use a horse and buggy.”
The introduction of cyclist safety gear that comes with e-bikes is also a concern.
“It brings along a totally different lifestyle,” he said. “The dress mode is different, and I don’t blame them, but a hard bike helmet and all the clothes they wear, they are totally not respectful to the way Old Order Amish should dress. That’s just the way it is.”
