The New Amish: Raising A Wyoming Horse Barn With Power Tools And Cellphones

BEAR RIVER — Under a crisp, blue October sky, the unexpected sound of shots rang out.

“Thwack, thwack, thwack!”

It was a nail gun tacking support beams into place as a new stables/horse barn took shape at Wyoming Downs in Bear River, a tiny town of about 500 people near Evanston.

What was so unexpected about the shots was not the nail gun itself, but the person using it.

Meet Albert Mast, an Amish man from Ohio serving as the crew boss for a group of seven Amish men hired to build a horse barn and stables for Wyoming Downs.

Mast doesn’t look Amish at first glance. He has a beard, but wasn’t wearing a hat at the time, and his shirt definitely wasn’t homemade. It was an Under Armour T-shirt. Mast also had a cellphone at the ready in his pocket, which he used a few times to order items the crew was going to need.

Mast not only seemed quite comfortable operating the nail gun, he knew how to maneuver an aerial work platform like a pro as well.

His colleagues, meanwhile, were comfortably operating heavy equipment like forklifts and bobcats with rotary drills. The latter dug huge, 4-foot-deep holes for support beams. Hand shovels were used a bit here and there to shovel powdered dirt this way or that — but mostly the hand shovel seemed aimed at pointing to the center of the next hole for drilling.

The New Amish

Here then are the new Amish of today.

They’re comfortable straddling two worlds, one that is more modern and another significantly less so.

“We still consider ourselves conservatives,” Mast told Cowboy State Daly. “But we see, like the elders say, there’s enough competition out there. If we would do everything by hand, it would take us so much more time that we couldn’t compete.”

Houses that the Amish build for themselves are still done the old-fashioned way, all with hand tools, Mast said. But for the purpose of competing commercially, some modern updates have been allowed.

“We obviously don’t have electricity in our shops,” he said. “But we have diesels. We have hydraulic, we have line shaft — whatever it takes to manufacture something.”

They also have trucking companies to help deliver things, and their homes these days have running water and indoor plumbing.

Just no electricity and no televisions.

And the cellphones are for business use only. Not for endlessly scrolling Facebook or other social media.

“We don’t have cellphones in the house,” Mast said.

Still Hand-Making Clothing, Growing Food

Practicalities have also led to some relaxation in clothing as well.

“We still make 70% of our clothes. Like, my wife made these pants. But obviously she didn’t make this shirt,” he said, pointing to its prominent Under Armour logo. “We have two kids, so it takes a lot of time (to make everything by hand), and she spends a lot of time with the kids and stuff. She doesn’t have time to do everything. So, we can buy some clothing to where she doesn’t have to be daily sewing, and we’re not just wearing one pair of pants.”

Hats are something Mast typically does like to wear outside — but only if it’s not so windy the hat becomes an impediment to work. In Wyoming, where there’s almost always wind, a hat is not 100% required.

“Our tradition is to grow beards and stuff,” he acknowledged.

But those are not restricted to married men, the way some online-perpetuated myths have portrayed.

“You can grow a beard when you’re 16 if you can,” he said, laughing. “It’s OK. It’s just pretty much we’re not supposed to shave after we get married.”

And, while much of the food Mast eats is homegrown, not everything comes from his own fields.

“We still want groceries and stuff,” he said, shrugging.

These days, there are wide variations among the Amish, Mast added. Some versions now allow children to drive their parents around, while others, where competition has been less prevalent, still completely restrict the use of anything related to power, including nail guns.

Some of the relaxation around technology might be somewhat generational, Mast acknowledged.

“My dad has never shot a nail gun,” he said. “He’s never used a circular saw.”

And, Mast added, he doubts his dad would use a nail gun if he were in Wyoming, helping to build the barn.

Growing Up In A One-Room School

Mast has been through the eighth grade at a one-room schoolhouse that had about 20 students. It was a blast.

“Our schools strictly have no technology,” he said. “It’s all done by the book, with books and notebooks. There’s a couple of classes you can take by choice, like history. I studied a little bit of history. But not a lot.”

Art’s another elective that students can opt to take if they want to. But the three R’s — Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic — are non-negotiable. Everyone has to take at least those to graduate.

“I enjoyed school,” he said. “We pretty much walked to school every morning. It was about a mile from our house. We did get a ride in the wintertime when it’s cold out and stuff. But that’s something I really enjoyed was walking to school. It’s out in the country, so it was a little bit like hiking.”

College, though, is something that the Amish say is “above our pay grade,” Mast said.

That doesn’t mean, however, that learning stops altogether. It just shifts to learning from one’s elders in the community.

“Like we learned building stuff, because our dad built stuff,” he said. “So, we just learned from him, like farming and stuff. Why pay for that when you can experience it hands-on and actually get the same (knowledge) it’s just not in the books.”

Another option, Mast added, is to travel somewhere to learn something. Like the time he and his family traveled to Utah, to visit a farm that grows herbs and prepares medicinal formulas with those herbs.

A Great Paid Vacation

Mast is from Gambier, Ohio, but most of his kin originally come from Kentucky.

Traveling such a long distance, from Ohio to Wyoming, did happen by driving a vehicle rather than a horse and buggy.

“We can hire someone to take us wherever, just like out here, we had somebody drive us out here in a bus,” he said.

He and his colleagues see their trip to Wyoming, to build a horse barn-stable at Wyoming Downs, as something of a paid vacation.

“I say that as kind of a joke,” he said. “But realistically, it really is our vacation. I have a metal shop where we make all the tin, so we made all the roofing and stuff that we brought for this, and we shipped it out here for the building.”

Lumber and things that would be too expensive to ship were purchased from a store in the Evanston area.

“I work in the shop 11 months out of the year, making roofing and siding and selling buildings,” he said. “But every now and then, I get to go out on jobs and see what they’re doing. And it’s interesting for me to get out of the shop.”

Raising a structure in a far-off state has become a tradition once a year, as a way of getting out and seeing the world, Mast said. The trip is generally bookended with a bit of sight-seeing for everyone who came along for the ride. That includes not just the men who are helping to build the barn, but family members — wives and children — who came along as well.

“A lot of the Amish love to see the country,” he said. “Maybe 80% of them don’t get to see anything, and maybe some of those don’t want to, which is fine. But I like to go out and meet new people and see different country sides.”

The money the Amish team makes by raising the horse barn-stable will largely pay all of the expenses for their vacationing.

“This way, we don’t lose a lot of money to go see the country,” Mast said. “We have to work a couple of days, but then we can go do a little bit of sightseeing.”

Once the stable-horsebarn is finished, the group plans to head West, then take a road trip along the north side of the United States.

Yellowstone National Park could be one of the places they go, though they did pass through there last year during April.

“They still had 20 feet of snow,” Mast said. “Like now would be a better time if they don’t have snow.”

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.