‘Reasons Why I Left’: NNY man writes memoir detailing departure from the Amish life

In October, it will be 13 years that Mr. Miller, 30, has been living life as a member of what the Amish refer to as “the English” — those outside their own community. His family has largely ostracized him, although he does have an Amish brother in Indiana he occasionally visits.

“I haven’t been invited back since I left the community,” Mr. Miller said. “You kind of get used to it. You just realize that’s the way it is. We do write a letter back and forth sometimes.”

Mr. Miller moved to the north country’s Lawrenceville with his family from Ohio in 2004, at age 12, after he finished seventh grade. He has six brothers and three sisters. Mr. Miller is the fourth child in the family.

“This was a new Amish community that had just started,” Mr. Miller wrote in his memoir, “and for five years, nobody left the community until I did.”

Mr. Miller, now of the Nicholville area, found a living working carpentry and construction jobs after he left the Amish community. In the north country, the Amish are Swartzentruber Amish, one of the largest and most conservative subgroups of Old Order Amish.

These days, Mr. Miller is busy with a large sugar bush he leases near Lake Ozonia, town of Hopkinton, in the foothills of the Adirondacks. He said the approximately 14,000 trees he has tapped in the past several weeks could create about 6,000 gallons of syrup.

Over the past dozen years or so as Mr. Miller went about his business, acquaintances, intrigued by his background, have told him he should write a book about his Amish experiences and that way of life.

“People would ask questions almost every day about the Amish,” Mr. Miller said during a March 1 visit to the offices of the Watertown Daily Times. “Occasionally, I would have people tell me I should write a book, but I’m not much of a reader, nor did I ever think I could write a book.”

Mr. Miller visited the Times with a friend, Christina A. Pointer, of Potsdam. The two met about seven weeks ago through acquaintances.

“I may be a little biased, but I’ve never met anyone as gentle, kind and nonjudgmental,” Miss Pointer said.

English is Mr. Miller’s second language. He grew up speaking Pennsylvania Dutch, a variety of the German language, and maintains a slight accent. Writing a book was challenging for Mr. Miller, who wasn’t educated past eighth grade. But he tackled it following a persuasive conversation with a couple, Jason J. and Jennifer L. Reome of Town Line Road in Malone.

“They both looked at me very seriously and told me I should really consider writing a book,” Mr. Miller said. “I went home and thought about it. It was only a couple of days after that I started writing it. I said, ‘I’m just going to write and see what happens.’”

“We just find him fascinating,” Mrs. Reome said in a phone interview. “We always thought the life was so interesting. In our neck of the woods, we grow up with the Amish around us. But they’re always very to themselves.”

Mrs. Reome said that she and her husband met Sam through a friend.

“He comes around to our barbecues and our family events,” Mrs. Reome said. “I always had a lot of questions for him. You get the inside view of how different the Amish live, but yet some things are kind of the same.”

Mrs. Reome has read Mr. Miller’s memoir.

“I thought it was very good,” she said. “I told him, ‘Sammy — I’ve got enough questions for two more books.’ But I liked how it touched on some of the main aspects of his life growing up. I’d like more on the everyday.”

Mr. Miller wrote out his manuscript in longhand. He then taught himself to type — “After a while, I got pretty good at it,” he said — and filed it in Google Docs. He researched publishers and decided on a self-publishing company in Pennsylvania.

“Memoir: Reasons Why I Left the Amish Community” was published in December by Dorrance Publishing, Pittsburgh. The accounts that Mr. Miller shared in his memoir have not been independently verified by the Times.

The book, Mr. Miller said, is more than about getting his story out in the public for those interested in his recollections of growing up Swartzentruber Amish.

“I also wanted to have the Amish to read it so they can see a little bit different side, so they don’t have to have such strict rules for their children,” he said. “Just be more caring.”

Mr. Miller said there’s been “quite a few” Amish in his area who have read his book.

“I think it’s good they read it,” he said. “They probably don’t like it that it’s out there for the public to read. I did hear from a couple of them who had read it. They thought it was some good information. They looked at things a little bit differently, I guess.”

That way of looking at things, the Amish lifestyle, was too much for Mr. Miller. Looking back, it was the rigid rules and the punishment that followed if those rules were broken. For example, he recalled the case of the cow that he colored incorrectly. He was 5 years old when a teacher in Ohio gave him the assignment.

“We were given a sheet of paper that had different animals on it,” Mr. Miller said. “We were asked to color the animals. The teacher said to color the animals whatever color you want to color them. So, I got excited because we had a book back home, some farming book. The book was about a green cow.”

When he colored his cow green, Mr. Miller said the teacher disapproved and gave him a spanking. His siblings told their parents about the punishment.

“The rule was, if we got a spanking at school, we got a spanking at home too,” Mr. Miller said.

His home front, Mr. Miller said, had more strict rules compared to other Amish households.

“I actually very much did like the Amish life,” he said. “But my father was the bishop of the community. He had very strict rules set for me and my siblings. I felt like I wasn’t necessarily fitting in because I wasn’t able to do the same things or the same activities and stuff like that than what some of the others were able to do my age. So, I just didn’t feel like I fit in.”

Mr. Miller noticed the differences in rules when he visited his uncles.

“When we went to visit, it was different,” he said. “I could see they didn’t have some of the strict rules that my father had for us.”

Those rules included the especially divisive one about suspenders.

“In many people’s eyes, that may not look like a big thing, but it is a big thing if you’re a teenager and you have to wear suspenders,” Mr. Miller said.

He said that usually in the Amish community he was from, a young man could stop wearing them between the ages of 14 and 17.

“My father wanted me to wear suspenders until I was 21,” he said. “That’s when we basically go on our own.”

The wearing of suspenders didn’t bother him until other boys his age began asking him about it. He started staying home on Saturday nights, a time reserved for socialization, to avoid the issue.

“I guess for quite some time, I had a lot of anger built up because of my father, how strict he was,” Mr. Miller said. “I felt things could have been different if he didn’t have such strict rules.”

Mr. Miller left his Amish life before reaching the age of 18 or 19, when he said the youth are asked to get baptized into the Amish faith.

“That is why I wanted to leave before I got baptized, as I didn’t want to make a commitment to God unless I could stand good for my word,” Mr. Miller wrote in his memoir.

Nonetheless, Mr. Miller said he would have liked to remain in the Amish community. “I would have not had any issues getting baptized and standing good for my commitment if I would have been able to enjoy my life and fit in with the rest of the community.”

He imagined fitting in, and becoming well known for certain skills, especially his singing.

“I practiced singing all the time,” he wrote in his memoir. “The animals were the best listeners. They would never talk bad about my singing. And not only would I do a lot of singing, I would do a lot of preaching as well.”

But such thoughts would eventually vanish. Mr. Miller left his Amish community a few days before his 18th birthday. He had met two “English” friends, who visited his family’s sawmill one day. Mr. Miller had discussed leaving with them previously, but didn’t want to do it in daylight. He told them to pick him up in the middle of the night that evening because he didn’t want his family to see him leave.

“As soon as I closed the door, I took off running down the road as fast as I could go,” Mr. Miller wrote in the memoir. “I ran down to the bottom of the hill where Matt was waiting for me.”

In addition to the suspenders, he left behind a note, which he said read something like, “I have decided to leave the Amish community.”

He stayed with acquaintances until he became independent, working on a farm, in construction and as a carpenter.

It was a much smoother break compared to the first time he left his Amish community a year earlier. While he and his brother, Ura, were walking through the woods one day, they came across a bicycle, which the Swartzentruber Amish are not allowed to have. Mr. Miller wanted to do whatever it took to learn to ride it.

“It was more of an old bicycle, but there was air in the tires,” Mr. Miller said.

He found a nearby hill and pushed off. It took several tries to find his balance.

“It was a very tough hill to ride down — very stony, gravelly,” Mr. Miller recalled, laughing. “It wasn’t the best riding. I fell off many times.”

But he finally got the hang of it. Asked to describe the feeling, he said, “It was pretty exciting. It made you feel like you’re a cool person or something like that.”

With the skill mastered, Mr. Miller plotted the time to leave the community. In Malone, he knew of an “older gentleman” who often did business at his home. He decided he would ride his bike the 17 miles to that person’s home. His bicycle trip there was at night on back roads and he arrived at his destination at about 2 a.m. Mr. Miller said that he was told he could stay as long as he wanted and relaxed from the ride.

“I think it was the first time I actually just sat down and watched TV,” Mr. Miller recalled. “I found it quite interesting. I don’t remember what I was watching, but I just thought it was cool to sit down and watch people talk on television.”

Mr. Miller then found a job in landscaping and construction and ended up being invited to stay at the home of “Timmy,” a co-worker.

“One day we were at work, Timmy got a phone call from the police station, and they were looking for me,” Mr. Miller recalls in his memoir. “My father had gone to the police station and told them what had happened.”

Back at home, Mr. Miller said his father told him God and the Amish community would never forgive him. But there was more, which hit Mr. Miller as especially cruel.

“He also said I would never make it to heaven,” Mr. Miller writes in the memoir. “Instead, God would create a very hot fire and my body would be burned.”

In his interview at the Times offices, Mr. Miller was asked about that passage.

“You know? I believed that,” he said. “But I said, ‘Why live this kind of lifestyle with strict rules like this if that’s the way it’s actually going to happen? Why not choose a lifestyle I can enjoy while I’m alive?’”

Friends have been invaluable to Mr. Miller since he left the Amish, helping him with getting things like a Social Security number and a driver’s license. For example, to get his Social Security number he had to first contact the hospital near Fredericksburg, Ohio, where he was born to get a copy of his birth certificate. The process took about a year. At one time, he began the process of earning a high school equivalency degree, but a job took precedence.

He’s been “trying out” some churches. One of them is Living Hope Church in Malone.

“I really like that one,” Mr. Miller said. “The regular Christian church, I had a very hard time connecting with those because it’s so different from what I was used to. Hope Church isn’t anything like what I was, but it’s kind of somewhat.”

He stressed, “I don’t think the Amish religion is a bad lifestyle. For most people, they really enjoy it. There’s quite a few that do leave. Most of them end up going back because they just like the Amish lifestyle better.”

He said he hasn’t considered it, but Mr. Miller could become a member of a less strict Amish order, such as the more “liberal” Old Order.

“I left before I was baptized,” he said. “It would be easy for me to join another Amish religion, but if I would have been baptized, that would make it really hard because I would make a commitment.”

Amish insight

Mr. Miller divides his book into chapters that give insight into the Amish community, with chapters such as “Amish Churches and Weddings,” “Amish School” and “Working for Another Amish Family.”

Chapter 10 is “Amish Accidents.” In the chapter, Mr. Miller recalls he was injured a couple of times, once when was 7. Boards gave way in a corn crib and a nail ended up going through a foot.

“For something like this, we did not go to the hospital,” Mr. Miller wrote. “Once a day, my mother would take off the wrap and clean the foot, and then put salve on it and wrap it back up. We did this until the foot was healed.”

At age 10, one of his fingers was smashed in a hay wagon accident. This did require a trip to the hospital, 13 miles away. An “English” neighbor drove them to the hospital, where a doctor applied 10 stitches to the finger. Later in his life, that doctor, Mr. Miller said, would be helpful as he acquired a passport. The young Mr. Miller was soon back at work — “easy” work — picking cherries.

Mr. Miller was asked about his thoughts on Amish buggy crashes, especially those involving motorized vehicles.

Mr. Miller said that the Swartzentruber Amish do not allow brightly colored caution signs on their buggies and the vehicles depend on a lantern to be seen.

“I never noticed this until I left, but you basically cannot see the lantern,” he said. “You will see the reflectors that they have on the buggies before you see the lantern.”

The reflectors, Mr. Miller said, are “pretty decent” when new. “But they’ve got to renew them more. The sun shines on them and it kind of fades them and makes them less visible.”

Mr. Miller said that from his experience, there’s no age restriction on driving a buggy. “If you can drive the horse, you’re good to go, pretty much. I can remember I had a brother who was 7 years old and he was driving. But that’s really young.”

Mr. Miller said that when occasionally talking to some people about the Amish life, they look upon it as a bad lifestyle.

“So, what I would want people to know is that from my view, the Amish for the most part have a good peaceful lifestyle,” he said.

He added, “I think a lot of the English look at the Amish and respect them a lot and think they’re very hard working and all of that. But I don’t think the Amish people actually sense that.”

Mr. Miller’s memoir highlights some of life’s simple pleasures. For example, he writes at length about how a simple candy bar distributed at a wedding is something eagerly looked forward to, and when received, is immensely treasured.

“I see a lot of stuff differently than most people do because I was brought up that way,” he said.

And if he could say something to his parents now?

“I guess if I was to say something to my parents, is that, you know, I think of them every day and appreciate the care they had for me while I was being brought up.”

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THE DETAILS

WHAT: “Memoir: Reasons Why I Left the Amish Community,” by Sam E. Miller, North Lawrence.

PUBLISHER: Self-published through Dorrance Publishing Co., Pittsburgh.

PUBLISHER’S DESCRIPTION: “His book was borne from people’s repeated interest in his life growing up Swartzentruber Amish.”

COST: $14

AVAILABLE: The Little Bookstore, Watertown Shopping Plaza, 1314 Washington St., has some copies and it can be purchased at online book stores and bookstore.dorrancepublishing.com.

OF NOTE: Mr. Miller is donating 25% of his personal earnings from the memoir to St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital.