- 29 minutes ago
Lancaster County’s hidden hemp history explains why the Amish almost never buy gasoline, and how one plant once powered an entire farm economy. From the Tuesday morning gas station scene to the horse-drawn buggy passing by, the video traces the real story of Old Order Amish life, Lancaster County place names like Hempfield, and the crop that fueled fields long before modern fuel prices mattered.
Elias Yoder walks through verified colonial records, the 1729 founding of Hempfield Township, more than 100 documented hemp mills, and the hemp stones still preserved in museums and old mill sites. The story also covers George Washington’s 1794 visit to a Lancaster hemp mill, the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act that ended American hemp agriculture, and the 2018 Farm Bill that brought legal industrial hemp back to Pennsylvania.
This is history, agriculture, and Amish farm culture told in a calm, detailed documentary style, with strong focus on Lancaster County, Pennsylvania Dutch traditions, industrial hemp, colonial farming, and the practical economics of a low-gasoline lifestyle.
For viewers searching for Amish history, Lancaster County documentary, industrial hemp history, Pennsylvania farm history, colonial agriculture, and documentary narration about traditional farming, this video offers a rich mix of local history, rural life, and agricultural heritage.
Elias Yoder walks through verified colonial records, the 1729 founding of Hempfield Township, more than 100 documented hemp mills, and the hemp stones still preserved in museums and old mill sites. The story also covers George Washington’s 1794 visit to a Lancaster hemp mill, the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act that ended American hemp agriculture, and the 2018 Farm Bill that brought legal industrial hemp back to Pennsylvania.
This is history, agriculture, and Amish farm culture told in a calm, detailed documentary style, with strong focus on Lancaster County, Pennsylvania Dutch traditions, industrial hemp, colonial farming, and the practical economics of a low-gasoline lifestyle.
For viewers searching for Amish history, Lancaster County documentary, industrial hemp history, Pennsylvania farm history, colonial agriculture, and documentary narration about traditional farming, this video offers a rich mix of local history, rural life, and agricultural heritage.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00It is a Tuesday morning at the gas station on Route 30 outside Lancaster.
00:05The pump reads $3.29 per gallon.
00:09A Ford pickup truck pulls in, fills up.
00:13$62 later, the driver heads home.
00:16The next car, the next pickup, the next minivan all do the same.
00:22The average American family spends about $3,000 per year on gasoline
00:27just to get to work, drive the kids to school, run errands, and visit the grocery store.
00:34Now look across the road.
00:36A horse-drawn buggy comes around the bend.
00:39Inside, an Old Order Amish family.
00:43The husband holds the reins.
00:45His wife sits beside him.
00:47Three children in the back.
00:49The buggy passes the gas station without stopping.
00:53It will go to a doctor's appointment, to the produce market,
00:56to a relative's farm five miles over.
01:00Today, the family will spend $0 on gasoline.
01:05Yesterday, they spent $0 on gasoline.
01:09Last week, last month, last year, almost nothing.
01:14I want to be straight with you before I go further.
01:18Old Order Amish folks do buy some gasoline.
01:21We hire English drivers for trips too far for the buggy.
01:25We pay for gas in a generator when we need it.
01:29Some Amish families run diesel for water pumps or grain mills.
01:34But our total gasoline use per household is a small fraction of what English families spend,
01:40because almost everything we do day to day still moves by horse, by hand, by gravity, or by sunlight.
01:50That is not by accident.
01:52That is by design.
01:55But the question I want to walk you through today is not about how we live now.
02:00It is about what grew in our fields for over 200 years before gasoline was even a word in the
02:08English language.
02:09The plant that fueled Lancaster County before any gas station existed.
02:15The plant that put food on 300 years of Pennsylvania Dutch farm tables.
02:22The plant that gave whole townships in this county their names.
02:26The plant the federal government stopped us from growing in 1937.
02:33And the plant the Amish are growing again today, legally, in the same fields our great-grandfathers planted 300 years
02:42ago.
02:44I am Elias Yoder.
02:46I am Amish, and I farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
02:49Today, I am going to walk you through the verified history of the crop that built this county.
02:57The legal change that ended it.
03:00The 80-year silence that followed.
03:03The federal law that brought it back.
03:06And what the careful old folks knew about a plant whose name appears on every road sign and county map,
03:14but whose story almost nobody alive today still remembers.
03:20Quick word before I go further.
03:23The old methods my family uses.
03:25There is more of it than fits in any one video.
03:29I gathered the whole of it into a book at EliasYoder.com.
03:35The book is the long version.
03:38If you want it, it is there.
03:40I will not mention it again.
03:42Now, the real history of Lancaster County hemp, plainly.
03:48The Colonial Beginning
03:50In 1683, the Pennsylvania General Assembly passed one of the first laws in the new colony.
03:58The law encouraged every farmer to grow hemp.
04:03This is verified in Pennsylvania colonial records.
04:06William Penn himself, two years later in 1685, wrote that hemp should be among the four staples of trade for
04:16the new colony.
04:17He had found hemp already growing in Pennsylvania when he arrived, planted by earlier Swedish and Dutch settlers.
04:26And he saw what it could become.
04:29By the 1720s, the Pennsylvania General Assembly began paying bounties for every pound of hemp produced fit for market.
04:39The bounties increased over time.
04:42The colonial government wanted hemp so badly that they were willing to subsidize the farmers who would grow it.
04:49This was not unusual.
04:52Hemp was a strategic crop in the 18th century British Empire.
04:57It made the ropes, the sails, the canvas, the grain bags, the soldier uniforms, the household linens, the paper that
05:07the entire colonial economy ran on.
05:09The farmers of the new Pennsylvania settlements responded to the bounties.
05:15Hemp went into the ground across Lancaster County, Chester County, Berks County, Lehigh County, and dozens more.
05:23By the late 1720s, certain townships were producing so much hemp that they became known as hemp-growing regions.
05:32Lancaster County was the most productive of them all.
05:35In 1729, the colony of Pennsylvania formally created the new county of Lancaster.
05:42And when the county boundaries were drawn, one township within them was named, plainly and directly, for the crop that
05:50had defined it.
05:52Hempfield Township.
05:53The name was chosen because of the vast quantities of hemp raised there.
05:58The official records of the county formation document this clearly.
06:02Hempfield Township became the original administrative unit of southern Lancaster County, including the lands now covered by East Hempfield, West
06:12Hempfield, Manor Township, the boroughs of Columbia, Mountville, and East Petersburg.
06:20The naming was not poetic.
06:22It was descriptive.
06:23The land grew hemp, the mills and the millstones.
06:27If you want to understand how much hemp Lancaster County was producing in the 18th century, look at what the
06:34county built to process it.
06:36Hempfield Township alone had multiple water-powered hemp processing mills by the 1730s.
06:44Throughout Lancaster County, between the years 1720 and 1870, historians have documented more than 100 water-powered mills that processed
06:54hemp fiber.
06:55That number comes from Les Stark, an Ephrata-born historian who has spent more than 20 years documenting the physical
07:03artifacts of the old Lancaster County hemp industry.
07:07His work is the most thorough survey of this history ever conducted.
07:11The hemp mills used a specific tool called a hemp stone.
07:15A cone-shaped millstone, weighing between 1,600 and 2,000 pounds, that rolled over harvested hemp stalks to break
07:25them apart and separate the fiber from the woody core.
07:28The hemp stone is unique in agricultural history.
07:32It was used almost exclusively for processing hemp.
07:36Les Stark has personally located and verified more than 30 hemp stones still surviving in Lancaster County, in museums, at
07:46the sites of old mills, and in private collections.
07:49You can still see hemp stones at the Landis Valley Museum near Lancaster today.
07:55Cone-shaped, two-ton stone wheels that rolled around a circular trough as oxen or water power turned them.
08:03The hemp stones are physical proof of an industry that processed millions of pounds of hemp fiber over 150 years
08:12of Lancaster County history.
08:14What hemp was used for?
08:16The hemp fiber processed at these Lancaster mills did not stay in Pennsylvania.
08:22It became the raw material for an extraordinary range of products used across early America.
08:28Ships used hemp more than any other single fiber.
08:31A single sailing ship of the era required between 60 and 100 tons of hemp fiber for its anchor cables,
08:40its rope rigging, and its sails.
08:43The cordage industry of the American colonies ran on Lancaster County hemp.
08:48Conestoga wagons, built and named in Lancaster County, used hemp canvas to cover their loads.
08:55Millions of bushels of grain moved across colonial America in hemp grain sacks made from Lancaster fiber.
09:03The household uses were equally widespread.
09:06Hemp linen was woven into curtains, tablecloths, handkerchiefs, napkins, pillowcases, sheets, towels, bedding.
09:15Clothing was made from hemp, trousers, belts, shirts, suspenders, shoes, hats, dresses.
09:24The Pennsylvania Dutch farm wives my own great-grandmother knew worked hemp fiber into household textiles that lasted for decades.
09:33Hemp oil was pressed from the seeds at oil mills throughout the county.
09:37The oil was used in household lamps, in soap making, in wood finishing, in cooking.
09:44The hemp meal left after pressing was fed to livestock.
09:48Hemp paper was a major product.
09:50Hemp fibers make paper that is stronger, brighter, and longer-lasting than wood pulp paper.
09:57Pennsylvania paper mills produced hemp paper for newspapers, books, legal documents, and currency.
10:04And the seeds themselves were food.
10:07Pennsylvania Dutch folks ate hemp seed in porridges and breads, fed it to chickens, used it as bird food.
10:14The plant was so versatile that it touched almost every part of daily farm life.
10:21The Founding Era Hemp Culture
10:23In 1794, the first President of the United States, George Washington, traveled to the small village of Paradise in Lancaster
10:33County.
10:34He visited a hemp mill there.
10:37The visit is documented in his personal papers.
10:41Washington was a hemp farmer himself at his Mount Vernon estate in Virginia.
10:46He came to Paradise looking for improved equipment to process the hemp he was growing back home.
10:53The President of the New Nation came to Lancaster County to study how the local hemp industry processed its crop
11:00better than his Virginia operation could.
11:03This is the depth of Lancaster County's hemp heritage.
11:08The President of the country came here to learn the methods.
11:12The cultural depth of hemp in Lancaster County is documented in places most folks have forgotten.
11:19The Ephrata Cloister, the famous German Pietist community founded in 1732, grew hemp on its grounds.
11:29Susanna Wright, the famous Lancaster County silk pioneer and businesswoman, grew hemp at her Wright's Ferry mansion.
11:36General Edward Hand, a Revolutionary War officer and physician, grew hemp at his Rockford plantation.
11:45These were not obscure figures.
11:48They were the cultural and economic leaders of Lancaster County in the colonial and early American era, and all of
11:55them grew the crop.
11:57Between the years 1681, when Pennsylvania was founded, and around 1840, when industrial cotton from the American South began to
12:06displace hemp in textile markets,
12:09the culture of hemp was, in the words of the Pennsylvania Hemp Industry Council, nearly universal in Pennsylvania.
12:16Almost every farm grew at least some hemp.
12:21Almost every household used hemp products daily.
12:25Almost every county had hemp mills.
12:28The 1818 Division and the Long Lancaster Tradition
12:33In 1818, Lancaster County divided the original Hempfield Township into East Hempfield and West Hempfield.
12:42The two township names survive today on every county map.
12:47Driving through Lancaster County in 2026, you pass through East Hempfield, West Hempfield, the village of Hempfield,
12:56and roads with names that all trace back to the same crop.
13:00Through the early and middle 19th century, Lancaster County continued to be a major American hemp producer.
13:08The Civil War era saw hemp cultivation slowly decline as cotton, jute imported from India, and steel cable replaced hemp
13:18in some markets.
13:19But Pennsylvania Dutch farmers, including the Amish families who had been farming the same Lancaster County land since the 1740s,
13:28continued growing hemp into the early 20th century.
13:32The plant remained part of the rotation.
13:35The mills remained in operation.
13:38The skills remained alive in the community.
13:41Before I walk through what happened in 1937 and what came after, let me pause for a moment.
13:48If your house is costing more than it should, you do not have to figure it out alone.
13:53Join our Amish home savings system and community.
13:58Esther and I answer questions inside, and members share what is working in their own homes.
14:04The link is in the description.
14:06Now, the 1937 Turning Point, the 80-Year Silence, and the Return.
14:13The 1937 Marijuana Tax Act
14:16On August 2nd, 1937, the United States Congress passed, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Marijuana Tax
14:26Act.
14:27This is the federal legislation that ended American hemp agriculture for the next 80 years.
14:34The verified text of the law is public record.
14:38I am going to be straight with you about what the law actually did,
14:42because most folks today understand this history through dramatic conspiracy framings that are not accurate.
14:49The Marijuana Tax Act did not technically prohibit hemp.
14:53What it did was impose a tax of $1 per ounce on every transaction involving any part of the cannabis
15:01plant.
15:01To grow, sell, transport, or process the plant legally,
15:05a farmer had to register with the federal government and pay the tax stamps.
15:10The registration was difficult.
15:12The paperwork was burdensome.
15:14The tax stamps were available in only a small handful of locations.
15:19The practical effect of the law was to make hemp agriculture so legally complicated
15:24that most American farmers simply stopped growing it.
15:28There is a real historical debate about why the law was passed.
15:33Some historians point to legitimate concerns about cannabis use in the period.
15:38Others point to economic interests in competing industries.
15:42The honest historical record shows multiple factors at work,
15:46not a single clean conspiracy of four men erasing a crop.
15:51What is verifiable, beyond debate, is the effect of the law.
15:55Within five years of August 1937, almost all American hemp cultivation had ended.
16:03Lancaster County hemp production effectively stopped.
16:07The mills closed.
16:08The hemp stones sat idle in their stone troughs.
16:12The skills started to fade.
16:15The 80-Year Silence
16:17From roughly 1942 through 2018, hemp was effectively absent from American agriculture.
16:25The Pennsylvania Dutch farmers of Lancaster County, including the Amish families whose grandparents
16:31had grown hemp for generations, switched to other crops.
16:35Tobacco became more important.
16:38Dairy expanded.
16:39Corn and soybeans entered the rotation.
16:42The hemp fields that had defined the county for 200 years went to other uses.
16:48The 80-year gap is a real historical fact.
16:52Almost no American farm grew hemp for eight decades.
16:57An entire generation of farmers, then a second generation, then a third,
17:02grew up without ever planting the crop their great-great-grandparents had grown without a thought.
17:08The knowledge of how to cultivate, harvest, process, and use hemp slowly thinned across America.
17:15By the 1990s, almost no American living farmer had hands-on experience with hemp agriculture.
17:23But the knowledge did not entirely disappear.
17:26In Lancaster County and other Pennsylvania Dutch agricultural communities,
17:31the old hemp tradition remained alive in the way most traditional farm knowledge is kept alive.
17:36Stories told by grandfathers.
17:39Old farm tools preserved in barns.
17:42Hemp stones recognized by their cone shape and noticed by historians like Les Stark.
17:49Family memories of when the hemp field mills were still grinding fiber.
17:53The plant was gone from the fields, but the memory of the plant was not entirely gone from the community.
18:00The 2018 Farm Bill and the Return.
18:03On December 20, 2018, President signed the Agricultural Improvement Act of 2018, commonly called the 2018 Farm Bill.
18:14This federal legislation made it legal once again to grow, process, transport, and sell industrial hemp anywhere in the United
18:23States.
18:24Industrial hemp was defined as cannabis sativa containing less than 0.3% THC by dry weight,
18:32which is the threshold below which the plant has no psychoactive effect.
18:37The 2018 Farm Bill ended 81 years of federal restriction.
18:43American farmers could grow hemp again, legally, the same way their great-great-grandparents had grown it.
18:49Pennsylvania quickly established a state hemp program.
18:53By 2019, the first legal Lancaster County hemp crop in 82 years went into the ground.
19:01Amish farmers in Lancaster County were among the earliest adopters.
19:05The traditional farming community that had grown hemp for over 200 years before the Prohibition
19:10was prepared to grow it again when the law changed.
19:14By 2023, Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture records showed Amish-operated hemp farms across multiple Lancaster County townships,
19:24producing CBD flour for the wellness market and hemp fiber for textile and paper applications.
19:31The crops are grown without synthetic fertilizers or pesticides on most Amish farms,
19:37processed using traditional horse-drawn equipment in many cases and sold to buyers nationwide who value the heritage farming methods.
19:46The plant that built the county for 200 years before 1937 is once again growing in the same fields on
19:54the same farms by the descendants of the same families.
19:59Now I want to take a moment because here is where it all comes together.
20:04Look at what we have walked through.
20:06300 years of Lancaster County hemp history, verified at every claim.
20:13The 1683 Founding Era Encouragement Law.
20:18The 1720s Pennsylvania Assembly Bounties.
20:21The 1729 founding of Hemp Field Township, named for the vast quantities of hemp raised there.
20:29The 100-plus water-powered hemp mills documented by historian Les Stark between 1720 and 1870.
20:39George Washington's 1794 visit to the Paradise Village Hemp Mill.
20:45The cultural depth at Ephrata Cloister and Wright's Ferry and Rockford Plantation.
20:51The 1818 Division into East and West Hemp Field.
20:56The nearly universal hemp culture across Pennsylvania from 1681 to 1840.
21:05The Civil War decline and slow displacement by cotton and imported jute.
21:11The 1937 Marijuana Tax Act that effectively ended American hemp cultivation.
21:18The 80-year silence.
21:21The 2018 Farm Bill that brought the crop back.
21:26And the Amish farmers in Lancaster County today, growing the same plant their great-great-great-grandfathers grew,
21:35on the same soil, in the same townships, that still bear the name Hemp Field.
21:42The honest economic story is plain.
21:46A single acre of hemp produces significant amounts of fiber, seed oil, food meal, and biomass.
21:55Through the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, Lancaster County hemp contributed measurably to the colonial and early American economy.
22:05A hemp farm in 1750 could provide a family with cash crop income, household textiles, household lamp oil, paper, soap,
22:18livestock feed,
22:19and even some human food from a single seasonal planting.
22:24The crop was so versatile that it filled multiple roles in the farm economy at once.
22:31That is what folks today miss when they think of hemp as just one crop competing against modern dollar-per
22:39-pound commodity prices.
22:41Lancaster County hemp was a whole-farm economic engine, producing many products from a single field.
22:49And the connection to gasoline is plainer than most folks realize.
22:55The Pennsylvania-Dutch farm economy that ran on hemp through the 18th and 19th centuries did not need foreign petroleum.
23:05Local fields produced the lamp oil, the rope, the canvas, the cloth, the paper, the soap, the seed feed.
23:14The local mills ground them.
23:16The local farms used them.
23:20The local economy circulated within a few miles of where the crop grew.
23:25A Lancaster County farm family in 1820 had a much smaller petroleum import footprint than a Lancaster County family in
23:352026,
23:37not because they had hidden technology or industrial fuel secrets, but because their fields produced what they needed.
23:45That is the deeper meaning of the plant that fuels their fields.
23:51Hemp fueled the Lancaster County farm economy for 200 years before any gas station existed.
23:59The fuel was not gasoline poured into engines.
24:03The fuel was economic, local, seasonal, and renewable.
24:08Grown from seed.
24:11Harvested by hand or horse.
24:15Processed in water-powered mills.
24:18Used by families who never traveled far enough from home to need an automobile in the first place.
24:25Tell me in the comments below.
24:28Did you know that Lancaster County had a township named Hempfield, and that the name still appears on every county
24:35map today?
24:37And if you live in a part of America with old place names tied to crops or industries that have
24:43since disappeared,
24:45share what you know about the history.
24:47The pickle factory town.
24:50The mill town.
24:51The rope walk village.
24:53The timber settlement.
24:55The little inherited histories are exactly the kind of knowledge that gets lost when nobody writes them down.
25:03I read every single one.
25:06Next video.
25:08Since today we covered the long agricultural history of Lancaster County,
25:13the next walks you through why Pennsylvania Dutch farm soil stayed rich for 300 years.
25:20The old crop rotation secret.
25:22The manure and ash and cover crop tradition.
25:26The way the careful old folks built soil instead of mining it.
25:30The same farming methods that grew the historic hemp fields are still at work today.
25:36Subscribe so you do not miss it.
25:38Until then.
25:39Drive through Lancaster County someday if you can.
25:43Look for the road signs.
25:44East Hempfield Township.
25:46West Hempfield Township.
25:48The Village of Hempfield.
25:50Every one of them named for a plant that grew here for 200 years, vanished for 80, and is now
25:58growing again in the same fields.
26:00The history is not in a textbook.
26:03It is in the place names, the museum hemp stones, the surviving water-powered mill foundations,
26:10the Pennsylvania Dutch farm families who never stopped remembering.
26:14That is how the careful old folks kept the story alive in any county that remembers.
26:20And I'll see you next time.
26:20For the sake of permission.
26:21village of
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