Technology calls: Amish raise phone booths, too

Off the side of a dirt road in southern Maryland stands an odd answer to the swiftly changing telecommunications industry.

It's a rusted metal chamber, nearly 8 feet tall. The door is padlocked. Trees surround it, with no houses in sight. It looks like an old bomb shelter.

Inside is a telephone. Built by several nearby Mennonite families, the oil tank-turned-phone booth connects them to the rest of the world — sort of. And sort of — when it comes to the estimated 1,600 Old Order Mennonites and Amish who still ride horse-drawn buggies down the roads of St. Mary's County — is the point.

In the past several years, they have quietly erected at least 12 similarly hidden, private phone booths, building them behind barns, in the woods and, in one case, inside a former chicken coop.

The phone booths allow them to conduct business while holding on to prohibitions against home phone lines and cellphones. Called "community phones," they are the latest example of how the groups in Maryland and elsewhere have been cutting deals with technology for the past century.

It used to be that Old Order Mennonite and Amish families in St. Mary's relied on public, coin-operated pay phones. But as people migrated to cellphones, telecommunications companies took notice. On average, they remove more than 1,000 pay phones a year in Maryland, according to state records.

So the Amish and Mennonites are adapting.

"Business is business," said Elmer Brubacher, a Mennonite standing over a pallet of tomatoes at the Loveville Produce Auction, which he helps run. "If they have to pull them out, I understand that."

The new phones hold advantages. The Amish and Mennonites don't have to carry around fistfuls of quarters or buy calling cards. Families divide monthly bills. The phones are hidden, locked and — in the case of the metal booth, which was fashioned out of a tank salvaged from a junkyard — reinforced, so they are less likely to attract vandals and drug dealers.

There are rules. Families can't build the phone booths too close to homes, and they can't outfit them with amplified ringers that effectively would make them house phones. Some Amish don't cotton to voice mail, but Old Order Mennonites seem more accepting of the feature. For both groups, the idea is to limit forces they think will distract them from faith and family.

"The telephone, and the use of the telephone, is not something we're opposed to. We just don't want it to be the main part of our lives," said Ethan Brubacher, 31, a nephew of Elmer, who owns Quiet Valley Structures, a shed-building business.

He and 11 neighbors share a community phone booth that is screened off by an evergreen hedge.

Community phone calls can be sad: A 39-year-old Amish bishop walks a half-mile through the woods to call to check on his mother, who is in a Washington hospital with cancer.

The calls can be scary: A Mennonite races to the metal phone booth after a relative was bitten by a black widow spider.

And the calls can be funny: An Amish man, having accidentally locked himself inside his phone booth, cannot call any brethren because they aren't near phones. So he calls his veterinarian.

"I had to make an emergency farm visit," veterinarian Chris Runde recalled.

In Loveville, after a nearby public pay phone was taken away, Ethan Brubacher and other Mennonites wanted something to replace it. The shed builder offered to construct a shanty, outfitting it with vinyl siding, two windows and a shingled roof.

On a recent 95-degree afternoon, a young Mennonite farmer rode his bicycle up to the shanty. He declined to give his name, citing Old Order concerns about appearing boastful. He unlocked the door, went inside, took a seat on a barstool, picked up the black Radio Shack phone and called a farm-supply dealer. "That Manex fungicide, do you have that?" he asked, ticking off an order for delivery.

In the shanty, callers had pinned up a buggy-shop calendar, a business card for a taxi company, random doodles and phone numbers, including one for Floyd's Weather Station, a local forecasting service.

A short time later, Irvin Gehman rode up on a red 10-speed bike, wearing a straw hat, wire-rimmed glasses, a shirt, suspenders, jeans and solid black leather sneakers. He owns the buggy shop and lives nearby with his mother, wife, 10 kids and a son-in-law. Gehman used the phone a lot recently to check on medications for his mother.

"Nobody actually has a phone," he said of the compromise he and his neighbors struck. "But everyone has the convenience of having one they can use."