9 Pennsylvania Amish Country Stops Locals Recommend

Thousands of horses changed hands last year at a sales barn outside New Holland, and many of the people filling the bleachers were Amish or Mennonite farmers, not sightseers.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a brochure mentioning that stop.

These are the Pennsylvania Amish Country stops locals send each other to.

1. Leola Produce Auction

Leola Produce Auction runs like no stop many visitors think to add to a Pennsylvania Amish Country itinerary.

Garden centers, grocery buyers, and restaurant owners fill the lot on auction mornings, not sightseers.

The auction opened in 1985 as the first of its kind in Pennsylvania, built so local farmers could sell straight into bigger supply chains instead of hauling produce door to door.

No souvenir stand in sight.

Buyers drive in from as far as Maryland some mornings.

By early afternoon, the floor is nearly empty, and the buyers who cleared it are usually back again the following week.

2. Green Dragon Farmers Market & Auction

Green Dragon Farmers Market & Auction is a Pennsylvania Amish Country stop that runs one day a week, and the auction floor fills before the rest of the market wakes up.

Miss Friday. Wait a week.

Produce and livestock buyers claim the front rows by mid-morning, well before the food stalls and flea tables that pull in the rest of the crowd fill in.

The 30-acre market outside Ephrata has run every Friday since 1932, on ground that once held a Prohibition-era speakeasy.

USA Today readers voted Green Dragon the second-best farmers market in the country, beaten only by a market in West Palm Beach.

That ranking explains the food-stall crowd, not the buyers who were already there for the auction.

3. Root’s Country Market & Auction

Root’s Country Market & Auction only runs on Tuesdays, the same as it has since 1925.

The produce auction opens at 1 p.m., poultry and equipment follow by late afternoon, and more than 175 flea market vendors fill the rest of the lot.

Locals who grew up nearby know to come early for the produce and stay late for the flea market.

One day. Every week.

Show up looking for it on a Wednesday, and the lot sits empty.

4. New Holland Sales Stables

New Holland Sales Stables runs a Monday-morning livestock auction that many Amish and Mennonite farmers in the area have relied on for generations.

Not a photo op.

Last year’s tally topped 12,000 horses sold, alongside more than 160,000 cattle and over 200,000 sheep and goats.

A veterinarian checks every horse before it goes up for bid, and any animal that doesn’t pass gets sent home instead of sold.

Mennonite families have owned and run the stables since the 1970s.

5. Lapp Valley Farm

Lapp Valley Farm is a Pennsylvania Amish Country stop that makes its ice cream from its own herd, not a distributor’s.

The stand still runs like the working dairy it started as.

Ben Lapp opened the farm in 1975, and the milk that becomes the ice cream comes from the same Jersey cows that keep the rest of the operation running.

It’s made a mile away.

More than 17 flavors rotate through the case, and locals who grew up driving past the herd know the stand by the farm, not by a name on a highway sign.

An indoor play area keeps the counter busy on a rainy day, the one nod to the passing crowd that needs a reason to stop besides the ice cream.

6. Achenbach’s Pastries

Achenbach’s Pastries has sold Long John donuts out of Leola since 1954, and many locals still can’t drive past without pulling in.

The bakery built its name on Long Johns, sticky buns, and vanilla and pecan rings, the kind of pastry case that draws a line before many people finish their coffee.

Families who moved away from Lancaster County still stop in the moment they’re back in town.

Every single time.

7. Stoltzfus Meats

Stoltzfus Meats grew out of an Amish farm family’s tradition of butchering their own hogs, not a marketing plan.

Amos and Mary Stoltzfus started the business in 1954 at a farmer’s market in New Castle, Delaware, selling scrapple, bologna, and sausage made the way Amos’s own family always had.

The Intercourse shop didn’t open until 2009, 55 years later, and it still opens at 6 a.m. six days a week, an hour built for the errand crowd, not a lunchtime tour stop.

Their products have gone on to win awards in statewide and national competitions, using recipes that haven’t changed since Amos and Mary started them more than 70 years ago.

It’s straight off the farm.

8. Dienner’s Country Restaurant

Dienner’s Country Restaurant closes every Sunday, a detail regulars know and out-of-towners sometimes learn the hard way.

Check before you drive over.

The Ronks buffet runs breakfast, lunch, and dinner Monday through Saturday, piling on baked oatmeal, corn meal mush, and scrapple alongside the usual eggs and home fries.

Locals build their Saturday mornings around it, the same way other families build theirs around a ballgame.

9. Kauffman’s Fruit Farm

Kauffman’s Fruit Farm is a Pennsylvania Amish Country stop that’s stayed in the same family for five generations, since A.L. and Sue Kauffman planted the first trees in 1915.

The Bird-in-Hand orchard grows more than 100 varieties of tree fruit across roughly 100 acres.

A hundred years and counting.

Its cider is what draws locals back every fall.

The farm presses close to 400,000 gallons of it a year, and the jugs don’t last long once the first pressing’s out.

Mud Sales Fund the Fire Companies

Pennsylvania’s Amish Country runs one more event locals plan around that never makes a numbered list, the mud sale.

It’s named for the mud.

Late winter’s thaw is exactly what turns the ground to mud, and this year’s count listed 17 of them in Lancaster County alone, running from late February into August.