How Amish ironworkers in Chester County adapt to modern technology without breaking their religious norms

From their high-ceiling shed at Compass Ironworks in Chester County, owner Amos Glick and his staff of mostly fellow Amish workers have supplied increasingly sophisticated stairs, gates, estate-style fences, bulletproof barriers, and other metalwork for East Coast Shore homes, resort hotels, city offices, private schools, and other clients.

Plain church leaders and scholars such as Donald Kraybill, author of The Riddle of Amish Culture, have long noted how prosperity and business needs can complicate guidelines based on church teachings, family values, and community self-reliance once centered on farm work.

But as its metalwork has become more intricate, Compass’ operating systems have become more efficient, thanks to improved batteries and related technologies that find a ready market among Plain business owners, despite communities that still oppose dependence on public utilities and other large, secular networks.

“What sets us apart is that, as a culture, some worldly conveniences are not OK,” Glick said. “So we need to adapt.”

He cited the example of a computerized “Hebo,” a German-built wrought-iron-twisting machine. “We make it work off a battery and hydraulics,” adding gears and weights that cut down on repetitive processes, he said.

This adaptability feeds innovation and ingenuity, Glick said. For example, the team recently built an axis of rods and trusses, threaded it through an eight-foot-wide spiral staircase, and corkscrewed the assembly through a six-foot doorway to turn into its tight-fitting place without having to cut apart the walls — or the staircase.

“I wish I could take credit,” he said, but it’s his mostly Amish crew that thinks and acts in terms of “exceptional solutions.”

Ten years ago, the fabrication shop on the Glicks’ family farm housed a collection of repurposed forging, shaping, stamping, testing, and cutting stations whose wires had been removed so they could be powered variously by small solar arrays, vehicle batteries, springs, and burners that could run on cooking oil, and other handmade or community-built energy sources.

It was the kind of homemade industry familiar to generations of family farmers.

More recently, Glick has invested profits, augmented by loans from Lancaster-based Fulton Bank, into these basic improvements:

“It really was a challenge for us,” Glick said. “But cordless tools have been developing, and Plain communities have been a very important part of that.”

He cited the “very progressive” example of Amish-owned MillerTech Energy Solutions in Middlefield, Ohio, a designer and developer of lithium-battery systems, chargers, tools, and LED networks. The company advertises itself as a “faith-based, family business” whose owner, Lester Miller, seeks to operate “in a way that brings glory to God.”

“We work in iron and steel, solid brass, bronze, and aluminum. We’ve messed a little in titanium, too,” said Glick, who learned his trade at the Pequea farm-equipment foundry in nearby Lancaster County, the historic cradle of Amish communities in the United States.

Clients want seamless work, he said. Pieces can be hammered smooth, shaped like pottery, or fitted like carpentry before they are heat-treated and finished.

Glick takes inspiration from plans and work left by seminal Philadelphia metalworker Samuel Yellin and prolific but lesser-known Italian artists whose ornate fences and window work Compass has updated.

“LEDs are bright, and they take less energy. You can run them off batteries,” Glick said on a tour of the shop after the daily 6 a.m. “shape-up” meeting at which the workers take turns reviewing the day’s jobs.

They may have shifted power sources, but they haven’t thrown out time-tested tools.

Compass workers still “jig” metal patterns on solid German-built Siegmund grid table tops set into home-welded custom tool benches. They switched a power hammer, built to run on steam engine pressure, to run on compressed air.

A scroll bender has been refitted with hydraulics and a battery-powered operating system. An end forger, enhanced by Compass workers with a larger gearbox and a flywheel, can heat aluminum bars for shaping in a single pass, not the three heatings it required when it was new from the manufacturer.

“Americans are smart. But we lean on Europe for a lot of machines” that aren’t currently made in the U.S., Glick said.

Small signs around the shop carry a message reinforcing that machines were built and are maintained by Compass and its people. Glick said the signs are, in part, a reaction to President Barack Obama’s widely reported 2012 comment that business owners “didn’t build” their companies alone because they relied on national infrastructure. “Our culture does not rely on government assistance,” he said.

The ironworks sits just down a short hillside from the stone-fronted home, behind garden rows of vegetables, that Glick constructed for his wife and seven children, including two sons who work with him.

Across the parking lot is a former family house converted into a horse stable. Along the state highway and across the truck lot from the ironworks is a coffee shop operated by tenants. Glick says he would “highly recommend the breakfast sandwiches,” well-stuffed for people starting a long day’s work.

Shaping metal is only part of the job.

Stairways in particular can require careful handling to fit into place. They might be stored lying flat on the ground — “all catawampus,” Glick said — but when lifted for installation, they have to be carefully attached to a crane, “plumb-level square,” with due consideration for the weight under stress, so the metal won’t buckle.

“It’s really like a piece of sculpture,” said Glick, who also makes miniature metal-tree sculptures and other art to donate to an annual sale in support of a clinic operated by University of Pennsylvania doctors who specialize in genetic conditions Amish families face.

All that fitting in tight places makes for what Glick calls “careful geometry.”

The math calculations are done by Benjamin Esh, an Amish member of the crew who, Glick said, “can do anything with numbers.”

“Just gimme a calculator,” Esh said, reviewing notes.

“He’s got an eighth-grade Amish education — and that’s good enough for a trigonometry professor,“ Glick said, smiling.