Muddy Pond Mennonite Community

Muddy Pond is a farming community in Overton County, near Monterey, where Mennonite families have lived since at least the early 1960s. The Mennonites around Monterey belong to what scholars call cultural communities, groups that define Christian discipleship partly by resisting parts of modern life, such as mass media and formal schooling beyond the eighth grade. Such groups drew families from Indiana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland and Ontario, looking for affordable land. One longtime resident, raised in Canada, remembers coming in 1963, when about a dozen families lived here, and clearing land with an axe and a handsaw.

What brings most visitors is sorghum. Families grow the cane, cut it by hand, press out the juice and boil it down to syrup, work done in the fall. Some presses now run on steam, and at one mill horses still walk the press. The syrup is sold at farm stores along the roads, along with baked goods, baking supplies and furniture made by residents.

This is a living community, not a museum. Shop at the stores, keep to the public road, and ask before photographing anyone. The pin marks the community, not a single shop, so ask locally for the mills that are open.