David Duprey / AP

Amish women ride in a buggy on their way home from shopping in an Amish country store in Centerville, N.Y. Centerville, a town south of Buffalo, has an established Amish community. Longstanding Amish population centers in Pennsylvania and Ohio have lost families while Amish numbers in New York have boomed in the past two years, according to a new study by Elizabethtown College researchers.

Amish communities booming in western New York State

By Rich Shulman

The long lens foreshortening (and some planning) really make this photo.

As AP reported:

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Affordable rural farmland and proximity to traditional population centers are driving a recent boomlet in new Amish colonies in New York state, according to a study by Elizabethtown College researchers.

The Amish, many of them from Ohio or Pennsylvania, have established 10 new settlements in New York since the start of 2010 — growth that doubles any other state. Total population there has grown by nearly a third in the past two years, to 13,000.

The first Amish districts in New York were established in the Conewango Valley in 1949, but in-migration amounted to a trickle until about a decade ago. As recently as 1991, there were just 3,900 Amish in the state.

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