GOOD NEIGHBORS

ONE EVENING A FEW YEARS ago, Kristin Kimball was looking out the window of her farmhouse in Essex. She saw a group of men in the driveway wearing plain blue shirts, suspenders and straw hats. They were Amish farmers, hoping to find a place to sleep, and she invited them in.

“I thought we knew them,” she recalled. “They kind of dress alike and we farm with horses, like they do. I thought we had already met through that world.”

It turned out to be a misunderstanding. The travelers were strangers, part of a settlement of roughly 3,000 Amish that’s been growing in St. Lawrence County just north of the Adirondack Park since the 1970s. They had come to the Champlain Valley on a mission.

“They were looking for land to start a new community across the lake in Vermont and they had come back on the ferry,” Kimball said.

It’s not often you can pinpoint a single moment that changes the texture of a community. But that accidental encounter in 2015 turned out to be pivotal. Kristin and her husband, Mark, encouraged the men to forget about settling in Vermont and search instead for farms to buy here in the Adirondack foothills.

“We thought it would be a win-win,” said Mark Kimball. “A lot of the mid-sized and smaller farms and dairies had gone out of business. The arrival of the Swartzentruber Amish was a chance to re-inhabit