They went to the bathroom in buckets.

When the Delagrange family moved to Lenawee county, Michigan, in 2015, they refused to use modern toilets. For religious reasons, they used an outhouse.

Every couple of days, once the container became about half full, someone in the family would remove the 5-gallon pail from their handbuilt outdoor privy and combine the waste with animal manure. The mixture would then get treated with lime and spread on to pastures, where horses and cattle grazed.

This was all very normal for the Amish family, who are farmers.

Henry Delagrange, the 74-year-old patriarch and bishop of the community, had lived this way for decades in neighboring Hillsdale county. When he and his sons moved to Lenawee in search of more land, they brought those practices with them – along with a commitment to avoid what he calls “the lush of the world”: phones, electricity and septic systems.

Soon, about a dozen other Old Order families – the most conservative of the Amish community – joined them to help form a new settlement.

At first, the relocation to Lenawee county seemed to be going well. The Delagranges, who lived near one another on different properties, became friendly with their neighbors. Melvin, one of the Delagrange sons, noticed one man in particular began stopping by his house often. “We thought he was going to be one of the nicest neighbors ever,” said Melvin.

One day, they received a knock on the door from the county health department, who showed up to inquire about their excrement. Where did their waste go? Their gray water?

The Delagrange family understood that someone must have reported them.

Indeed, the health department had received what one officer called “a large number of complaints” about the Amish. Cindy Merritt, the health code inspector, paid a visit to Melvin’s property and documented the offending outhouse. The county’s health code requires homes to have septic systems and prohibits sewage from being “discharged or deposited upon the surface of the ground”. Furthermore, the families hadn’t applied for a sewage and water system permit.

As Joseph Graber, an Amish man who moved to Lenawee, later explained in a deposition: “God knew that man was going to have feces and he made soil to absorb that.”

The department gave them seven days to comply but, after some back and forth, Melvin and his wife, Rosemary, refused.

“From there, it just went on,” said Melvin. “And kept getting serious.”

The Amish population doubles every 20 years. With large families and most people choosing to stay in the faith, this is not surprising. Henry, for instance, has 80 grandchildren and 20 great-grandchildren.

The broader numbers reflect this growth. About 40 years ago, roughly 90,000 Amish lived in the US; today, the population exceeds 410,000. Over the past five years, at least 70 new Amish settlements have formed across the United States, from Maine to Montana. In Kentucky alone, the population swelled from 2,000 in 1992 to almost 16,000 last year.

Much of this migration is the response to a booming population growth, as families like the Delagranges seek more land. Some also want to escape overcrowding. In a couple of instances, the introduction of cellphones and other modernities have driven families to look towards quieter pastures and to raise their children in a more traditional lifestyle.

The Old Order subsect, the most conservative, is said to be growing the most – not just in the US but everywhere. According to Mark Louden, a professor of Germanic linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, no other human population is growing faster than the Old Order Amish in North America.

This has made them visible to more rural communities, some of which are encountering them for the first time.

In some places, such as Whitefield, Maine, the newcomers have been a welcome addition to help revitalize agricultural communities. It’s also not unusual for rural residents to admire their work ethic. “They take pride in what they do,” said Whitefield resident Robin Chase, who sold her farm to an Amish family. “They show up, they don’t call in sick, they don’t say they have a headache and ‘I have to go home.’”

But elsewhere, a clash of cultures has resulted in spats over manure, buggy safety and road damage.

In 2017, 13 Amish men in Auburn, Kentucky, were cited for violating an ordinance that required them to use a “collection device” to catch their horse’s waste. This same issue led a township in Pennsylvania two years later to also consider whether to require Amish horses to wear diapers. The year prior in Ohio, a drunk driver hit a buggy and killed a 23-year-old Amish woman.

Delbert Shtetler, an Amish man who began a new settlement in West Virginia in 2022, said his community discussed whether or not to have dog kennels similar to ones in the large Amish community in Holmes county, Ohio, which he said sometimes breed a couple hundred dogs and sell the puppies to pet stores. Due to their sheer size, he said some people call them puppy mills. (Some animal advocates have uncovered poor and abusive treatment by Amish breeders.) The new settlement decided against the kennels so as not to upset the neighbors. “Not everybody is happy to see us show up,” he said.

Perhaps nowhere have these tensions been more visible, though, than with a slate of lawsuits over the use of outhouses instead of flush toilets. Over the past several years, health departments in Ohio and Indiana also sued Amish families for public health violations and condemned their homes.

In Fillmore county, Minnesota, a long-running dispute over Amish gray water (from sinks and laundry, but not toilets) led the state court of appeals to rule that septic systems were not required in 2023 – a decision now back under review after reaching the US supreme court.

These cases pit post-pandemic public health fears against religious freedom – a defense the Amish have long invoked.

“Sometimes to me it seems like a valid argument,” said Erik Wesner, a chronicler of the Amish for his website, Amish America, about freedom of religion. “And in other cases, it seems like it’s stretching a bit.”

On a sunny Saturday in September, with the leaves just starting to change, I turned off a Michigan country road and pulled into Melvin’s circular driveway. In the middle, two horses stood beside their buggies near a barn full of hay. From somewhere inside the house, I heard a baby crying.

Henry, who lives with Melvin, creaked open the back door. “You’re the lady that wants information,” he said. “I’ll get my hat.”

Getting to this point had been an arduous process. About a year prior, I began arranging calls with the family through their driver, whose phone number I had been given by one of the Delagranges’ lawyers.

Initially this tactic worked, albeit slowly. The driver, a local man named Frank Storrs, who is not Amish, would ask me what times I was available and then go over to Melvin’s house so that they could speak to me using Frank’s phone. At some point, though, I stopped hearing from Frank for a long period. The lawyer then gave me the number of a neighbor, where I left messages for Melvin. No one ever picked up the line, but some time afterwards I would receive a call from Melvin, which I tried very hard not to miss.

After Henry fetched his hat, he got in the passenger seat of my rental and I drove us two miles along the country road to Amos’s house. I had been under the presumption that we would take the horse and buggy, but Henry said it was too far. They aren’t against other people driving them to certain places, like the grocery store. Frank told me he’s driven the family to weddings and funerals, once going as far as Pennsylvania.

We walked into the barn right as the 10am break was under way. Amos, one of Henry’s nine children, sat at the head of a long wooden table holding a giant bowl of cookies. Melvin was at the table as well. A dozen or so heads of young children turned to look at us. The family was using the space, which will eventually be a horse and buggy garage, to cook and gather while the main house was under construction. A cluster of rocking chairs occupied one half of the barn and a makeshift kitchen with a potbelly stove the other.

Soon the children scattered outside while several women in long dresses and bonnets stayed behind to sweep, iron (with an iron made of actual iron) and transfer a large batch of raw chicken breasts to the burner.

Amos, Melvin, Henry and I gathered around the table to talk. They were wearing their handmade “everyday” clothes of white button-down shirts and navy trousers. Both Melvin and Amos have jet-black hair, Amos’s cut blunt across his forehead and Melvin’s more shaggy. Henry was balding on top though he maintained a long beard the color of straw.

The case had spanned almost a decade of their lives. They told me they believed “the instigator” was a neighbor whose grandchild was installing a septic system for $7,500. The neighbor, they told me, couldn’t understand why the Amish weren’t held to the same standards.

A local named Stephanie Dominique did write to the health department that she was frustrated she had to install a $15,000 system while others didn’t. She also questioned the religious exemption argument “because I have researched this online, and other communities still required Amish people to utilize septic systems”. Similarly, the county lawyer in the Indiana case once said: “It’s all about money” to explain why the Amish didn’t want to pay for a hook-up.

But to Melvin, “it’s not the cost that we don’t live that way”, he said, referring to the reason they forgo modern amenities. “It’s our religion.”

They moved to tear the homes down.

In 2019, four years after the first complaint, the health department sued every Amish family in Lenawee county and asked the court permission to demolish their homes. The health department put up signs on their doors that said: “Unfit for human habitation.” Bridge Michigan, a local outlet, dubbed the situation the “poop dispute”.

Later, a now retired health officer named Martha Hall testified in a deposition that she didn’t have any evidence of contamination but that the county hadn’t ever before allowed a privy on a private residence – a “longstanding policy” but not, technically, a violation of the code. Ultimately, they wanted the Amish to comply and to hire licensed septic haulers to manage the privies. (The department declined to comment for this story.)

In turn, the Amish families sued the department for violating the “free exercise” clause in the constitution, the Fair Housing Act, and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. The latter, RLUIPA, had also been the basis for a similar case in Sugar Grove, Pennsylvania, in which the Department of Justice alleged the township was in violation. “No one should have to choose between keeping their home,” said Troy Rivetti, the acting attorney for the western district of Pennsylvania, “or practicing their faith.”

Obtaining lawyers and participating in the legal system typically goes against Amish belief. But the Delagrange family heard about a lawyer – “a friend of the Amish” – who had represented others in almost the exact same cases for free.

Rick Schulte, a mass tort lawyer in Ohio most known for securing a $41m settlement for Ohio State University athletes who were sexually abused by the team doctor, became aware of these cases about a decade ago. A local tradesman had called him up one day and said: “Listen, these Amish folks are in trouble, Rick.”

The health department in Shelby county, Ohio, was readying to seize their homes. As Schulte dug in, he discovered what he considered to be an abuse of power against a religious minority happening not just in Shelby county, but in Indiana and elsewhere. “I didn’t know this was a national problem,” said Schulte.

Feeling called to intervene, Schulte soon became well-known in the Amish community for successfully arguing on behalf of his clients. In Indiana, he claimed his private investigator was routinely pulled over by the cops. In Ohio, “[the county] terrorized the place with local police to the point where Amish women were hiding and crying”. During one mediation with the health department, Schulte taunted officials with Amish-made cinnamon buns.

In Michigan, however, “the degree of hate” was “probably at a higher level than Indiana and rivaled Ohio”, said Schulte. Melvin said it had reached a point where the threat of child removal was used. “We were stressed out for three or four years,” he said.

Together, Schulte and the ACLU countersued the department in 2019 for, as a press release by the ACLU states, “in effect expelling an entire faith community from its borders”.

The county had been arguing that since the complaints in 2015, they had tried to reason with the Delagranges and other families, but because the Amish families refused to budge and install septic systems, their only choice was to evict. On the flip side, the Delagrange family told me they had come up with compromises that the department declined.

“Like everything in life, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle,” said Stephen Behnke, Schulte’s law partner. “I think the Amish can be kind of difficult, because left to their own devices, they don’t want to deal with the English.” At the same time, he believes health departments “aren’t used to pushback and they don’t like it when they get it”.

For the Delagrange family, the intervention of Schulte and Behnke was a godsend. “We didn’t know which way to turn,” said Melvin.

According to the family, the legal pair would fly down to Lenawee county in a private plane to meet with them.

The lawsuit that came together included depositions spanning a gamut of topics, from questions about pH levels to explanations of the Amish faith. Richard Stehouwer, a soil scientist, was asked by the Amish lawyers to assess the risks of their spreading septage to the land. He concluded that the 300 gallons of latrine waste they produced a year was “trivial” compared with the 30,000 gallons spread per acre on the region’s large corn farms.

But much of the line of questioning during the depositions focused on the confusion, mainly by the health department’s lawyers, over what constitutes modernism to the Amish families. For instance, why could Joseph Graber, another Lenawee man being sued, use a gas motor for washing dishes but not pump into a toilet system and let the water run out?

“Because it’s modernism,” said Joseph, evoking a refrain that was repeated throughout the case as a blanket term of explanation.

The Delagrange family tries to stay away from phones but allows them in case of emergencies or for business dealings, like ordering animal feed and talking to their lawyers. I was similarly confused about where they decide to draw the line. When I asked Henry, he said, “We don’t want to be famous with it.”

The rules differ among Amish communities and are dictated by each group’s specific Ordnung, a rulebook that addresses such specifics as clothing style, house design, education, and which advances — such as milk tanks — should be permitted. Louden, the UW-Madison professor, described Ordnungs as “familiar codes of dos and don’ts.” The Ordnung the Lenawee County Amish use is from 1960, was written by Graber’s great uncle, and is considered to be a higher authority than the health code.

As the community’s bishop, Henry meets with other church leaders to decide what’s permissible – and using septic systems is not. Which isn’t to say a Lenawee county Amish family couldn’t install one (in fact, the rules against septic systems aren’t explicitly stated in their Ordnung). But, as Henry explained to one lawyer, if someone decides to use one “then they’re shunned from our churches”.

Throughout the case, the fact that each Amish settlement operates differently became a touch point. Matt Smith, the supervisor for Hudson township, also in Lenawee County, wrote in an affidavit that the health code officer Martha Hall, “didn’t seem to understand, or didn’t want to understand, that not all Amish communities are the same, even if they live relatively close to each other”.

“That Martha Hall was a rough lady,” said Henry. “She wasn’t going to bend.”

(Stan Sala, the lawyer who represented the county at one point, said he would reach out to Hall but didn’t follow up. In an interview about the case and use of privies, he said, “She wanted it stopped.”)

Louden said that courts often have a difficult time grasping the idea of the Ordnung and its variances. “I’ve heard judges also say: ‘But wait, there are Amish people two counties over doing something different,’” he said.

There’s also been confusion over how the Amish decide to update the Ordnung. At one point in the Michigan case, the county’s lawyers asked Lewis Legenacher, another Amish man being sued: “So you make the rules up as you go?”

Legenacher replied that they change the rules “if it jibes in God’s ways”.

At the same time, said Louden, the Ordnung is pertinent to the freedom of religion argument. In one of the most well-known supreme court cases involving Old Order Amish, Wisconsin v Yoder, the court ruled in 1972 that it was a first amendment violation for the state of Wisconsin to force Amish children to attend school past eighth grade, a tradition outlined in the Ordnung. The majority opinion stated: “Amish objection to formal education beyond the eighth grade is firmly grounded in these central religious concepts.” Similarly to what’s happening today, the case arose after some Amish families migrated from Iowa and clashed with the authorities in their new state over compulsory attendance laws.

But this also doesn’t mean that anything goes. As Richard Foltin, the religious freedom fellow at the Freedom Forum explained: “Just because you believe in child sacrifice, doesn’t mean you get to go around sacrificing children.”

More recently, this argument has been on display in a high-profile dispute involving an Amish farmer named Amos Miller, who’s been in hot water with local Pennsylvania authorities over selling unpasteurized milk without a permit (other Amish farmers obtain permits).

Miller’s products were linked to a listeria outbreak in 2015 after one person died. He’s now a poster child for the “food freedom” movement touted by Robert F Kennedy Jr and other conservatives. One headline even called him a “Maga icon”.

Yet Wesner, the Amish America writer, explained that underneath the wholesome product narrative, there’s a financial incentive. “The permit the state issues doesn’t cover certain products he sells,” he said. “So that’s the reason he’s going around and they’re framing this as a religious freedom case.”

Though the case hasn’t brought in the Ordnung, it did serve to stir up sympathy for the Amish, whom Wesner explained are often seen by the public as “the little guy”.

After we chatted in the barn, I asked the Delagrange men to show me the outhouse. By that time, the sun had moved across the sky and darkened the barn. The aroma of sizzling chicken filled the room. We moved outside into the daylight and walked a few paces away.

The outhouse on Amos’s property stands just outside the main house in the front yard, next to a small garden with hoes propped against a fence. It’s a handmade wooden structure with white vinyl siding, much the same as it looked before they reached a settlement in 2023. The construction was easy for them. “A little privy is not much,” said Henry.

Except that now, underneath the structure there’s a sealed, 500-gallon holding tank to catch the waste – in essence, a vault toilet. The family is required to empty it intermittently and to pay a $75 annual permit fee. They can still spread the waste on their land so long as they test the septage with pH strips. The Amish were also allowed to continue with other practices that arose during the case, such as their use of wells.

In fact, the Amish have prevailed in the other privy cases or at least come to an agreement on how to keep their outhouses and spread their waste. In Indiana, the sewer district created an exemption, and in Ohio, the privies had to adhere to certain constructions.

The outcome seemed to mostly please all sides, though Stehouwer, the soil scientist, reasoned some aspects might have been overkill. Pam Taylor, a vocal activist with the Environmentally Concerned Citizens of South Central Michigan, told the Toledo Blade: “This is a good settlement.” The group had been outspoken about their support for the health department and opposition to any sort of pollution to groundwater, despite no evidence of such in the case.

Stephanie Dominique, the local who complained, wrote in an email that she had had initial concerns, but said: “I’m happy that a solution was found between the parties that fits within their religious beliefs and prevents untreated human waste from potentially polluting the ground.”

For now, Melvin and his family will continue to use outdoor toilets, just as God intended.