When the power grid goes down: Survivalists seek out hardware store that serves Amish Country.

• Author: Kaelble, Steve
• Position: Opener - Yoder's Shipshewana Hardware - Brief Article

Pull into the lot at Yoder's Shipshewana Hardware and, at first glance, it seems about like any other independent, small-town hardware store: some 14,000 square feet, tucked into a little shopping plaza, an affiliate of Fort Wayne-based Do It Best Corp. like a lot of Indiana's Mom and Pop hardware stores, a place where one can find everything from a lockwasher to a washboard.

Washboard? Yep. Right by the square-sided washtubs, and not far from the shelves displaying oil lamps and hand-cranked grain mills. Maybe this isn't such a run-of-the-mill little hardware store you've wandered into... come to think of it, those were hitching racks Out front, with horses tied to them and buggies behind.

Yes, it's 2002, and Yoder's does sell power tools and light bulbs and those bright orange adapters that let you plug your microwave into a non-grounded outlet. But this is Amish County, and a lot of Yoder's customers aren't customers of the local power company. Hence the need for human-powered water pumps, kitchen ranges fueled by wood, hand-cranked meat grinders and a variety of cast-iron and ceramic cookware.

"We didn't know we were doing anything different," says Winford Jones, the store's manager. "I don't think of my merchandise as unique because I see it every day."

But different it is, different enough to attract a clientele from far beyond Amish Country. It seems that somehow--Jones says he has no idea how--word about Yoder's reached the survivalist community on the Internet. The store developed a national reputation as a place to find hard-to-get items that would be awfully handy should the modern world suddenly lose some of its modernity.

Under normal circumstances there aren't that many people who worry about such things, but Y2K brought out survivalist leanings in a lot of otherwise rational people. Back in...