Across a Great Divide

"We in the Old Order community take no government money of any kind. . . . They couldn't understand this," said Wenger, a compact, thoughtful man who was wearing a black brimmed hat and suspenders one recent morning. The most conservative Mennonites refuse money like this, considering it undue entanglement with the government.

"In short words, they just upset everyone," Wenger said.

In other areas, the problem was even more basic: Officials had a hard time telling one group from another.

All Amish and Mennonite congregations trace their roots to Christian movements during the Protestant Reformation in Europe. They follow a faith that emphasizes modesty, simplicity and, in the case of Old Order sects, separation from the modern world.

But, beyond that, they're a religious kaleidoscope. Some groups hold to horses and buggies, and others live fully modern lives. Between these poles are untold gradations with only the subtlest clues to the differences.

In Western Maryland's Washington County, where some Mennonite families drive cars, state officials learned to use the bumpers as barometers. A shiny metal one indicated a more liberal family, which might be open to taking government aid. If the bumper had been replaced with a flat-black version, the state officials knew not to even bring it up.

"You wouldn't even discuss participation in a government program" in a black-bumper house, said Elmer Weibley, head of the county's soil-conservation district. "They kind of see that as, 'Aw, they're trying to get me.' "

In the Shenandoah Valley, the relationship between bureaucrats and Mennonites was helped by Phillips, the local outreach worker, whose co-workers joke that he could talk the ears off a cornstalk.

After that first tense encounter with Wenger, Phillips patiently lobbied farmers to put up fences around streams to keep cows from standing in the water and leaving their waste. Doing so, he said, would keep the water clean and might keep government regulators off their backs.

Slowly, about two dozen have made changes -- in most cases, paying the costs themselves. One farmer, Kenneth Heatwole, paid almost $150,000 for upgrades, including a system that collects manure and rainwater from the barnyard and stores it instead of letting it flow into nearby Silver Creek.

"Before when it would rain, that manure-y water would run off and run right into the stream here," Heatwole said, standing near a yard full of cud-chewing cattle. Now, "if you see that water there, that looks like it's clean enough to drink," he said. "Right down there. See all those little minnows down in there?"

Improvements have also been noticed downstream, in the formerly manure-laden Muddy Creek that started the whole mess. In 1998, it violated standards for fecal bacteria 91 percent of the time. By 2005, that was down to 44 percent, enough to be cited by the Environmental Protection Agency as a national success story.

Phillips is trying to improve the situation further, using private donations from the Chesapeake Bay Funders Network, a group of foundations, to pay for more fencing.

Wenger, the farmer who confronted him in 2004, has a fence up. He and Heatwole emphasized that they hadn't done more than any others in their community.

To him, Phillips's real success has not been explaining the government to the Mennonites but explaining the Mennonites to the government -- an odd and sometimes inexplicable tribe that finally seems to be listening to reason.

"He's got to go slowly and speak softly . . . to get them to see our side," Wenger said. "And it's happening, slowly."