Archbold, a town with a population in 2007 of 4,483, is located in the southwest corner of Fulton County in northwestern Ohio. It is the center of a large (originally Amish) Mennonite settlement, extending eastward ten miles (16 km) to Wauseon, the county seat, and westward seven miles (11 km) to the town of Stryker in Williams County. The original settlers came from Alsace and Montbéliard in France during the 1830s.

In the 1950s, five congregations of the Mennonite Church (MC), with a total combined membership of 1,700 had meetinghouses in the vicinity of Archbold, but none in the town itself. The Evangelical Mennonite Church had two congregations with a combined membership of five hundred, one with a meetinghouse in Archbold, and the other in Wauseon. The Reformed Mennonite Church had a small congregation with a meetinghouse northeast of Archbold, and the Church of God in Christ, Mennonite also had a small congregation with a meetinghouse in the nearby village of Pettisville. Several of the congregations have mission outposts in suburban Toledo, forty miles (65 km) distant.

A unique feature of the Archbold community was the development of a number of small Mennonite industries which served to absorb the surplus farm labor, so that fewer of the members found it necessary to go to larger cities for employment. Among these industries in the 1950s were woodworking and furniture factories, a farm machinery factory, and a meat packing plant and livestock sales establishment.

Adapted by permission of Herald Press, Scottdale, Pennsylvania, and Waterloo, Ontario, from Mennonite Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, pp. 146. All rights reserved. For information on ordering the encyclopedia visit the Herald Press website.

©1996-2008 by the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. All rights reserved.

To cite this page: