Back home in Indiana : Old-fashioned values prevail in a land where horse-drawn buggies hurry along country lanes, village stores feature homemade quilts and jams, and cornfields reach out to the horizon

Soon winter will dust the land with snow and the tourist will be gone, but presently, pumpkins ripen on the vine across northern Indiana’s Amish country, signaling harvest time and a season of good cheer.

Horse-drawn buggies hurry along country lanes, and signs in old-fashioned stores tell of quilt sales and hand-crafted dolls. Roadside stands shelter garden-fresh corn, fruits, eggs, apple butter and other farm produce.

In Indiana’s Amish communities, visitors photograph the horse-and-buggy world of a religious sect that shuns the automobile, the telephone, TV and other material possessions venerated by a nation that, in the eyes of the Amish, travels a self-indulgent path strewn with eroding moral values.

Amish elders study the Bible of an evening by the light of a hissing kerosene lamp while their wives fashion carpets from rags and brooms from corn straw.

This isn’t to say that all Amish practice abstinence. As a 19-year-old, Mel Riegsecker lusted for a ’56 Chevy, which got him excommunicated from the Amish fold and delivered into the arms of the Mennonites, a more liberal order that permits one to sport fancy cars and enjoy the benefits of electricity.

Along the way, Riegsecker also got rich.

In the storybook village of Shipshewana, surrounded by great Amish farms, Riegsecker operates the Crafts Barn, the Antique Mall, a sweet shop, the Old World Copper Smith Shed, a glass studio and other tourist-oriented enterprises that fan out from his Blue Gate Restaurant & Bakery, where Riegsecker features Amish and Mennonite country-style meals.

Mel makes it easy for his guests to spend up a storm, inviting them to browse in his shops until a table is ready and they’re paged over a speaker system connected to the stores.

For a one-time unsophisticated Amish lad with cow dung on his boots and hay in his hair, Mel Riegsecker, 49, is harvesting a fortune as Shipshewana’s leading entrepreneur.

Vagabonds settling for a spell in Shipshewana stroll down Main and Middlebury and Depot streets, listening to the creaking of buggy wheels and inhaling the fragrance of fresh-baked bread, sticky buns, peanut-butter bars, cinnamon rolls and cream cheese brownies turned out at a shop behind Morton’s Bed & Breakfast, a two-story white frame with black shutters, antique beds and a porch where guests gather as darkness falls and a chorus of crickets is heard near an old mulberry tree.

Other wayfarers stop for a spell at the Davis Hotel (circa 1891) and Green Meadow, a 20-acre Amish farm with horses and goats and roosters that sound reveille of a morning for guests who repose in brass and four-poster beds, their rooms facing a garden crowded with roses and hollyhocks, along with maples whose leaves are turning with the first frosts of autumn.

Quilts, rag dolls and stuffed animals share the parlor at Green Meadow, and breakfast is served on a porch strewn with antique wicker furniture. House rules forbid smoking and alcohol. And this being Amish country, guests must do without the Cosby Show and Roseanne, simply because there is no TV. Instead, guests read and play checkers and stroll through the garden.

At Shipshewana, thousands of head of cattle are sold year-round in one of the nation’s largest auctions, and an indoor flea market draws hundreds of vendors from towns throughout Indiana each Tuesday and Wednesday, May to November.

In this bucolic corner of northern Indiana, buggies belonging to the Old Order Amish race along country lanes to join cars at traffic lights in villages strung from Shipshewana to Elkhart and Goshen. These are the Plain People, and they are particularly visible on market day as they load buggies with garden-fresh vegetables, smoked meats, turkey sausage, eggs, fruits and other fresh produce.

Shipshewana is true Amish country, where marriage is forever and divorce is unspeakable. The Amish plow the earth in the old-fashioned way, with horses, and whitewashed barns and silos and endless miles of corn and alfalfa reach out to the horizon.

Particularly on weekends, tourists by the hundreds turn out to watch Amish buggies roll into Shipshewana. Stores display homemade quilts, afghans, sun bonnets and patchwork pillows.

Indiana’s Amish country is famous for its country restaurants with their all-you-can-eat, family-style meals. At Mel Riegsecker’s Blue Gate restaurant, waitresses in Amish bonnets with beepers strapped to their belts load tables with chicken, ham, potatoes, homemade dressing and gravy, garden-fresh vegetables, tossed salad, bread, apple butter, ice cream, date pudding and shoofly pie. The family physician would wince at the cholesterol count. Still, the meal’s a steal at $8.75.

A few miles away in the village of Middlebury, as many as 3,000 guests gather daily at the country inn called Das Dutchman Essenhaus. Housed in a huge barn, the restaurant turns out hearty meals that draw diners from as far away as Ohio and Michigan.

In one corner, an Amish buggy serves as a private dining room and a bakery prepares oven-fresh bread, English muffins and dozens of kinds of pies. Waitresses deliver country-fried chicken, ham, roast beef, sweet corn, peas, green beans and potatoes with whipped butter and ladled with gravy.

The cholesterol count climbs. Indeed, it simply skyrockets.

Besides meals, Das Dutchman Essenhaus lets rooms in a rambling white-frame Amish farmhouse that faces a pond, a meadow and a country lane along which guests are delivered on carriage rides. Quilts hang from the walls, and furniture created by Amish craftsmen makes for an atmosphere of old-fashioned country goodness.

Ten miles west of Shipshewana, John and Susan Graff’s Checkerberry Inn at Goshen has been nominated one of the 10 best inns in America by a national newsletter. Facing a country lane and miles of cornfields, the Checkerberry is impossible to fault. The Graffs spent months at inns in Europe, gathering ideas for the Checkerberry.

Set on their 100-acre farm, it is an inn for all seasons--a three-story frame lodging with a wide front porch and wicker chairs for studying the pasture with its shocks of wheat and buggies that pass en route to Goshen. Dairy cattle graze nearby, and deer and duck farms face millponds that reflect a cornflower sky.

Stepping inside the Checkerberry is like entering a French country inn. A dozen rooms named for flowers are fashioned after the B&Bs; studied by the Graffs during their European tour. Old World antiques are scattered throughout guest rooms, and there’s an Amish touch as well, what with straw hats strung from pegs above the beds.

Each guest room is equipped with a chaise, where guests repose with a book, or else catch a nap while awaiting the serving of afternoon tea in the library. For actives, there’s a swimming pool just out the door as well as Indiana’s finest croquet green.

Set back from the road, the Checkerberry provides a serenity that attracts guests from California to Connecticut, as well as others from overseas. With a dining room second to none in northern Indiana, the Checkerberry features country French cuisine, farm-fresh produce, meats and herbs.

The menu lists duck served with a spice pear sauce, beef peppercorn, rack of lamb, veal with roast and chicken prepared with a shallot sauce--four-course meals that begin with a fresh garden salad and a fruit sorbet, winding up with Checkerberry’s classic chocolate bombe, which is to say a bittersweet chocolate mousse that’s guaranteed to please the fussiest chocoholic.

Needless to say, the Checkerberry tops the list of northern Indiana inns, and so we give it our rare five-star rating.

Returning to Shipshewana, visitors purchase handmade copper and brassware at the Old World Copper Smith and look in on an art gallery housed in an 1800s train depot that once served Indiana’s twisting Pumpkin Vine Line. At Galarina Folk Arts, Steve and Sheri Scott-Welty display the works of Grandma Moses’ great-grandson, Will, along with paintings and etchings by local and nationally known artists.

Other crowds browse through Yoder’s Department Store, with its display of hand-cranked ice cream makers, wood cook stoves, sleds, Amish hats, quilts, bibs, bonnets and shawls. (Buggy hitches for customers are provided just outside the door.)

In August, Shipshewana celebrated its 100th birthday with a parade, a pageant and an ice cream social, while visitors checked out the new Menno-Hof Mennonite-Amish Visitor’s Center on the approach to town.

With harvest time in Indiana, Hoosiers are taking part in pie-baking contests, sack races, rug hooking and quilting competition. In dozens of villages throughout Indiana, celebrations are drawing visitors to Small Town America.

Across the state they’re lining up for the Catfish Festival at Petersburg, the Blueberry Festival at Plymouth, Strawberry Days at Ligonier, turkey races in Montgomery, the Pumpkin Festival at French Lick, the Grape Stomp at Hessville, the Oktoberfest in Terre Haute with its oompah bands and polka contest, and the Parke County Covered Bridge Festival at Rockville.

Roadside stands display pumpkin, melon, corn and other harvest produce, and tour buses zero in on villages serving kettles of harvest food.

At the autumn celebration in Montezuma, roast pig is featured with hot cider, crullers and pumpkin ice cream, and muzzle-loading contests attract crowds to Thorntown for its Turning of the Leaves Festival.

Hoosiers wolf down barbecued chicken, Polish sausage, pork chops, roast pig, apple dumplings, strawberry shortcake and cotton candy. Meanwhile, tents blossom across the state for nightly games of bingo, gospel singing, craft demonstrations and fiddlers’ contests.

The air is sweet with the fragrance of new-mown hay and smoked curls from farmhouses, fetching reminders that Smalltown America does, indeed, still exist.

For Hoosiers, it’s the season to celebrate. A chill is in the air and leaves are turning in southern Brown County. Dew shines like diamonds in trees throughout the 15,000-acre Brown County State Park. For miles around, the land is turning yellow, orange and bright red.

In Nashville, which is the county seat, crowds stroll down Honeysuckle Lane and study the works of artists.

Autumn reaches out across Indiana, and with a nip in the air, Hoosiers are enjoying a season of fairs and festivals with a down-home friendliness that sets small towns apart from cities where neighbors frequently are strangers.

For reservations for northern Indiana inns discussed in this article, write to the following:

--Morton Street Bed & Breakfast, Shipshewana, Ind. 46565. Telephone (219) 768-4391. Rates: $55/$65.

--Davis Hotel, Shipshewana, Ind. 46565. Rates: $40/$55. Call (219) 768-7300.

--Green Meadow Ranch, Route 2, Box 592, Shipshewana, Ind. 46565. Telephone (219) 768-4221. Rate: $25 per person.

--Das Dutchman Essenhaus Country Inn, 240 U.S. Highway 20, Middlebury, Ind. 46540. Telephone (219) 825-9447. Rates: $52/$105.

--Checkerberry Inn, 62644 C.R. 37, Goshen, Ind. 46526. Telephone (219) 642-4445. Rates: $85/$165.

Other inns in northern Indiana’s Amish country:

--Varns Guesthouse, 205 S. Main St., Middlebury, Ind. 46540. Telephone (219) 825-9666. Five bedrooms, private baths. Rates: $60.

--The Bee Hive Bed & Breakfast, P.O. Box 1191, Middlebury, Ind. 46540. Telephone (219) 825-5023. Rates: $52.45/$57.70/$63.

--Victorian Inn Guest House, 302 E. Market St., Nappanee, Ind. 46550. Telephone (219) 773-4383. Rates: $40/$60.

--The Patchwork Quilt Country Inn, 11748 County Road 2, Middlebury, Ind. 46540. Telephone (219) 825-2417. Rates: $52.45/$57.70. The restaurant serves lunch and dinner as well as breakfast. Tours of the Amish countryside.

Note: Other vacationers take in the 80-acre Amish Acres Farm, Restaurant & Playhouse on U.S. 6, a mile west of the village of Nappanee. This is a century-old Amish homestead (quilts created while you watch) where visitors ride buggies and attend performances at the Amish Acres Playhouse. Call (219) 773-4188.