Anna Balmer Myers was an American author of romantic novels featuring the local color of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. She was born in Lancaster County in Manheim, Pennsylvania and attended school there. She later attended Drexel University and lived and worked as a schoolteacher in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her most well known work is Amanda: A Daughter of the Mennonites; other works include Patchwork; a Story of "the Plain People", The Madonna of the Curb, I Lift My Lamp, and a collection of poetry entitled Rain on the Roof. Amanda, about a young Mennonite girl who seeks an education, is hired as a teacher in a local one-room schoolhouse, and eventually marries a childhood friend, contains many delightful appreciations of life along with early 20th century reminiscences, as indicated by such chapters as: "The Snitzing Party", "Boiling Apple Butter", "The Spelling Bee", and "One Heart Made o' Two" . Patchwork, the story of a young girl growing up within a community of "plain people", some of the story in the format of a diary, includes the girl's first romance. [More at Wikipedia]

Lancaster County