Complaints piling up in New Wilmington about horse manure are evidence of a cultural clash between longtime Amish residents and new arrivals.

Some residents of the town are raising a stink to get the Amish to clean up the messes left by their horses at stop signs and hitching posts around town.

"They never clean it up. You just get used to the smell," Joni Pugh, 45, a waitress at the Shortstop Inn, the local diner frequented by the Amish and other townsfolk, told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in a story published Sunday.

"It really piles up. It gets pretty heavy sometimes -- and pretty smelly," said Mayor Wendell Wagner, who was voted into office in January on a pledge to clean up the streets -- literally.

The Amish aren't new in town -- they were living in Lawrence County 20 years before the borough came along in the 1860s and are an integral part of the economy -- but the hubbub is.

The culture clash between the 1,500 Old Order Amish, longtime residents and annual influx of students at nearby Westminster College has apparently been exacerbated by people flocking to the town to escape big city life.

Property values have climbed as much as 700 percent in some areas as people are scooping up land on the cheap and building homes for half what they'd cost closer to Pittsburgh.

"The taxes are low, the property values are low. We don't want to live in the city, but the city's coming to us," said Kent Mitcheltree, 41, who runs a sawmill outside town.

Apparently, so are big city sensibilities.

"It's a difficult problem," Wagner said. "These people are our friends, so we want to handle it the best we can."

New Wilmington has used a street sweeper to take care of the droppings in the parking lots around the three hitching posts in town, but keeping up with the buggies on residential streets has been a problem.

Some have suggested requiring the Amish to use manure catching bags or diapers on horses -- neither are up to snuff with the Amish.

"That wouldn't do no good. They'd have to change the diapers," said John Byler, 48, an Amish furniture maker.

Aside from college or high school students occasionally vandalizing a farm, or rural road rage caused by the buggies, officials say there's little tension between the Amish and other townsfolk.

Recently the Amish around New Wilmington joined their neighbors to oppose a shopping center and repeated attempts to open the dry town to bars and liquor stores.

"We have a basically progressive group (of Amish) here. I'd like them to be a bit more progressive," Wagner said.

Some say they would rather keep the horse manure than lose the Amish, who are vital to the local economy.

"If it wasn't for the Amish, I think there's a lot of businesses -- the restaurants and lumber stores -- they'd be out of business," said Judy Benka-Means.