Inspiration, innovation
For 150 years, Amana Colonies have boldly fostered community
By Jameson O’Neal
The Gazette
AMANA COLONIES — This sprawling network of villages, established as a utopian society, has struggled, flourished and reinvented itself for 150 years, evolving into a community that is arguably even more idyllic than its founders prophesied.
A sesquicentennial celebration next weekend will showcase the Iowa County colonies’ European and religious heritage as well as their 20th-century transformation into a prosperous and welcoming population center.
As they commemorate this landmark, Amana residents sing the praises of their tranquil, picturesque environment and their strong sense of belonging, not to mention the dividends many of them reap from their shares in the Amana Society Inc., the corporation formed in 1932 to steward the founding colonists’ common assets.
The colonies, among Iowa’s top tourist draws, offer a glimpse into a communal way of life that thrived for more than three-quarters of a century. But Amana history didn’t end with the Great Change of ’32 — a shift from an all-for-one, one-for-all commune to a close-knit community.
“Our history is almost half and half,” says Lanny Haldy, executive director of the Amana Heritage Society. “We have a long non-communal history now.”
The seven colonies, spaced a few miles apart from each other on 26,000 acres of lush farmland, woodland and meadowland in the Iowa River Valley, are home to some 1,600 people, roughly half of whom are descendants of founding families.
Their heritage goes far beyond a collection of fascinating artifacts. The society’s real estate is assessed at $24.9 million, and the Amana Colonies Convention & Visitors Bureau estimates tourists spend $45 million a year in the seven colonies and the cluster of businesses at Interstate 80 and Highway 151 called Little Amana.
The colonies’ history is a singular amalgam of religious innovation, social experimentation and business savvy.
Inspiration
The Community of True Inspiration, the religious fellowship that settled the Amanas, was established in Germany in 1714 during the pietist movement, which stressed personal devotion over dogma and ritual.
The sect’s founders taught that God speaks through post-biblical prophets known collectively as “Werkzeuge.” When inspired, a Werkzeug would shake in ecstasy before delivering God’s word.
Inspirationists were persecuted in Germany, where the Lutheran Church enjoyed state sanction, for refusing to perform military service or to send their children to schools run by Lutheran clergy.
Guided by a Werkzeug, some 800 faithful emigrated to America in 1842 and founded the community of Ebenezer on a 5,000-acre plot of land some affluent members had bought near Buffalo, N.Y.
The original plan called for other Inspirationists to buy into the real estate, but poor and unskilled members were unable to fulfill their obligations. The community scrapped the buy-in plan when a Werkzeug testified that it was God’s “most holy will that everything should be and remain in common.”
Like other utopian communities, the Inspirationists informally referred to their economic system as communism, a term that had yet to acquire the taint of totalitarianism.
Ebenezer was not a utopia.
The community bought the New York land, a Seneca Indian reservation, with the understanding that the Seneca would move to a new reservation. The Seneca did not share that understanding. The tribe’s hostility kept the settlers on edge for years.
At the same time, the community was growing more populous but could not afford to buy more land near booming Buffalo.
Again prompted by a Werkzeug, the elders sent scouting parties westward in the 1850s. After a search of Kansas turned up no workable tract, another committee discovered a large section of available land in the Iowa River Valley that suited the community’s purposes beautifully.
The community purchased 18,000 acres and established the settlement’s first village in the summer of 1855. It was named Amana after a mountain mentioned in Song of Solomon. The word, which correlates to constancy, was chosen to signify the community’s faithfulness.
The next five villages were named according to their geographic relation to the first – West Amana, South Amana, High Amana, East Amana and Middle Amana. The seventh was added when the community in 1860 bought the town of Homestead to secure its railroad station.
As it sold off New York land over the next decade, the community expanded its Iowa holdings to 26,000 acres.
Prospering in the heartland
The community blossomed on the Iowa prairie. Exercising both Old World and New World skills, the Inspirationists raised crops, harvested timber, built homes and schools, and launched a woolen mill, a lumber mill and furniture shops.
They built a seven-mile-long canal called a millrace to generate water power.
They adopted a constitution, incorporated as a religious society and carved out a German-speaking enclave in the heart of America.
And at last they settled into the serene, faith-centered way of life they had dreamed of for generations.
Colonists attended 10 church services each week, including three on Sunday. Then as now, services were spare, consisting mostly of a cappella hymn singing and the recitation of testimonials.
The colonists’ loyalty to their leaders — men chosen for their sound judgment, piety and selfless service — helped ensure harmony.
The community’s principal authority was a 13-member board of trustees called the Great Council of the Brethren. The Great Council, elected by the general body of elders, made the major decisions, consulting the Werkzeug when there was one.
The Great Council, in turn, selected the village elders, relying largely on the recommendations of the villages’ resident trustees.
Each village board of elders, known as a Bruderrath, made parochial decisions such as assigning residents to jobs and houses, sanctioning marital pairings and meting punishment for offenses.
A colonist who took issue with a decision of the governing Bruderrath could appeal it to the Great Council.
Disputing a decision of the Great Council was tantamount to excommunicating oneself. The first of the sect’s 21 Rules for the Examination of Our Daily Lives was, “Obey, without reasoning, God, and through God your superiors.”
A simple life of faith
Life in communal Amana was orderly and rigorous.
Elders assigned men to their vocations according to aptitude, special gifts and family tradition.
Women and older girls worked in communal kitchens and vegetable gardens.
Kitchen bosses were such strong authority figures that each kitchen was known by the surname of the boss, recalls Middle Amana resident Henrietta Ruff, 89, who grew up in Homestead and worked in a communal kitchen run by her great-aunt.
“It was really like family,” she says.
For most colonists, the workday began at 7 a.m. in the warm months and 7:30 a.m. in winter, and breakfast was served an hour earlier. To accommodate that schedule, the kitchen workers often had to arrive before dawn.
“There were no streetlights,” Ruff recalls. “I wonder how sometimes I found my way.”
Dinner was served at 11:30 a.m. Supper was served at the close of the workday — 6:30 p.m. in the winter and 7 p.m. in the summer. Men, women and children ate for about 15 minutes at separate tables in the communal kitchens. Chatting was discouraged.
Each kitchen was paired with a vegetable garden. Produce — spinach, beans, potatoes, onions, cabbages, tomatoes, melons — was fresh and usually abundant.
The colonists raised livestock to provide the community with beef, pork and dairy products. A teamster delivered milk to the kitchens each morning. Kitchen workers pasteurized the milk, skimmed off the cream to make butter and cheese, and served skim milk at table.
West Amana native Erna Fels, 89, now of Middle Amana, recalls making butter in rolls shaped like thick sausages. The kitchen boss allotted portions to the families.
Fels learned to make signature Amana dishes, including cabbage flavored with lard, beef stock and braised onions.
A focused education
New mothers were granted up to two years’ leave from communal labor to look after their infants. Once they resumed working outside their homes, they took their preschoolers to kinderschules or left them with older women.
Villagers reared children collectively. Socialization was geared toward fitness for communal life, with an emphasis on self-abnegation and spiritual purity.
Youngsters attended village schools from age 5 through eighth grade, after which they entered the community work force unless specially selected to attend high school and university to train as doctors or teachers.
The school day was divided into three parts — Lehrschule, to study reading, writing and arithmetic; Spielstunde, or playtime; and Arbeitschule, which consisted of training in handicrafts and manual trades.
Fels has fond memories of spending Spielstunde on the sloping playground in her childhood village, West Amana. She recalls that boys and girls alike played baseball and took turns playing on a seesaw, swings and a giant’s stride – an apparatus consisting of rope swings suspended from a swiveling ring atop a tall, sturdy pole.
By popular demand, the teachers in West — colony residents typically refer to the villages other than main Amana and Homestead by their adjectives — took the children on a picnic near the starting point of the millrace each fall, Fels says.
“We would chant, `We want to have a picnic! We want to have a picnic!’ ” she says. “We would get one nickel for a pop — orange, cream or root beer — and one nickel for a hot dog. We’d have a wiener roast.”
The Great Change
The communal system that served the Amana pioneers’ purposes in the 19th century began to chafe in the 20th as colonists interacted more and more with “outsiders” and gradually adopted English as their primary tongue.
Colonists whose families had never laid claim to houses, horses or businesses began to envy everyday Iowans. Young people, especially, wanted to taste American independence – to earn wages and college degrees, to choose their own vocations, to buy cars and travel.
At the same time, larger economic forces undermined the community’s structure. The Amana name had come to signify top-quality furniture and woolens, but the market for such goods shrank as American consumers turned to cheaper mass-produced merchandise.
The community’s farm department kept pace with technological improvements, but each tractor it bought reduced the need for workers.
When the Great Depression struck in 1929, slashing Americans’ buying power, the community began to recognize it could not retain its relative self-sufficiency.
More and more members felt they needed jobs, cash and autonomy to adapt to a changed world. Older members resisted reform, fearing they would be left destitute after toiling for the common good all their lives.
In 1931, an elected committee explained the community’s fiscal straits to residents and solicited ideas for an economic overhaul. In March 1931, the committee asked the community’s 917 adult members if they wanted to retain the old system or reorganize. A strong majority voted for change.
Community leaders crafted a system that replaced the non-profit Amana Society with two new entities – the Amana Church Society, which owns the church buildings and cemeteries, and the Amana Society Inc., a shared-stock company that assumed ownership of the community’s land and industries.
Company stock was allocated according to community members’ inheritance rights and years of labor.
When the Great Change took effect in spring of 1932, many families exchanged shares of their stock for ownership of the homes they already occupied. Some sold stock to start private enterprises or relocate.
Patchwork governance
Deeming it impractical to incorporate as a municipality, given the many miles of roads that must be maintained and the vast amount of sparsely populated land that must be policed, Amana Colonies residents have developed alternative ways to meet their common needs.
Business people formed the Amana Colonies Travel Council, later renamed the Amana Colonies Convention & Visitors Bureau, in 1965 to market the colonies as a tourist attraction. The U.S. Department of Interior named the colonies a National Historic Landmark the same year.
In 1968, the Amana Heritage Society was founded to preserve and interpret historical sites, documents and artifacts. It operates five museums and a library and archives.
Because Iowa County does not exercise zoning authority, Amana Colonies residents successfully lobbied the Iowa Legislature to establish the Amana Colonies Land Use District (ACLUD) in 1983.
The ACLUD board guards the district’s historicity and “visual corridor” — the pastoral view motorists enjoy while circling the villages — by establishing sign standards and restricting construction projects.
The board flexed its muscles in 2003 when it declined to authorize construction of a hotel/water park and condominium complex on land adjoining the Amana Colonies Golf Course, which is north of Middle Amana.
Local business people backed the project, saying it could lengthen the tourist season, but the ACLUD board was put off by the developers’ impatience and what they perceived was a lack of commitment to preserving the corridor view.
Tom Berthel, well acquainted with Amana culture while serving as chairman of the golf course board, is developing a revised plan with new partners. Berthel and Amana Society officers say negotiations are promising.
The Amana Historical Sites Foundation, established in 1994, uses grants to restore buildings that embody the colonies’ heritage.
While protecting its heritage, the colonies are adding new chapters to their history.
The Middle Amana refrigerator manufacturing plant, which employs about 2,700 people, has changed hands repeatedly. Founded by a local entrepreneur in 1936 as Amana Refrigeration Inc., the plant has been owned successively by the Amana Society Inc., a group of Cedar Rapids businessmen, Raytheon Co. and Maytag Corp., which is being acquired by Ripplewood Holdings.
Tourism is a steady source of revenue for the once-reclusive colonies. Each year thousands of people from throughout Iowa and the world come to the Amanas to visit the museums, enjoy festivals, dine on hearty German fare and shop for hand-crafted goods, antiques and locally produced wine and beer.
The Amana Colonies’ population has held fairly steady since about 1875. Buyers of homes in new developments have offset the departures of offspring of founding families.
“People don’t understand you can move here and live here — and it is a wonderful place to live,” says Amana Society Inc. CEO Steve Penney. “There are young people living here who moved in, love the lifestyle, the peace, the serenity.”
Jon Childers, 35, of Middle Amana, says the community’s warmth drew him back after he studied abroad.
“Living in Amana is a very special experience,” Childers says. “When you know everyone in town and go to church with them, it’s a very comfortable feeling to be able to be here and have this.”
This story was published June 26, 2005, in The Gazette of Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, Iowa.