Iowa -- Amana Colonies: Revisting An Ideal That Really Worked

HOMESTEAD, Iowa - It might be called the first intentional community based on peace, prayer and sauerkraut.

The Amana Colonies, a string of seven villages 90 miles east of Des Moines, Iowa, were created in the mid-19th century by German immigrants who wanted to practice religion and self-sufficiency in isolation.

Amana was a commune that worked: Despite or because of church services 11 times a week, it was a solid community that provided a free education, home, job, health care and three heavyweight German meals a day for everyone.

Amanans were born in identical places - one of the four 15-by-15-foot identical bedrooms in each home, on beds from the colony factory, above rag rugs from the communal loom.

They grew up to work in the communal gardens and kitchens if they were female, or in the farms, shops and factories if they were male.

On the same day every spring, the entire village cleaned every room in every house and every shop from top to bottom.

Amanans brewed their own beer, wove their own blankets, built their own furniture, bound their own books, stamped their own calico and made every necessity and luxury from pickle barrels to lace, from bricks to cigars.

All ended up in identical cedar-bordered graveyards with identical small headstones.

The Community of True Inspiration thrived in this green and restful corner of Iowa from 1855 until 1932, when it succumbed to the triple whammy of a fire in the flour and woolen mills (the colonies had no insurance), declining orders for Amana products because of the Depression, and the restiveness of young members who were eager to explore the wider world.

During The Great Change, as the Amanans call it, they distributed stock in the society and the villages became private.

The Amana Colonies have nothing to do with the Amish religious sect, although the confusion is common. Amana, from the Song of Solomon, means "remain true."

Many descendants of the original 700 German settlers have remained true - still living in the villages and attending church in traditional black dresses, aprons and bonnets.

The original 26,000 acres of neat houses, old yews and lilacs, hackberries twisted with age, climbing roses and a 100-acre lily pond are still intact, although today a refrigerator plant stands on the site of a woolen mill in Middle Amana, and a golf course has taken over a pasture.

"As a girl I remember getting on boots and selling the lilies to the tourists - they are the most wonderful-smelling flowers, but they don't last long," said Elsie Caspers, clerk at the Ehrle Winery in Homestead.

Caspers, born in 1933, says the post-1932 changes bothered her grandmother and mother, who missed the old life.

"There was camaraderie, but hard work too," she said. "The women had to get up so early to go to the kitchens."

Whether they were behind or ahead of their time depends on whom you ask.

"Were they backwards? Yes and no," said Lanny Haldy, executive director of the Amana Heritage Society, a local nonprofit historic organization that operates three museums in the colonies. His ancestors joined the Inspirationist church in 1742.

"They were taking the Chicago Tribune and Scientific American - they were very much in contact with the outside world. They had telephones 10 years after the outside world did. They sent students to college to become doctors in the 1860s.

"The colonies lasted for three generations - it's remarkable they lasted as long as they did."

As time passed, Haldy said, "the young people weren't committed anymore. And it was harder to live differently than the rest of the world in 1932 than in 1882.

"But the Amana church still exists today with beliefs and practices similar to 100 years ago."

There is a notion that communal society stifles individual creativity, but it wasn't suppressed in the Amanas. The abundance of art, craft, furniture and gift shops in the villages today springs from the same impulse that created the crafts, needlework, handwork, furniture and even the tinware a century ago.

Amanans were - and are - systematic, organized and hardworking.

"Have you ever known a German who wasn't?" asked Barbara Hoehnle, librarian for the Amana Heritage Society.

"The motto was `Alles muss genaues sein' - everything must be exact," she explained. "You knew what had to be in the house: The most important things were the clock, the table, the bureau and a rocker. But they were all the same; you could go into any house blindfolded and find your way around."

Today, half a million to 1 million visitors a year drop by for a peek at that happy but exacting world gone by.

Barns and houses still cluster in each village with fields surrounding them, European style. High fences in front of many homes are a relic of the days when the cows were herded through the villages to the barns twice a day for milking.

The result, then as now, was that the woods were spared more than on non-Amanan farms. Tender spring nights and soft summer evenings are not punctured by yard lights, so deer graze at the edge of the road, and porcupines, opossums and skunks thrive in the quiet fields and in the nature preserve on the Iowa River near Homestead.

Each village is no more than seven miles from the next. Walking or biking from village to village is not only possible, it's the best way to savor the peace and the smells of the past: the sigh of yeast from the cellars of the wineries; the stink of sauerkraut fermenting in crocks; the warm, almost breadlike, smell of manure on the gardens; a gust of lilac, mint or rose.

To the senses, the past is very palpable in the Amanas.

Founded on religion, the colonies today seem to be equally about farming, gardening, crafts and eating. Amana cuisine, however, is anathema to the rest of the 20th century's low-meat, low-fat culture.

The Amana Meat Shop and Smoke House in Homestead (with the last surviving meat-drying house in the colonies) offers a carnivore's feast of smoked bratwurst, smoked pork chops, liverwurst, hickory-smoked sausage, head cheese, blood sausage, jagdschinken and bierwurst. The butchers here process 3,500 pounds of deer a year and sell 600 to 800 pounds of bratwurst a week in summer.

Gift shops and cafes offer local specialties including dried sweet corn; pumpkin, peach, prune and apricot butters; mustards; horseradish; popcorn; gooseberry preserves, and sorghum.

There are eight wineries, including the Ehrle Winery in Homestead, built in 1934 and said to be the first in state. Caspers will serve samples of Ehrle wines made from dandelion, cranberry, blueberry, raspberry, plum, rhubarb (here called piestengel) and four local grapes.

In the Ackerman Winery in Amana, glass fonts of Niagara, Riesling, Dechaunac and chenin blanc and fresh fruit wines glow in jewel colors.

Many homes still boast grapevines on trellises that stripe the sides of the big four-square brick houses.

In the old days, wine was piped directly from the presses to the church cellars. Men received an allowance of 20 gallons annually, women 12 gallons. When Prohibition arrived, the Amanans dutifully dumped 19,000 gallons of wine into the Iowa River - and legend has it that the fish had hangovers for a week.

The colonies once had five breweries, but Iowa prohibition closed them in 1884. Today the state's only brewery, Millstream, is in Amana, and 350 cases a week of its Millstream and Schildbrau beer make their way to eastern Iowa. Samples are available in the shop and in the adjoining biergarten on the millstream.

Home-style farm food is still the rule at all cafes, including the Ronenberg Inn, one of the original communal kitchens; Bill Zuber's Restaurant in Homestead, the Colony Inn, and the Ox Yoke Inn.

Meals include bowls of gravy, red cabbage, beans, salad and cottage cheese, pickled ham cubes, pea salad. And every restaurant has its own variety of sauerkraut - some sweet, some tart, some with red pepper bits.

The land, the fruit and vegetables are basic to the Amanas. Even though baseball was forbidden under the Old Order, Zuber learned to pitch at a secret spot in the woods by throwing onions.

Two Amanans, Joseph Prestele and his son, Gottlieb, gained national recognition for fine-art botanic illustrations for the Smithsonian Institution, for U.S. Department of Agriculture yearbooks and for private nursery catalogs.

"Gardening is very important," Haldy explained. "There are still unspoken rivalries: Who can get their potatoes in the earliest. That dates from the communal era, but more so after the reorganization, when suddenly people saw gardens as an important part of economic well-being. They were suddenly wage earners and had to worry about where meals come from. So people still have very big gardens, bigger than you'd think they'd need."

Larry Rettig, a German linguist living in South Amana, preserves part of that heritage through a seed bank collected from women who ran the kitchen gardens.

"I discovered all sorts of seeds exclusive to the Amanas, common in Germany in the 1850s, but now found only here," said Rettig. They include a yellow, buttery, bitter lettuce called Eiersalat - egg salad - because it was prepared with chopped boiled egg; a flat string bean with a unique flavor that gives two crops; the Ebenezer onion - a good winter keeper - and an Amana radish.

Amana is a gardener's heaven, with a climate so gentle that magnolia, crape myrtle and even kiwi grow in the Rettig yard.

Rettig, assistant to the vice president of research at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, and his wife, Wilma, a preschool teacher, are both descendants of original Amanans. Although they left home in 1959 after high school, they returned in 1976 and now live in her mother's 1900 home. They are refurnishing a communal day-care center in the back yard to serve as a gardeners' studio.

Rettig earned his master's and doctoral degrees in the Amana dialect and has published the only book on the colonies after the change of 1932.

The colonies' isolation may have preserved the language and the vegetables, but, Rettig pointed out, it also led to inbreeding with its attendant bad teeth and mild retardation.

The Rettigs left the Amanas because "we wanted to get away from this hothouse atmosphere where everyone knew everybody's business. We were overly sheltered.

"But we began to appreciate our culture when we moved away. And our unspoken goal became to return here."

"This community is so small that if you do outlandish things, the next day everyone knows - they hear it on the Oma (grandmother) hot line," Wilma Rettig said.

At the Amana Store in High Amana, Emilie Jeck hauled down the original account books where charges were written in an elegant hand: "Four yards ribbon 16 cents, two yards print 32 cents, 8 1/2 yards flannel $3.74, one pair shoes 80 cents."

The store, now 136 years old, was the first in the colonies. In 1898 her father, then 16, worked there. By 1917 he managed the store, and in 1932 he bought it.

It has changed little - wood counters and glass cases display soap, jawbreakers, licorice sticks, puzzles, canned goods and record albums by the late Willie Dittrich, of Homestead, known as "The Singing Zither."

Jeck's family has another distinction: Her brother, George Foerstner, founded Amana Refrigeration Inc. in Middle Amana.

"He just made a little cooler for a friend in Iowa City who had a restaurant, and it worked," she said. "Now they employ 3,000 people."

As for life in the colonies?

"It's getting too commercialized," said Jeck, venturing a nongroup opinion - then adding hastily: "That's what some people say."