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Thank you.

To.

Yeah.

Are are a man of church.

And that society today has its origins in what scholars refer to as radical German pietism.

Pietism was a movement in Europe in the late, 17th, early 18th century, by people who were were actively trying to reform the Lutheran church at the time.

They felt that the established Lutheran church was too academic, too formal.

It didn't give the individual a chance to have a meaningful, individualistic religious experience.

I would, say that when it comes to the way the Amana church was started in Germany, it was a group of people, mostly Lutherans, a few Catholics who wanted more.

And it was during, the time that Philipp Jakob Spina wrote his book, Pious Desires.

People looking for a more intimate relationship with God, wanting some reform within the existing Lutheran church.

But the group that that we belonged to, the Radical Pietistic, believed that the, institution of church was broken, so they wanted to withdraw from it and sort of do their own thing.

And so to be a member of the early inspiration is church not only believing in the belief of inspiration, but also believing in separating from the existing Lutheran church.

That would have been a big step for them.

You had to really be convinced to do that in Germany, where you had to where you had to, profess a confession.

Are you Catholic or are you Lutheran?

Because there really wasn't another box to check, unlike we have here in America where you can be a member of anything or nothing.

At the same time.

And that is true that, There's actually many of.

Oh, it wasn't that radical.

You see that, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes.

Well, I have to get in, but how can you pick?

Yeah.

It's true.

And that looks good.

Yeah, it looks good.

This part doesn't look so bad at the back and the front.

And look at the first.

What do you think was that about the crutches.

Yeah.

Well there it is to there twice now.

But they'll do it once they go out of the out there.

These guys look pretty good.

All right.

Yeah I to ask well you.

Know look here.

No, no.

Yeah.

What are those.

They're they're piddly.

Yeah I know what it's it's it's hard to tell.

Oh this is the only right.

Yeah.

I only panned it a little bit.

Well no, I did all the way up.

I planned the whole.

You came in back and made a whole row up here because I thought they were rough.

You.

Hey, you plan a how are you?

Thought so.

We're.

I have a whole row of kale now.

Yeah.

And here these are the leaves that I just played.

Yeah, those look good.

Okay.

We've got a whole row here.

We had a sort of a row last year and use this.

Well I didn't I would just put.

You.

I'm Elizabeth Trumbull.

Mom and I grew up in the house that we're currently filming in.

I am a senior research scientist at the University of Iowa, currently at MIT and Health Services Research.

We also have a medical clinic here in town.

Oh, an elder in the church and on the HPC Historical Preservation Commission.

I'm a board member on that.

And I guess more than anything, I feel like I'm a community member here in Amana and pretty proud of my heritage.

And this is my mother.

Marlene.

Trampled on, trampled.

And I moved into this house when we got married, after we had remodeled it.

And, my I went only to high school, but I feel like I had an education anyway because I spent a lot of years first of all, at Super's restaurant in homestead.

And Bill Zuber is related to us.

So I have to be one of the girls that said I would do it.

And then I went to the woolen mill where I was the secretary, and I know I said to my daughter, now we're going to have a computer.

I'm not going to work there anymore.

I'm going to quit now.

And then I said, then she said to me, what, you're going to quit because you're going to get a computer?

I said, I'll never learn it.

I'm too old for that.

And she said, mom, you can do it.

And I'm glad I did, because I've really learned a lot of things.

Well, yes, she's on the iPhone and sends memes and pictures to her grand children.

So yes, she's very computer savvy.

Well, I wouldn't say that.

But I grew up in this house.

And mom, you moved here in 1954 and remodeled the upstairs, and then we grew up upstairs.

My grandmother and grandfather were downstairs and my great uncle was across the hallway in the bottom part of the floor.

So we had older people with us up until I was in probably eighth grade or ninth grade.

Yeah.

I'm not allowed to play it without me.

Super.

Well, the reason I thought about it was because I said I played to AP and you said, oh, where did you find finals?

And I said, oh, they're in the corner.

I said, no, we didn't have seats ready.

So we sell them plants, but I've got a few.

The hospitals and, and then this is all just empty until we do pumpkins and fords, and then our sunflowers and sunflowers are.

What?

You got it?

You got.

You have.

You.

I'm Peter Hanley.

I'm an elder.

The Amana Church society, and I've been a community historian for many, many years.

And written a couple of articles and a few books and things like that.

I live in the village of homestead, and I am a descendant of, people who were here during the communal era.

Of course, the Pytest movement starts in the 1670s, and it's kind of a reaction, to the state of affairs with the Lutheran church.

At that time, it was people who wanted a, simpler, more direct form of worship.

A more direct relationship with God.

There was a big emphasis on personal study of the scriptures and, just just a simpler, home household, type of worship.

There were, house prayer meetings where just a small group of people would get together.

And the radical pieties, really gave up on the Lutheran church at the time.

I think.

And what really spurred the inspiration is in the beginning, began in France in the late 1680s, where there was a Protestant revolt led by a group of revolutionaries known as the French prophets.

And these individuals led a revolt.

And, it was unsuccessful.

Louis the 14th was able to, defeat them.

Several of the French prophets wound up eventually moving into Great Britain, into London, where, they gained a little bit of a following and then they made, two tours of, Germany and Holland and other, European states.

And it was while they were in the, pietistic town of Hala, it was a university town where a lot of artists lived, that they evidently connected with.

The three brothers named popped Pot in the Pot Brothers all received this gift of inspiration and began delivering testimonies.

And they began going on, missionary journeys.

And eventually on one of these trips, they wound up in the village of him back, which is near Frankfurt.

This is in the region of East and Burg, which was an area where a lot of, dissident religious groups had settled.

There were a lot of, piety sects living in these.

And Burke, there were is a large Jewish community there because, in 1711, the local count had issued an edict of tolerance, which basically encouraged people to come and live in his region.

He was trying to rebuild after the 30 Years War, and he wanted to tax money.

I believe that the church at that time was very much a conversion church where you said, hey, I want to make this change.

I want to get more personal.

I want to withdraw from society a little bit.

And so living in the area north northeast of Frankfurt, Germany, that was an area where these people could do this because there was an edict of tolerance that was that was, given at that time where people could come from other areas and live there, and they basically if they paid their taxes, they were okay.

They left them alone.

From a religious standpoint.

And among these people was, Eberhard Ludwig Gruber, who was a Lutheran pastor, who had, left the church and also a man named Johann Friedrich Roch, who was the son of a saddler.

And Gruber and Roch became close friends and associates.

They met for private worship and in 1714 they met with the Potts and a woman named Johanna melchior, who had come to Himbac on, a missionary journey.

And they held a religious meeting on November the 16th, 1714, which is regarded as the start of what became as divine inspirations combined, or the true inspiration and community.

Later on, of course, the Amana community.

One of the things that I think was a clear remnant of communal Amana is that we were raised with the understanding that everybody had to help everybody else, and they had to do for their community.

So we always have felt that we were a community that worked together.

My mom and dad and my grandmother, grandfather, my grandfather was in the church as an elder.

My mom is a singer in the church.

So in our church, because we don't sing with an organ or a piano or any kind of instrumentation, someone has to fore-sing, they need to sing a note ahead of everyone else to get the notes started correctly.

And my mom did that at 17 when you were 17, and I started when I was 17, being a fore-sing and my daughter's currently a fore-singer.

That's a passed down cultural thing that matters to us.

And that idea that you are part of that community and you have to be working within it, is something that our family has always strongly endorsed.

And so I'm on the Historic Preservation Commission.

My mom was a charter member of the Amana Heritage Society.

She's an active member in the church, was always active in many different committees.

We just believe that you're not here for you alone.

You're here for a whole group of people, and that you have a responsibility to all the people around you to make things better and to do it better, don't you think?

I mean, that's what, you know, my always my grandmother.

Yeah.

My grandmother used to make sometimes she made 45 potato dumplings.

She'd make 45 or 50 potato dumplings.

You know, they're delicious potato.

They're about the size of your fist.

She made 45 of those, and she would give them to people.

Yeah, all around the town, all the neighbors got them.

Neighbors.

All the neighbors would look forward to it.

And so the idea that we're communal and we take care of each other didn't die in 1932.

It just took a new way of operating.

Yeah.

Just became a different thing.

Well, and so we still do that when I, when my husband's a physician and I'm a research scientist, when we moved here, my research is focused on the Medicaid program and helping people get better care.

My husband, as a physician, we set up a small, independent private practice to help people.

We take everybody.

It doesn't matter you.

You can be in our practice.

Doesn't matter what your insurance is.

It's not about money.

It's about helping as much as anything.

And I think that matters still.

And that comes from being communal.

Oh yeah.

And the other thing is, mom, whenever there was anybody that was sick or if anyone died, my mother would always make something and take it to them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, not just for the funeral, it was just for them.

Like a soup or she'd make a meal.

And people still watched out for each other.

You know people think about a small town as a nosy place but it's also a caring place.

They look out for you if they notice there's a problem, they try to help you however they can.

But I. I think that's important now we're trying to preserve that and that's become far more difficult.

We have a lot of historical homes here that need to be refurbished, and we're trying to make sure people do that.

It's very expensive.

It's hard to find the money to do it for everybody.

It's been a struggle because people inherit their homes, but they may not inherit the money to keep them.

And so some people here are very anxious about making sure that everybody does it just right.

But that's expensive.

And we also want our heritage families to be able to live in the homes that they've got.

And so there's got to be a compromise between cost and keeping things up.

That's one of the reasons we allow vinyl siding here now.

Might have never been here before, but then we laugh because in Old Amana, if you look around, these houses don't look like this because there was some sort of traditional structure that had to happen.

They look like this because that was the cheapest material, or that was the way they knew how to do it.

And I think our forefathers would laugh now with vinyl siding, to think that we try to force people to put on cedar siding when vinyl is far more effective, like why are you not letting them put on something different?

Because that's what we'd be doing.

And they were very practical people.

I always, I always remember what Glen Wendler used to say, that the forefathers were not the kind to keep things back.

No, like the Amish, you know, they they don't want to to go to the world.

We, we were always ready to, to learn something new.

This clock up there that was made by my great, great, great great grandfather.

And he made the works and everything.

Of course, the works were replaced, but and he made, he made the first telephones in the man.

And they did them early.

They had electricity early.

They did.

They really wanted to move forward in, in how they operated in the world, but they wanted their religion to still.

Be stayed the same.

Yes.

And so we, I think we've always embraced new things.

Yes.

It's just hard to balance that with the communal way because that's not kind of how people are now.

No.

Right.

Right.

The inspirationists, not surprisingly, their key point of belief was that God could still speak to individuals today, just as he had to the prophets of the Old Testament.

And they believed, that certain individuals could be inspired to speak God's words.

And there were several of these in, in our church in the early days.

In the early days, as many as 14 people were considered to be these inspired instruments.

The the German word was Werkzeug, which, in its literally translates to be a tool or an instrument, that they were a passive instrument that God was using to speak through them.

These inspired individuals, would would testify the Lord's words.

And most of those, most of those messages would be, messages of repentance or messages of piety that an individual or groups of individuals or even some were directed towards cities and states that that people should become more concerned with living out their beliefs, that they shouldn't have academic, theological notions, but should live their faith.

And that whole notion of living your faith and living your belief is what Pietism really was about.

I think.

Werkzeug were identified, through a process.

There is written down in one of the old books a, a method to determine if somebody is truly an inspired instrument or werkzeug.

There's a whole series of things that the elders in the congregation would check with this person.

There were some people.

It's probably not a surprise.

There were some people who claimed to be werkzeug.

or claimed to be inspired and they really weren't.

Maybe some attention seekers, I don't know.

But once someone is identified as a Werkzeug, then their words become that much more important.

I understand, of course, this is many years ago, hundreds of years ago at this point that, sometimes they would have a, a physical manifestation that the Holy Spirit was coming into them, some sort of a shaking or other manifestation.

And when that was noted, the scribes would be ready to begin to record the words that this person was saying.

And again, sometimes the person would become inspired when they were alone and perhaps writing and they would write the words as, as they came to them.

We do not currently have a werkzeug, we don't believe that that, gift has been, negated or taken away from us as a people.

We have a lot of testimonies that we still need to translate from German into English so that they can be useful for us.

Our my thought, personally, I think that because we have such a wealth, such a library of work, that we are still working through, that we don't have a need for it.

So I get this point that other people may say differently.

The way that things, I guess, in my opinion, have changed over time is when the revelation spoken by Rock and, by Jay Gruber, who was El Gruber's son, Ursula Meyer, in some of the early 18th century prophets, and then also in the in the early 19th century, mid 19th century Christian Metz were behind him on Monday.

Michael Kraus, you would have been affected very emotionally and also in the presence of when this was going on, because they would frequently speak out during church, and so that would have had a, in my opinion, more profound effect on the on the believers at that time versus today.

When some of us engage in translating these, we still read them at every service, as they always had traditionally, but they would read one.

But then all of a sudden Christian Metz would come under inspiration, or Ursula Meyer, or somebody would come under inspiration, and that would have almost been, I don't want to call it theatrics, but there would have been a theatrical, element to it occasionally.

Ursula Meyer was known for, getting up and walking around in the in the room where they were meeting, and sometimes she would sit down at another worshipers, feet, and then she would put her arms around him and he would represent Christ, and she would say, I cling on to my love.

And things like that.

And that's what that meant.

Christian Metz would oftentimes, spread his arms out and make the sign of the cross and then be speaking what Christ's words were, as divine revelation for, for those people at that time.

One of these Werkzeuge, as they were called, her instruments actually spoke for only three months.

J.F.

Roch spoke for, almost 35 years.

There are two types of inspiration.

There's einsprache and aussprache .

Aussprache is spoken testimony.

Einsprache is written testimony.

And Metz started out, just delivering written testimonies in the early in his early years.

So the Amana people, about 25 years ago, we came up with the idea that we would take students from junior high, seventh grade, eighth grade students over to a free lunch program in Iowa City where they feed homeless people, and people with reduced food.

And we would take 10 to 12 junior high kids, and they would get that experience in the pandemic.

Then we could do that anymore.

So we went with the adults, and we still now take a group of adults, and it's it has become very much like what I imagine working in the kitchens was.

We all come and we laugh and we enjoy it, and no matter what goes wrong, it always it's the serving, serving others together that is just.

Yeah.

There's something in it that I think people are missing.

Giving together is even better than giving each individually, don't you think?

It's just the heart to heart and then heart to heart.

We love to be cooking together.

I think that's a really old Amana thing to like.

Even my good friends here in Amana Christi, a good friend of mine, when we're together and cooking, there's just something special about it.

It goes back to the old kitchens.

Eventually, the community at Ronnie Burke, had a dispute, with the account over the lease of the Reinhardt burg.

And so they moved to a place called Iron Spur, which they renamed Armon Burg.

Which is a slight change in the name Armon brick means, hostel of the poor.

And, this is the community that lived in.

And, essentially the roots of communal living are started at this time.

There are about 300 to 400 inspiration is living on the estates, but there's still a lot of people living in, scattered congregations, in different places in, in East and Burke in the area.

Notice the vent, allow and into Prussia.

So by 1840, you have what's called the Marshall Vincent or Eden Company.

They were the they were the new woolen mill people, not new, but I mean, they they had been in the area, they had been active, but they sort of renewed things to keep, to keep up the ability for the inspirations to provide jobs for their members coming from other areas.

And so, a man named Phil, a marshall who lived right up the street here and a man and he died in the 1860s, he writes this contract that he wants to provide, work for the inspirations coming from other German speaking lands.

And there ends up being a fight then between them and some of the local people there.

And when I mean a fight, I mean there's arguments and bad blood between some of the locals, and then some of the people coming from these other areas are saying, why don't we get to have these jobs when they, you know, they only want these foreigners doing them and, and instead, instead they're providing about 300 jobs for these, these displaced inspirations, so to speak.

So eventually, once they decide they actually are being forced to leave Europe and they come to America, they're able then to organize themselves according to the way that they want to organize the folks that were in charge of the church at that time, and also the ones that had the money, they were kind of some of the same people.

They were making the agreement that they were going to come to America and that they had a plan.

And if you wanted to come along, they said, you bring your money with you, you know, provide, you know, put your money into the common fund as we are.

And if you have no money, bring your heart and hands to create a community in America.

And so then when they come, they establish a communal living.

They think they're only going to do it for a few years, but it works out so well because they were able to have a division of labor, they were able to worship at the same time.

And for the first time ever, a lot of inspiration as we're getting to know each other, because there are people in abou In 1842, facing some increased pressures, met and delivered a test, Simone, that indicated that the community should migrate to the United States, or at least, explore that possibility.

This is in July of 1842.

They sent a committee to, look for land that included Christian Metz.

And they landed in New York in October of 1842.

Talked to a German land agent there, eventually learned that there was, good deal of land available in Chautauqua County, New York.

So they took the Erie Canal out to Buffalo.

And while in Buffalo, they learned from their, hotel keeper that, the farmer, well, stand still.

The buffalo Creek Indian Reservation, which was in the Seneca Reservation, would be coming up for sale, and, you know, ultimately made an offer and purchased, 5000 acres at about $10 an acre.

On what was Seneca land.

There was a lot of dispute about that property.

The land company they bought it from did not have a clear title to the land yet.

And so there was a lot of back and forth between the inspiration House and the Seneca, and the land company.

And eventually, they did gain clear title, to 5000 acres.

And they called the place Ebenezer, which is a biblical name meaning hitherto the Lord has helped us.

First inspiration is, started coming from Germany, in the spring of 1843, when they actually really didn't have, title to the land.

But they occupied the property, on May the 2nd, f 1843, which is kind of ironic because, that's almost exactly 89 years to the day, from the date of the great change.

So we were communal, for about 89 years total.

And they originally had planned to have a temporary communal, arrangement.

Where the land would be held in common.

And, everybody would contribute their money to a common fund, so that they would be able to pay for everybody to come across the Atlantic, and to purchase the land.

And the original idea was that after a preliminary period, the property would be, divided and everybody would get their assets back.

They 1846 for a number of reasons, Mets determined that this communal system, should be made permanent.

When I think about communal life and its impact on a man, today, one of the big takeaways is respect for the land.

When they came to Amana in 1855, and they looked over this valley, they saw the forest, and they fell in love with the forest.

They fell in love with the hills.

They welcomed the fact that there was a river running through the valley because they valued the water power.

They valued the river, and they saw it as an opportunity, this land as an opportunity not to be exploited, not to be exploited, but to be embraced.

And I think that's still true of Amana today.

I was on the amount of society board of directors for six years, and one of the conversations that we had on a very regular basis, which I know they still have, is the topic of sustainability.

And how do we conserve the resources that we have?

How do we conserve the soil?

How do we can serve the forests?

How do we can serve the water and the and the quality of the water?

How do we conserve the historic resources, whether they are the buildings or the the archival literature of the church?

And I'm an elder on the Amana church and have been since the early the mid 90s.

And there again, it's about sustaining a relationship with God and having a relationship, establishing a relationship, and then sustain that relationship.

We see our power in not change, but continuity.

Now, in order to maintain continuity, you must be flexible and you have to look at what's out there and make those changes you need to make to be able to keep what you value.

And one of the things that is truly valued in Amana is our connection with one another.

And to do that, you have to work really hard.

And there are times when you're going to disagree, but you have to come back and make it work.

Once they get to Amana, starting, you know, 18, 1860s until 1932, the power structure and the way they're able to live all really sort of regulates very nicely.

There are a few blips here and there, and especially once you get close to World War one, where being German in America is not a healthy thing, and especially a group of Germans living here where they're speaking, you know, 99% of the people spoke only German and only some of the leadership were able to speak English.

That's where they ended up getting into disputes.

The change that they were always looking for was a change.

Even during communal times.

How can we preserve our our religious beliefs, which in America nobody could touch?

In Germany, of course they could try to force them to be baptized.

They could try to force them to pay their taxes.

You know, if they were trying to teach their children at home or whatever.

And in America, they were they had state sponsored schools.

But the interesting thing is, they could train and then just come back here and it was a state school, but they could teach whatever curriculum that they wanted.

But it's just small little parts like that.

And overall, the Amana church, traditionally, and especially Christian Metz, during his time, he was a person who was always trying to seek, seek compromise.

That was what he did with the church elders.

That's what they would do with the governments.

And that was one of the reasons why they were able to stay together as a group.

Were one of the few, religious groups that's been around for 300 years that have never split away and split into two groups, one more likely more conservative, one more likely more progressive, and then one of them dies out or whatever.

Our group is still going to this day.

Okay.

What what I think's amazing about our archive collection here is that so much of this material has been brought from Germany, and here it is in the middle of Iowa, you know, and it has its origins in Germany 300 years ago.

You know, you know, when you think about how they, they had to move from Germany to the United States and then from New York here to Iowa.

They felt it important enough to bring this material with them that they could, you know, they had limited space on the ship.

They had limited space on the trains to come over here.

But they found it important to use some of that space to use some of that, resources to bring their history with them, to bring their history along.

And I think we're so fortunate in our church today, to have all this history here and to have a building that's dedicated, to housing that history, just just some examples here.

What we've been going through, this is this is a manuscript copy of one of those, inspired testimonies, by Johann Friedrich Rock that was delivered in 1727.

And what they would do is they'd make copies of these testimonies in booklets like this and distribute them to different communities throughout Germany.

This one is is marked that it should go to the community and Hano in Germany.

We and this just looking at this, this is this is a well traveled letter.

This is a letter written by Johann Autumn Gruber.

In Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1745.

And he send it back to his friends and the community members and, and, the Reiner burg Germany.

And they kept it and brought it back here to the United States.

So this letter has gone from Pennsylvania to Germany to New York.

And now here it sits in the middle of Iowa.

I think that's kind of cool.

I mentioned poetry as being so important.

What we've sorted through here.

Here's a stack of original poems, written by community members.

This was written, by a man named Jonas Widmark and Lee Bloss.

Germany on the 11th September 1779.

This is the original and this is the even signed it.

So we're it's just it's just amazing stuff.

I just love to come in here and you pick up any.

You pick up any box and look in it and, and you're going to find treasures.

And we have a lot of treasures in our archive.

And it's it's just a fun place to hang out.

I think.

And I'm going to pull out my husband's best joke about the land for that.

Our villages, High Amana, West Amana, South Amana, Amana, middle Amana, East Amana.

You know, we're not very terribly creative.

And it was the same when we were in Buffalo.

The the, the villages there were named according to where they were.

And his joke is that when the scouts came out to look at this land, they came up on top of the hill that comes from homestead down into Amana.

They were in Iowa Township in Iowa County on the Iowa River, and decided that this is where their people needed to be.

It's a terrible joke, but.

Today I think one of the most beautiful aspects is we still value our forest.

We have the largest privately owned forest in Iowa and we the size of this forest.

If you were to look at a footprint of Amana two generations three generations ago and Amana today, if you were to send a drone up and look at the forest from the sky, the size is the same.

We have not encroached on the forest because we value them.

After the great change, it became very important to provide employment for people, and they had several industries that were in place that they built upon, most importantly the farm.

Secondly, the Amana Woolen Mill, and thirdly, a new business called the Amana Refrigeration.

The Amana Refrigeration was founded by George Fortner of High Amana and his friends and relatives, and it had an opportunity to grow, and it came at a good time in American society when kitchen appliances and the need for kitchen appliances just exploded through the 40s, 50s and 60s.

So Amana Refrigeration became a leading employer in this county and even in eastern Iowa, as it grew kind of exponentially after World War Two.

And built in with that was the idea of quality.

We are going to put out a quality product, and that is something that has been a hallmark of all Amana production, whether it be woolens, cottons currently being produced at the wool mill.

Right now we have the oldest textile mill in the Midwest, and perhaps really the oldest owned by a single owner, and society in the country, because the mass society has operated the woolen mill.

From 18.

59 to present.

These are the blankets.

After they've come off the loom, they've been cut into blankets, and they're ready to be sold.

And the label put on.

Here in the historic Amana Woolen Mill.

This one mill was built in 1855.

At one time, we raised sheep right here on the farm.

We share the wool off of the sheep.

We washed it, dried it, dyed it, and spun it into yarn.

After it was spun into yarn, it then went through the warping and the weaving process.

And today we no longer raise sheep on the farm.

We buy our yarn already manufactured.

Because of that, we can weave whatever fiber we choose.

Today we're using cotton.

Cotton is very popular.

It's a natural fiber it's easy to take care of.

So our yarn comes on these cones that are about 2 to 3 pounds.

The machine that I'm standing in front of is the Creole.

The Creole holds 240 pounds of yarn.

That's what places the pattern on the blanket before it goes on to the loom.

When the woolen mill was built and we started weaving again, we sold woolen fabric to clothing manufacturers in New York City.

We had salesmen that would go to New York and sell our wool fabric.

We had an army contract with the Army where we made army blankets.

The wool.

And this was very important to the economic success of the colonies.

As time went on, wool was not as important of fiber to the community and to the American economy.

So we found new ways to, use the woolen mill by weaving cotton, by weaving eco two, which is a recycled cotton.

We found new ways to share our heritage and to educate, the public on what we do here.

I feel like this is a very important craft art to keep alive.

It's something that our ancestors kept alive for us.

It's something that we can keep alive for the next generation.

We scaled down to this, scale that we are now, which is that we make enough for our own use here to sell in our salesroom, to sell online and to sell to our wholesale customers.

Weaving takes two different processes.

It takes the warp, which is the lengthwise threads on the blanket, and it takes the weave, which is the width wise threads on the blanket.

So this machine, the warping Creole, is putting the lengthwise threads on the blanket.

The loom puts the width wise threads on the blanket.

We make 30 blankets at a time, and so for our weaver to set up the Creole, it takes about eight hours.

She has a computerized, program that tells her what order to set the cones up so that it puts the proper design on the blanket.

That will take her probably eight hours.

Then once it's taken off of the Creole, it goes on to the loom beam.

Then it's put into the loom.

It would probably take him almost a day to put on a loom beam into the loom.

Once the machine starts weaving the blanket, it can weave a blanket in three minutes.

It goes very fast.

It has a shuttle.

You can't see the shuttle because it's moving so fast.

Then it's taken off of the, loom.

It's cut into blankets.

Then it goes to the sewing machine.

The sewing process takes time.

Also, that's probably the most labor intensive, is actually sewing the blanket at the end.

So we do about 6000 blankets and you.

My name is Mike Williams, and I am the crop production manager here at Amana Farms.

And I've been in this role, taking this lead for right about ten years now.

We have a very unique cropping system here at Amana Farms.

Within the society we currently row crop about 9000 acres and predominantly corn and soybeans.

Our major focuses of production are white corn, waxy corn, and non-GMO soybeans.

And some of.

That gets fed.

To our, our.

Livestock, which we've got, we've got.

A feedlot and we have a.

Very large cow calf herd.

Here on the farm also as well.

One of the things that we do here on the farm, just in particular, we have an anaerobic digester.

The manure goes into the digester from the feed yard and it goes into this vessel.

Methane gas is captured off of that.

And then the methane gas is used to power four engines with generators on them.

So we have we can produce almost enough power right in there, enough kilowatts to provide power to most of the Amana Colonies.

And so we're really proud of that.

The manure then goes into fertilizing our crop fields, and we can pump that out through a dragline system.

And, we are able to fertilize, the bulk of our corn acres with our with our own manure.

In turn, the grain goes back to the cattle.

The cattle feed, the digester.

So there's a cycle there that is just we feel like just a very, very nicely sustainable system for us.

So in the 30s, with the expansion of automobile traffic, this became kind of a nice, convenient stop on the way from point A to point B, and people would come here for a meal in the 40s.

That was true.

And in the 50s, that was true as well.

And a lot of families, because we had a history of communal kitchens serving 40 people at a meal, they gravitated towards serving and working in restaurants.

The actual kitchen is 81 years old.

The ranch Burger restaurant was founded by a communal kitchen boss.

The Millstream Brewing Company grew out of that communal tradition of beer making.

The wineries grew out of that co I think one of the things that we kind of overlook is how much we enjoy welcoming people to Amana.

We love people coming to visit us and seeing our community.

We love sharing our stories.

We love sharing our food.

We love being hospitable.

We love putting on a party.

And I think that's inherent in who am in it.

The Amana people.

It's inherent in our community life because we were about welcoming everyone to the table.

The other thing that makes it important, and what scares me sometimes, is we focus so much on the physical buildings and not enough on the culture.

We're not teaching our young people German.

We're not teaching them how to be a community.

We're not teaching them the civic responsibility that they used to have to have here.

Amana represents a time when people cared very deeply about each other and were able to work side by side that those kitchens, what they had in those days.

I still feel when I go to free lunch like we did today, that we're working work side by side with someone, and it's just a closeness.

You can imagine a sisterhood beyond anything.

Girl.

Yes, mom.

Mom always said that.

She said that the we had to go early in the morning.

Sometimes you felt like you didn't want to get up.

You were 14 years old.

You got up when it was cold or hot or whatever, and you went to the kitchen and there were the others, and you just gloated in that.

They they just get it.

They always have fun.

You said they worked well together.

Mom's kitchen, they.

But where they worked, they always had fun.

In fact, they even learned mom even learned how to how to play the guitar.

And she thought it was when she was 91.

One of the grandchildren had a guitar and she said, let me have the guitar.

I want to try it.

You remember that right there?

Yeah.

And she tried it.

She had begun.

Yeah.

It didn't sound very good.