The Routledge History of Rural America by Pamela Riney-Kehrberg

Author:Pamela Riney-Kehrberg [Riney-Kehrberg, Pamela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781135054977
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 13.1 Amana farm picture from the mid-1930s, showing use of both tractors and horses, taken by Rudolph Kellenberger. By permission of the Amana Heritage Society.

The colonists rapidly cleared land, constructed villages, barns and craft shops and, in the 1860s, dug a 6¾-mile-long mill race that diverted water from the Iowa River to the various industrial enterprises established by the Society in the villages of Middle and Main Amana. The factories included two woolen mills (together employing one hundred and twenty-five people), a flour mill, sawmills and a calico mill in which twenty-five workers printed patterns on 4,500 yards of muslin fabric, daily.21 By 1883 both the Rock Island and Milwaukee Railroads served the Society.

For all of its effort towards self-sufficiency and isolation, the Society was always connected solidly with the external world. Although Society members in most cases were so isolated that many never learned to speak English, visitors from outside the community began to come as early as the 1860s, eventually necessitating the construction of four hotels. The Society depended on the income from its sale of flour and textiles to purchase goods such as tea, coffee and machinery from the outside as well as the growing list of consumer goods with which its six village general stores were stocked.

As was the case with Zoar, few of the outsiders who visited the Society and wrote about their impressions of the community identified the dichotomy between the agricultural and traditional life espoused by the community and the industrial facilities in the villages. Accounts by outsiders often dwelt on the quaint stone, brick and wooden structures, the trellises and fruit trees and the huge profusion of flowers maintained in almost every Amana yard, instead of the factories. Writer Bertha Horak Shambaugh wrote rhapsodically of the “fringe of grape vines and pickerel weed” that bordered the placid mill race, crossed by “quaint little bridges,” rendering an artificial stream created solely to power machinery into a picturesque water feature. Similarly, Shambaugh described yokes of oxen pulling wagons on the dusty streets of Amana while these same streets led to what was, at the time, the largest textile mill in the state.22

Shambaugh sought to locate the manufacturing of the community within her rural idealization of the villages, noting such humanizing features as old-fashioned spinning wheels, vases of flowers atop looms and the singing of hymns during work hours. The flowers and the hymns may well have been imagined, as neither would have been likely in the rumbling noisy and grimy interior of the mill buildings. Richard T. Ely, a pioneering economic historian, could not resist the urge to write, “I saw more flowers in Amana than in the two hundred miles and more between Amana and Chicago” – comments mirrored by Henry A. Wallace’s more extensive observations about flowers a decade later.23 Thus, the Amana mills were truly “machines in a garden.” Conversely, the mills were in fact picturesque structures of stone and brick, often covered with vines, and they did utilize the products of the surrounding land, in this case wool from sheep, to produce their product.

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