The Amana Colonies: A Communal Utopia That Became a Refrigerator Brand
Near Amana Colonies, Iowa
In east-central Iowa, on a stretch of bottomland along the Iowa River, seven German villages sit in a cluster unlike anything else in the United States. They are the Amana Colonies, and for nearly eighty years they operated as one of the most successful communal societies in American history. The Community of True Inspiration was founded in seventeen fourteen in the German principality of Hesse by Pietist mystics who believed that God still spoke through living prophets.
They called these prophets Werkzeuge, the German word for instruments or tools. For this belief, and for refusing military service, state oaths, and church-run schools, the German authorities persecuted them for over a century: fines, imprisonment, beatings, expulsion from one place after another. In eighteen forty-two, the community's leader, a carpenter named Christian Metz, led a scouting party to North America.
They settled near Buffalo, New York, in what they called the Ebenezer Society. In eighteen fifty-five, seeking greater isolation from growing cities, they purchased twenty-six thousand acres of Iowa prairie and timber and moved west. They laid out seven villages, each a reasonable walk from the others, each with its own church, communal kitchen houses, a school, and craft workshops.
They named the central village Amana, a Hebrew word from the Song of Solomon meaning to remain faithful or to stay true. For nearly eighty years the society operated with no individual wages and no private property, only a small yearly allowance to spend at village stores. Members were assigned their trades and their houses.
Fifty-five communal kitchen houses fed the villages, each kitchen serving a cluster of households three times a day. The community produced its own cloth, furniture, leather goods, and food. Then in nineteen thirty-two, the Great Depression strained the communal economy past its limits.
The members voted to reorganize. The communal kitchens closed. Private property was established.
The community called it the Great Change. What emerged from the Great Change was, eventually, one of the most recognized appliance brands in America. The buildings that housed the old kitchens now serve tourists.
The seven villages remain.
