front cover of Gardening the Amana Way
Gardening the Amana Way
Lawrence L. Rettig
University of Iowa Press, 2013
Gardening in Iowa’s Amana Colonies is the culmination of techniques that stretch back several centuries to central Europe, when adherents to a new faith called the Community of True Inspiration formed their own self-reliant communities. As a child of parents who were part of the communal life of the Amana Society, Larry Rettig pays homage to the Amana gardening tradition and extends it into the twenty-first century.

Each of the seven villages in Amana relied on the food prepared in its communal kitchens, and each kitchen depended on its communal garden for most of the dishes served (the kitchens in Rettig’s hometown produced more than four hundred gallons of sauerkraut in 1900). Rettig begins by describing the evolution of communal gardening in old Amana, focusing especially on planting, harvesting, and storing vegetables from asparagus to egg lettuce to turnips. With the passing of the old order in 1932, the number of the society’s large vegetable gardens and orchards dwindled, but Larry Rettig and his wife, Wilma, still grow some of the colonies’ heirloom varieties in their fourth-generation South Amana vegetable garden. In 1980 they founded a seed bank to preserve them for future generations.

Rettig’s chapters on modern vegetable and flower gardening in today’s Amana Colonies showcase his Cottage-in-the-Meadow Gardens, now listed with the Smithsonian in its Archives of American Gardens. Old intermingles with new across his gardens: heirloom lettuce keeps company with the latest cucumber variety, a hundred-year-old rose arches over the newest daylilies and heucheras, and ancient grapevines intertwine with newly planted wisteria, all adding up to a rich array of colorful plantings.

Rettig extends his gardening advice into the kitchen and workroom. He shares family recipes for any number of traditional dishes, including radish salad, dumpling soup, Amana pickled ham, apple bread, eleven-minute meat loaf, and strawberry rhubarb pie. Moving into the workroom, he shows us how to make hammered botanical prints, Della Robbia centerpieces, holiday wreaths, a gnome home, and a waterless fountain. Touring his gardens, with their historic and unusual plants, will make gardeners everywhere want to reproduce the groupings and varieties that surround Larry and Wilma Rettig’s 1900 red brick house.
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front cover of Kolonie-Deutsch
Kolonie-Deutsch
Life and Language in Amana, An Expanded Edition
Philip E. Webber
University of Iowa Press, 1993

Founded as a communal society in 1855 by German Pietists, the seven villages of Iowa’s Amana Colonies make up a community whose crafts, architecture, and institutions reflect—and to an extent perpetuate—the German heritage of earlier residents. In this intriguing blend of sociolinguistic research and stories from Colonists both past and present, Philip Webber examines the rich cultural and linguistic traditions of the Amanas.

Although the Colonies are open to the outside world, particularly after the Great Change of 1932, many distinctive vestiges of earlier lifeways survive, including the local variety of German known by its speakers as Kolonie-Deutsch. Drawing upon interviews with more than fifty Amana-German speakers in 1989 and 1990, Webber explores the nuances of this home-grown German, signaling the development of local microdialects, the changing pattern in the use of German in the Colonies, and the reciprocal influence of English and German on residents’ speech. By letting his sources tell their own stories of earlier days, in which the common message seems to be wir haben fun gehabt or “we had fun working together,” he illuminates the history and unique qualities of each Colony through the prism of language study.

Webber’s introduction to this paperback edition provides an up-to-date itinerary for visitors to the Colonies, information about recent publications on Amana history and culture, and an overview of expanded research opportunities for language study and historical inquiry. The result is an informative and engaging study that will be appreciated by linguists, anthropologists, and historians as well as by general readers interested in these historic villages.

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Picturing Utopia
Bertha Shambaugh and the Amana Photographers
Abigail Foerstner
University of Iowa Press, 2005
More than a hundred years ago, Bertha Shambaugh set out to photograph the Amana Colonies, the utopian religious community twenty miles northwest of Iowa City. Following her example, several Amana members ignored their community's prohibition against photography and took up cameras to record the people and events around them. Picturing Utopia celebrates their artistic vision and offers a rare glimpse into a 19th-century religious utopia, providing an unbroken photographic record beginning with Shambaugh's work in the 1890s and continuing through the Colonies' transition to mainstream American life with the Great Change in 1932.Abigail Foerstner, whose great uncle was one of the Amana photographers included in this book, brings together this stunning collection of photographs along with the stories of the photographers who took them. Together the pictures and text fill in an untold chapter in American photographic history and provide an insider's view of life in Amana.
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front cover of Seasons of Plenty
Seasons of Plenty
Amana Communal Cooking
Emilie Hoppe
University of Iowa Press, 2008

Seasons of Plenty provides colorful descriptions, folk stories, appealing photgraphs and illustrations, excerpts from journals and ledgers, recipes for good food like savory dumpling soup, mashed potatoes with browned bread crumbs, Sauerbraten, and feather light apple fritters.

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