Amana Colonies

It was 1:00 to 4:00, yeah.

So, so anyway, we decided, we decided on Tuesday night that we would get up and we would go to Cedar Rapids, go to s- go to like Amana Colonies and everything, do that, and then come back and do Gri- do the museum, and then we would drive to, um, Stitch and Clip in Hannibal.

But I, but I'd figured out in the middle of the night that if we did that, we wouldn't even get to Stitch and Clip until after 5:00, so we would have to spend the night anyway, right? So-

Yeah

But, um, we also met my friend Julie up there, Julie Herman.

And-

And so we went to the Amana Colonies, which has a really nice, it's called The Heritage Some- Heritage Design Quilt Shop.

Something Heritage.

So you can find out when new episodes are released.

We've had a little bit of a lull here in the summer, people being in and out and schedules on, uh, summer break but we're ramping back up here and getting ready for all the stuff that's going on uh and in fact next week at this time you'll find probably the three of us wandering around handworks in the amana colonies in iowa here checking out all the cool tools and dealers and people that are going to be there looking at hand tools.

So if you see us, come on up, say hi.

Thanks for listening for the show.

This week, returning to America's fascination with religion and diets led me to look at what the National Park Service's inventory of utopias might be.

So this led me to the Amana Colonies just west of both Iowa City and Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Unlike many religious utopias founded in the 19th century around the United States, this organization of true inspirationists that emigrated from Germany in the 1840s managed to reinvent itself several times and remains with its original ideas intact, but still flexible in the face of the world changing around it.

Originally a truly communal colony of co-religionists, the Amana Colonies expanded to seven largely self-sufficient villages that mainly interacted with the rest of the world through selling handicrafts and foodstuffs based on skills and expertise also imported from Germany.

Since life for all people depended heavily on communal support and included almost no cash payments through the mid-1800s, this way of life was not out of step with their neighbors.

The care and pride in craftsmanship that was a cornerstone of their community made it so they had goods the rest of the world was interested in purchasing, things like watches, cloth, and even smoked meats.

However, as the villages grew and the mechanical age encroached on the villages, coupled with the financial collapse of the country during the Great Depression of the 1920s, it threw the old methods of funding the communal life into disarray.

Faced with the possibility of either dissolution or contraction and a turn to an even more austere way of life, the Amana Colonies decided to give up their internal moneyless existence and went through what they called the Great Change.

Um, but, but a, a good case has these multiple, multiple chains of evidence.

Uh, I investigated a case here in Iowa at the Amana Colonies where there was a, um, a streak...

A fellow had taken three pictures of a streak of light, uh, across the sky, and, uh, we went to investigate that thing, and at, at first it was inexplicable.

We couldn't understand it.