MIDDLE AMANA — The Amana Heritage Museum opened a new exhibit this month, sharing the history of its print shop as a 19th- and 20th-century agribusiness.
Titled “Bringing to Light,” the exhibit includes a Linotype machine, print plates and samples of letterhead printed by the Amana business.
Jennifer Miller, an undergraduate from the University of Iowa who is a former intern at the University of Iowa, answered the questions of visitors to the exhibition during a last-week open house. “Amana print shop is not just the religious books,” said Miller.
Miller is a master’s candidate in book art. She spent the months of June and July assisting Amana Heritage Society curator Rebecca Simpson as she combed through agribusiness ads, correspondence and agreements between 1870 and 1932. The aim was to document the job-printing industry, which had been a part of Iowa County History that has never before been explored.
Amana sold dozens of agricultural products to local farmers and also outside. It was a dealer in many product lines. The new exhibit recreates the local ag economy to show communal Amana’s connections to its customers and vendors, including Iowa County farmers and customers in a dozen other states.
Gary Frost has been studying this collection for the past 20 years. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Iowa Center for the Book. Frost explained that it was once housed at Homestead. But the 2020 derecho ripped the roof from the building, and a 130 year-old oak tree was broken.
The 15 years the collection spent in Homestead “was fun for me, but nobody ever came there,” said Frost. Frost says Jon Childers of Amana Heritage Society imagined that the collection would be more popular in Amanas.
The exhibit is located at the Communal kitchen Museum, 1003 26th Ave. Middle Amana. Frost demonstrated the Linotype on display during last week’s open house at the museum.
“When the [German] community came to Ebenezer and Amana, the printing just surged,” said Frost. “The printing industry there has a history of 300 years,” he said. “We had better start commemorating it.”
Ottmar Mergenthaler is a German who invented the Linotype. The first commercial use was in 1886. Frost said that at one point, Linotype was used to create all newspapers in the United States.
In the 1980s, the Linotype was no longer used by most newspapers.
Frost stated that the Linotype at the Amana Museum was brought to Iowa in 1953. German residents in the Amana Colonies were able to use the Linotype in English, but they continued to typeset German manually.
Linotypes are still being used today to produce publications by Amanas.