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 intern from the University of Iowa, answered questions for visitors during an open house for the exhibit last week. “Amana print shop is not just the religious books,” said Miller.
A Master of Fine Arts candidate in book arts, Miller spent May, June and July helping Amana Heritage Society Curator Rebecca Simpson comb through agribusiness advertisements, correspondence and agreements from 1870-1932 to document the job printing industry, a previously unexplored part of Iowa County History.
Amana produced dozens of ag products for local and outside sale and was a dealer for numerous product lines sold to area farmers. 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, professor emeritus and conservator from the University of Iowa Center for the Book, has studied this collection for 20 years. It was formerly housed in Homestead, said Frost, but the 2020 derecho tore the roof off the building and broke a 130-year-old oak.
The 15 years the collection spent in Homestead “was fun for me, but nobody ever came there,” said Frost. Jon Childers, executive director of Amana Heritage Society, imagined the collection would find more traffic in the Amanas, Frost said.
The exhibit is housed in the Communal Kitchen Museum, 1003 26th Ave. in 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 has a 300-year history there, he said. “We had better start commemorating it.”
German Ottmar Mergenthaler invented the Linotype machine. It was first used commercially in 1886. At one time, the Linotype composed all the newspapers in the United States, said Frost.
Most newspapers had given up the Linotype by the 1980s.
The Linotype in the Amana museum came to the Iowa community in 1953, Frost said. The German residents of the Amana Colonies used the Linotype for typesetting in English but continued to typeset in German by hand.
The Linotype is functional and is still used to compose publications for the Amanas.