The third generation was now grown.  A number of dissatisfied members had left.  Many of the children never joined the society but found work elsewhere.  A great deal of the work had to be done by hired help.  Under the leadership of the younger element it was decided in 1898 to abandon communism.  Appraisers and surveyors were set to work to parcel out the property.  Each of the 136 members received a cash dividend, a home in the village, and a plot of land.  The average value of each share, which was in the neighborhood of $1500, was not a large return for three generations of communistic experimentation.  But these had been, after all, years of moderate competence and quiet contentment, and if they took their toll in the coin of hope, as their song set forth, then these simple Wuerttembergers were fully paid.

The Inspirationists were a sect that made many converts in Germany, Holland, and Switzerland in the eighteenth century.  They believed in direct revelations from God through chosen “instruments.”  In 1817, a new leader appeared among them in the person of Christian Metz, a man of great personal charm, worldly shrewdness, and spiritual fervor.  Allied with him was Barbara Heynemann, a simple maid without education, who learned to read the Scriptures after she was twenty-three years of age.  Endowed with the peculiar gift of “translation,” she was cherished by the sect as an instrument of God for revealing His will.

To this pair came an inspiration to lead their harassed followers to America.  In 1842 they purchased the Seneca Indian Reservation near Buffalo, New York.  They called their new home Ebenezer, and in 1843 they organized the Ebenezer Society, under a constitution which pledged them to communism.  Over eight hundred peasants and artisans joined the colony, and their industry soon had created a cluster of five villages with mills, workshops, schools, and dwellings.  But they were continually annoyed by the Indians from whom they had purchased the site and were distracted by the rapidly growing city of Buffalo, which was only five miles away!

This threat of worldliness brought a revelation that they must seek greater seclusion.  A large tract on the Iowa River was purchased, and to this new site the population was gradually transferred.  There they built Amana.  Within a radius of six miles, five subsidiary villages sprang up, each one laid out like a German dorf, with its cluster of shops and mills, and the cottages scattered informally on the main road.  When the railway tapped the neighborhood, the community in self-defense purchased the town that contained the railway station.  So when the good Christian Metz died in 1867, at the age of seventy-two, his pious followers, thanks to his sagacity, were possessed of some twenty-six thousand acres of rich Iowa land and seven thriving villages, comfortably housing about 1400 of the faithful.  Barbara Heynemann died in 1883, and since her death