By some estimates, over one-half of German settlers to the state became farmers. Merchants, tradesmen, and military officers abandoned their earlier professions to take up the plow. Early immigrants reported that Iowa’s prairie soil was wondrously fertile and much cheaper to clear than Wisconsin’s forests.

Germans also brought skills in a variety of trades. Masons and carpenters helped to create main streets, homes, and barns throughout the state. Bakers, shoemakers, and tailors kept Iowans fed and clothed. Meanwhile, German bankers and pharmacists cared for Iowans’ finances and health. There were few German lawyers and physicians, however: most immigrants shied away from professions that required a high proficiency in English.

On occasion, Germans made significant contributions to Iowa’s leading industries. Engineers John Froelich and Louis Witry created the world’s first gasoline-powered tractor, the Waterloo Boy, later bought by John Deere. Firms such as Witmer & Witmer Insurance (Des Moines) or Rath Meatpacking (Waterloo) figured prominently in the history of insurance and meatpacking in the state. Leopold and Abraham Sheuerman, immigrants from Binau near Heidelberg, established woolen mills in Marengo and Des Moines, eventually becoming the state’s largest clothing manufacturers. These industries employed other immigrants in turn, not just from Germany.

Most businesses were family-owned and -operated. Wives often tended shop rooms and kept accounts, while children helped where they could. Prior to industrialization, unmarried women often served as domestic servants or worked in textile manufacturing. Later, many were employed as shop workers or as unskilled labor in factories that placed a premium on manual dexterity, such as Muscatine’s pearl button industry, founded by Hamburg native John Boepple, or Davenport’s cigar rolling shops.

German Iowans joined other workers in demanding a safe working environment and basic social provisions from their employers. Factory workers and meatpackers from Ireland, Scandinavia, and Germany were at the forefront of unionization efforts throughout the state. Like their counterparts in Milwaukee and elsewhere, laborers in towns like Muscatine supported union activists and voted socialist, much to the chagrin of German-Iowan factory owners such as John Boepple.