Johanne “Amalie” Feuchter was born in the Province of Saxony, Prussia (modern-day Germany) in 1820. She married Johann “Phillip” Mannstedt (1812–1907) in 1841. The couple and their five children immigrated to the United States in 1873 aboard the ship S.S. Donan to New York City. The family soon made their way to the city of Dubuque, Iowa, and settled down.
One of Amalie’s daughters, Natalie (b. 1855), started her own business around 1874 manufacturing “fine hair-work” at their residence at 1218 Iowa Street (Hawley’s Dubuque Directory, 1874–1875). The business, referred to as the “Mannstedt Sisters,” eventually moved to 1032 Main Street. She and her teenage sister, Amalia, crafted and sold human hair goods and hair jewelry until the 1890s. Amalia continued to work at the location as a hairdresser with her children until finally selling the business to the O’Donnell sisters.
Just four years after immigrating to the United States, the family’s matriarch, Johanne Amalie, passed away in December 1877. Her daughters likely created this hair wreath to memorialize their mother using family hair. The locks are wrapped with wire, twisted, tufted, and looped to create flowers and leaves. The flowers are adorned with small turquoise and crystalline seed beads. At the top of the shadow box, the hairwork is formed into a weeping willow, a motif associated with grief and love, as the drooping branches simulate a shrouded figure hunched in sorrow. In each corner, there is an initial, likely of her still-local children at the time. At the center of the wreath is the elder Amalie’s coffin plaque, a metal plate with her name and birth and death dates engraved in German. During the late Victorian period in the United States (circa 1880s to 1900), these name plaques were popularly removed from the tops of coffins by loved ones of the deceased. Victorian hairwork also became very popular as mementos of both the living and the dead. For loved ones of the deceased, hair wreaths and coffin plaques served as memento mori, a “reminder of death.”
Amalie’s great-grandson donated this wreath to the museum in 2025 in memory of his parents, George E. and Helen Schumacher. George passed down stories of helping his mother and aunt Nat make real-hair wigs in the store as a young child.