[5][4] Anabaptist scholar Susan Biesecker-Mast calls it "an effort to exceed the tourist economy of Holmes County by offering a transformative rhetoric for its visitors.

[6] In June 1979 a local Mennonite, Helen F. Smucker, offered funding for a studio, materials, and a display facility for the finished work in exchange for a share in ownership of the painting.

[2] Smucker died later that year, and a group of investors bought out her share and decided to build a display facility on the Amish Farm, one of the earliest tourist-oriented businesses in the area.

They formed a committee to develop a Mennonite Information Center; the main agenda item at their first meeting was concern about the painting being purchased by someone who wanted to use it in a business venture.

[8] The remainder of the painting demonstrates how the Amish, Mennonite, and Hutterite movements grew, moved and developed from the Anabaptist beginning in 1525 in Zurich, Switzerland, their persecutions and their emigrations.

"[2] She notes that the primary theme of the mural that its story is not one but many interwoven threads, "complicated and messy" and that it was unlikely viewers would come away "with a sense of a neat chronology."

[2] This in turn she likens to the attempts at easy commodification of the Amish by local entrepreneurs: "Just as one cannot hold the painting in one's hands or one's gaze, the mural suggests that this history and these people are not, in fact, reducible to a singular narrative."

Sue Gorisek, writing in Ohio magazine, said, "As a work of art, it's impressive....As history, it's downright chilling," with depictions of beheadings, drownings, and burnings.

Gorisek notes that "Gaugel has chosen to depict the bloodiest era—the mid-16th century—in a turbulence of interwoven scenes bound together with subtle waves of a reddish hue, which can be seen as fire, or blood.

"[11] When the painting was first put on display, some Amish community members had reservations, seeing it as self-promotional and therefore unseemly, and local farmers would not allow signage on their land.

"[8] Heinz Gaugel was born in the Black Forest Region of Germany, where he grew up speaking Swabish, a dialect similar to Pennsylvania Dutch.

[16] He was living in Ontario when he travelled to Columbus, Ohio in 1962, stopped in the town of Berlin for lunch, and overheard someone speaking what sounded much like his mother tongue.