Ammann is a curiously blank figure for the founder of a people named after him. What survives is mostly the correspondence of the division itself, gathered in the Letters of the Amish Division, and it shows a man who forced a schism over a discipline he believed Menno Simons had commanded, then spent years trying to undo it. He added two practices that outlived him: feetwashing at communion, and a plain dress specified rather than merely encouraged. Amish preaching does not hold him up as an example and does not tell his story from the pulpit — an Amish person may go a lifetime without hearing a sermon about Jakob Ammann. The tradition venerates martyrs, not founders.