Swabian Farm Museum

The Swabian Farm Museum in Illerbeuren , a district of Kronburg , is ten kilometers south of Memmingen in the Illertal . It is one of the older open-air museums in Germany. In 1955 it was the first of its kind in the south of the Federal Republic. The carrier is a municipal association to which the district of Swabia , the district of Unterallgäu and the association Heimatdienst Illertal belong.

history

The museum was founded in 1955 by Hermann Zeller, who managed the house until 1986. His successor was Otto Kettemann, who carried out this task until 2014. From August 2014 to January 2015 Ursula Winkler was director of the Swabian Farm Museum. From August 1, 2015, Philipp Herzog was museum director. At the beginning of June 2017 he announced that he would not extend his contract, which expired at the end of July, “for various reasons”. Wolfgang Ott has been reactivated from retirement since August 2017 and has been temporarily entrusted with the management of the museum for a year and a half. He was previously the long-time director of the Weißenhorn local history museum and was responsible for the reorganization of several museums. Building researcher Bernhard Niethammer has been the museum director since January 1, 2019.

Buildings and cultural goods

Krugzeller Zehentstadel

The museum has 32 houses in its fund, which provide an insight into the building history and the various house types in the region. On the site in the Illerbeuren district of the Kronburg community, houses and farms from the 17th to the 20th century from Bavarian Swabia have been preserved for posterity. Craft workshops and early technical buildings from the area between Iller and Lech are also presented.

The buildings used to house interior used for living and doing business . Both in individual houses and in separate buildings, special collections and exhibitions deal with related topics:

Carriages and sleighs from the country are collected in the Zehntstadel from Krugzell .
Country life in the period before the 1950s is documented in the Neubauerhof, taking contemporary history into account.
The currently closed Swabian Rifle Museum, which is affiliated with the Farm Museum, showed exhibits from the traditional history of the shooting industry in the administrative district of Swabia. A new building with a newly designed exhibition should open in 2016. Due to water damage that could not be finally repaired until today (2018), the opening was canceled about a week before the planned date.
Old grave crosses are in the area of the chapel, which has been faithfully rebuilt in the museum .
In an agricultural machinery exhibition with around 1000 m² of exhibition space, tractors from the regional companies Fendt (Marktoberdorf), Osterrieder (Lautrach), Mengele (Günzburg), Dechentreiter (Bäumenheim) and Epple & Buxbaum from Augsburg are on display. In addition to machines for cultivating the fields and the technical aids for hay harvesting and drying, there are also manure spreaders , liquid manure trucks and milking machines . You can also see the prototype of the rotary haymaker from 1959, manufactured by master blacksmith Josef Maugg from Böhen near Memmingen .

You can see Hafner at work and buy their products.

Animals

The farm museum keeps old breeds of pets to give visitors a taste of the wildlife on the old farm. In the autumn of 2000, the Swabian Farm Museum was able to import a few Zaupelschaf , a breed that has become extinct in Germany, from Hungary. In the early 18th century, Zaupelschafe came to Hungary with Swabian emigrants. Nowadays there is only one breeder there, from whom the museum was able to obtain a few specimens. Thus the animals have returned to their ancestral home almost 300 years after their departure.

The horse breed Oberländer Noriker (Oberland draft horse) owes its name to the former Roman province of Noricum , today's Carinthia. The noble, medium-weight cold-blooded horses were first mentioned in an episcopal decree of 1565. The patient Noriker from the Oberland is used in alpine regions to manage steep areas, in forest use as a back horse , and also as a team horse .

The robust Swabian-Hallish country pig is descended from the Celtic-Germanic pig. Since the neck, pelvic area, thighs, tail and, above all, the head are colored black, the animals are also referred to as "Moors' heads". Today there are around 150 registered breeding sows and 15 boars in the Federal Republic of Germany.

The Allgäuer Original Braunvieh , a breed of cattle, was widespread in the foothills of the Alps and the Alps for centuries . In the meantime, the Allgäuer Original Braunvieh is on the list of cattle in Bavaria that are critically endangered. Since 1995 a breed club has been taking care of the preservation of this breed.

The Augsburg chicken is the only breed of chicken in Bavaria. It was crossed from Italian Lamotta and French La Flèche chickens in the Augsburg area around 1880 . The shiny black, greenish shimmering Augsburg chicken has a cup or crown comb (formerly: Augsburger comb) as a special feature. This breed is now considered extremely endangered; In 2002 only about 120 animals were counted.

plants

Fire station and chapel Hettisried

The farm museum not only shows furnished houses on its premises, but also grows old cultivated plants , such as an apple variety that existed 150 years ago. In the Central Swabia sub-assembly, one area is reserved for the cultivation of - mainly - grain. The fields are tilled according to the improved three-field management.

The cottage gardens belonging to the houses are a great attraction for many visitors. Because here you can see in what variety and mixture (vegetables, flowers, medicinal herbs) these small kingdoms were cultivated and cherished. In order to draw attention to the former variety of cultivated plants, the project "Cultivated Plant of the Year in the Farm Museum" was created in the museum. In different years a plant variety (previously allium , legumes, cabbage and beets, tomatoes) is grown and explained in around sixty predominantly older varieties. In addition, a book is published that contains everything you need to know, from cultural history to farming rules to cultivation instructions and cooking recipes.

In order to increase the yield of fruit trees, pulled one already over 200 years ago topiaries , so espaliers . Typical forms of fruit trellises can be seen in a separate area .

What beer was to Bavarians, must was to Swabians. Obtained from apples and pears, it refreshed generations of farmers - today it is almost only a drink for lovers. The fruit trees once lined the streets, and on the outskirts there were orchards. But not only the fruit trees have become fewer, many varieties have also been forgotten. As part of the museum expansion, the farm museum repeatedly plants fruit varieties that were known and planted a hundred years ago.

Swabian Rifle Museum

View of the Woringer Häusle

The Swabian Rifle Museum is currently closed.

In the old museum building, historical material goods, mainly from Swabian riflemen, rifle clubs and rifle clubs, could be viewed on two floors. The time of creation of the objects ranges from the end of the Middle Ages to the end of the 20th century. The oldest of the valuable shooting targets comes from the former imperial city of Memmingen from the year 1508, modern precision sporting weapons from the most recent post-Olympic shooting history. The exhibition documented the technical development of firearms from the matchlock musket from the time of the Thirty Years' War to flintlock and percussion lock mechanisms to semi-automatic and automatic multi-loading weapons, showed examples from the class of cold weapons - tournament bows and crossbows - and cleared the upswing of air pressure sports in the post-war period wide space.

Customs and awareness of tradition in shooting sports were documented in many exhibits. Historical marksmen's flags and standards, discs of honor , trophies, rifle chains , medals and other festivals and decorations were on display in large numbers. The display collection was completed with shooting range systems , equipment for ammunition production and hit evaluation as well as many historical documents.

Since the previous location was viewed as problematic for museum use, a new building with approx. 700 m² of exhibition space was built on the museum grounds on the edge of the old village for a newly designed exhibition on the cultural history of shooting in southern Germany. This was supposed to be opened on July 10, 2016, but this was prevented by water damage that had occurred recently. The damage turned out to be so severe that the opening had to be postponed indefinitely.

Publications

Helga Hoffmann; Otto Kettemann (ed.): Up in the Allgäu, where bread has an end: on the cultural history of a region. Zweckverband Schwäbisches Bauernhofmuseum, Illerbeuren 2000, ISBN 3-931915-03-4 (= printed products of the Swabian Farm Museum Illerbeuren , Volume 14).