Heuerhaus
The residential buildings for servants belonging to a farm , especially in the heaths of northwest Germany to East Frisia , are referred to as wage houses .
The staff ( Heuerleute or Heuer pieces ) were often spätergeborene sons of peasants who had her eldest brother, the heir to the farm left. The wage house also regularly included a piece of land that was worked by the hirer and whose income was due to him. With this lease and additional manual work, often only a small income could be achieved. Many men from these hireling families therefore regularly moved in the summer to mow grass or cut peat in neighboring rich Holland , or they hired themselves out as seamen on the ships. When the USA actively recruited immigrants and workers in the early 19th century, it was mainly the former Holland-goers in the Oldenburger Münsterland and Osnabrücker Land who established their own existence in the New World.
The wage house often resembled a small copy of the farmhouse . There were usually no horse stables in the front of the house, but there was space for a cow on one side and a few pigs on the other. In the Oldenburger Münsterland and the Lüneburg Heath in particular , hay houses made of oak half-timbered houses were predominant, lined with bricks or clay, which rested on solid field stone foundations .
Restored wage houses can today u. a. can be visited in the open-air museum Ammerland farmhouse in Bad Zwischenahn and in the museum village of Cloppenburg .
literature
- Robben, Bernd / Skibicki, Martin / Lensing, Helmut / Strodt, Georg: Heuerhouses in Transition - From the poor Kotten to the individual dream house, Haselünne 2017.