Moor museum Moordorf

View over the area

The Moordorf Moor Museum is an East Frisian open-air and moor museum in Moordorf , a district of the municipality of Südbrookmerland . It shows the difficult 200-year development history of an East Frisian bog colony using various dwellings, huts and houses. The Moor Museum celebrated its 40th birthday in 2018. In the preseason, over 28,000 visitors were counted from the beginning of spring on March 20 to the end of October 2018.

Permanent exhibition

Mud huts in the Moordorf Moor Museum

The open-air museum is located on 3.2 hectares of moorland, consisting of Leegmoor (= peated, agriculturally used moor) and high moor. Essentially, the development history of Moordorf as well as the living and working area of the moor colonists starting with the cultivation edict Friedrich II of 1765 are presented on the site. One focus of the exhibition is the presentation of the difficult life of the bog colonists in the village, which, in contrast to the fen colonies , arose largely without a plan. Are shown peat , peat fire , craft and techniques. A boardwalk leads over the remains of a raised moor to a viewing platform. In a moor biotope you can also see typical moor plants such as sundew.

Several buildings from the 18th to 20th centuries have now been rebuilt in the Moordorf Moor Museum. The buildings are true-to-original reconstructions of the sod and plague huts made of peat, mud houses and huts as well as original stone buildings that were transferred here. They give an impression of the poor conditions under which many Moordorf residents had to live well into the 20th century, but also of the social differences. The last mud hut burned down in 1960.

A separate exhibition area is dedicated to the Moordorf sun disk .

history

Entry was 3 DM in 1994

The planning for the museum began in 1978. A working group was founded which immediately began looking for a suitable piece of land near the raised bog. The members of the working group found what they were looking for in a moorland area that was misused as a garbage dump and was eventually bought. Half of it was paid for with funds from the Alma-You Foundation. The municipality of Südbrookmerland paid the other half. The Moormuseum Moordorf association was founded on February 9, 1979 . Its members prepared the area and laid sand paths. In 1983/84 the first exhibition building with an integrated tea room and an apartment for the museum attendant was built.

On July 13, 1984, the entire facility was inaugurated and made accessible to the public. The museum village is visited by up to 35,000 people annually.

Enno Schmidt, the former head of the district adult education center in Aurich, said in his speech at the inauguration ceremony: “The Moordorf Moor Museum is a museum of poverty!” The association largely waives subsidies. Ongoing operations are financed through entrance fees and membership fees.