Girls and boys always listen when grandfather begins a tale with, “When I was a boy.” But many times the girls and boys who listen to grandfather’s tales find it hard to make pictures in their minds of the houses grandfather tells about, of the games he played, or of the dances he and grandmother danced. And it is much, much harder to understand when grandfather and grandmother tell the tales that their grandfathers and grandmothers have told them!
Many Swedish children go to a museum each year to see how their great-great-great-grandparents actually lived. For in that northern country—and in Norway too—people have built museums which are different from America’s big buildings with their many showcases filled with things of long ago. They have built what they call open-air museums.
A Swedish man got the idea for such a museum. One day more than sixty years ago that man, a doctor, was far out in the country districts of Sweden. There he saw old, old buildings with furniture like the furniture used long, long ago. He saw people dressed in costumes like those worn by their great-great-great-grandparents. The doctor said to himself, “Why not buy some of those old, old houses, their furnishings, and the costumes of the people, and put them where many people can see them?”
Very soon after, the doctor began carrying out his idea. Other people helped him. What a big task it was! They brought together old houses, old churches, old schoolhouses, old windmills, and other farm buildings from all over Sweden. On a large piece of wooded land outside Stockholm they rebuilt homes and constructed whole farms as nearly as possible like homes and farms of the long, long ago. That is the way they made an open-air museum.
One day a class of Swedish school children visited an open-air museum. Very soon after they entered the gate they saw a group of buildings. The buildings were made of rude logs which have turned dark brown with age in the sun and rain. The teacher said that the group of houses belonged to one family. The pupils asked, “Why did a family build a group of houses so close together like this?”
The teacher told them that in the early days a family in Sweden usually had several houses. They had a house with thick walls and thick roofs where they lived in the winter. They had another house with lighter walls and roofs where they lived in the summer. They had a storehouse in which to keep their food and fuel. They also had a guest house, for in those days the people in Sweden gave their guests a whole house to themselves.
The pupils went inside one old, old house which had been built about seven hundred years ago. It is a one-story house with a sod roof. Inside the children found furniture placed about the rooms as it had been placed in those early days. But, of course, there was little furniture. And strangest of all there were no windows in the house. The light the people could get from the sun came into the living room through a hole in the roof above the center of the room. That hole was just above an open fireplace. Through it the smoke from the fire could escape. A long pole hung from the hole into the room below. On that pole was a thin skin which could be pulled into place over the hole when the rains came.
But the children saw other houses more like those in which their grandfathers and grandmothers had lived. In those houses the fireplace was built in the corner of the room. They saw some fireplaces with kettles hanging just as they had hung in the days when a fire had blazed on the fireplace. In the room were rude chairs cut from large tree trunks. On the ceilings pictures had been carved and painted. The children knew the stories which those pictures told, for the stories were Bible stories which they had read many times.
Some of the boys found an old bed which amused them very much. It had three stories. The first story stood out into the room about a foot farther than the second story, and the second story stood out about a foot farther than the top story. In that way there were two steps up to the upper bed. The girls and boys laughed, then the teacher lifted the lid into the lowest bed and said, “This is where the cats and dogs slept.” Then he showed them the inside of the middle bed and said, “This is where the children slept.” The children then guessed that the top bed was for the mother and father.
That afternoon the pupils went to see the folk-dances. Some of their older brothers and sisters were in the dances. They wore costumes such as Swedish people long ago wore, they danced the dances that were danced in those days.
When the school children got back to their school the next day, they wanted to dance some of the old Swedish dances. The gymnasium teacher helped them learn the steps, and the sewing teacher helped them make their costumes. Then one day they danced for their mothers and fathers and their grandmothers and grandfathers.
When the teacher of those children told them about the man who had made the gift of the museum to Sweden, the pupils agreed that the man who built the open-air museum was a citizen of whom Sweden may be proud.