Guided Tours

Guided Tours The History of Maihaugen Anders Sandvig, the founder of Maihaugen, came to Lillehammer as a young dentist in 1885. He had contracted a serious lung disease and thought he only had a few months left to live. The climate in the town was considered to be good for people with lung disease and he gradually recovered completely. He died in 1950 at the age of 88. As a dentist, Sandvig was responsible for all of Gudbrandsdalen. On his travels, he began to collect objects from the old farming culture that was in the process of disappearing. Nordiska Museet in Stockholm was buying old objects in Gudbrandsdalen at this time. Sandvig thought it was important for the old objects not to disappear from Norway. He not only collected precious, special objects. Everyday objects were just as interesting. He also bought old buildings and reerected them in his own garden in the centre of Lillehammer. This gave him the space to exhibit the objects. The collection was moved to Maihaugen in 1904. Today the museum has nearly 200 historical buildings in three departments: Bygda – a village in Gudbrandsdalen from the 18th-19th centuries Byen - Lillehammer in the early 20th century Boligfeltet – homes from nearly every decade of the 20th century Garmo Stave Church The church was traditionally the village's meeting place, for services and for gatherings in front of it. Torgeir Gamle built the church on Garmo farm in Lom in return for King Olav Haraldsson, later called Olav den Hellige (Olav the Holy), giving him the Tesse fishing lake. This is said to have taken place in 1021, and this was the first church to be built in Garmo. A new church was built in around 1200. This is the church in Maihaugen today. It has been extended somewhat. A stave church is a church built using the stave technique. It consists of a framework of vertical posts and crossbeams. The framework is filled out with boards and planks that form the walls. Churches continued to be built using the stave technique long after other houses had started being built using the cogging technique. Cogged timber walls produced better insulation and warmer houses. This was important in this cold country. For churches, however, it was more important to build them tall and big than to keep them warm. This was possible with a stave structure. Stave churches had no windows apart from small round peepholes at the top of the wall, as has been preserved in the choir. The church was extended several times. A ridge turret with room for the church bells was added in 1690. The last extension took place in 1730, when the church assumed its current form. The congregation had grown and the extension was necessary to provide room for everybody. With the cogged transept, the church became a cruciform church. This was in line with the 18th century style of church building in Gudbrandsdalen. The cathedral built in Oslo in the 1690s may have been the inspiration. Garmo Stave Church was consecrated for use by the Church of Norway when it was re-erected at Maihaugen in 1921. It is used for services and weddings by the Parish of Lillehammer in the summer. The Pillory The pillory is outside the gate of the churchyard. This is a wooden post with a neck iron in which a convicted person was locked and left to be the laughing stock of the churchgoers. Anyone who ended up in the pillory was marked for life. The pillory was used, among other things, to punish swearing and for young people who disturbed the services. The pillory was only abolished in 1848 but it was little used in the time just before it was abolished. The Parsonage The parsonage was built when Friedrich Grüner took office as a parson in Vågå. He had married Anna Hedvig in 1696 at the Manor in Larvik. This was the residence for the Norwegian governor Coount Ulrik Frederik Gyldenløve, to whom the bride was related. Anna Hedvig and Fridrich Grüner had spent many years at Gyldenløve’s court in Copenhagen before they arrived at Vågå. She was in possession of quite a fortune, and the large parish secured the parson with a good income. Thus, the Grüner family became a link between the building styles and life styles of the Danish- Norwegian upper classes and the local traditions of Vågå. The Manor in Larvik was a source of inspiration to Grüner when he wanted to build a contemporary and worthy dwelling on the farm. In the parsonage one can see how the mountain district of Vågå and the Continent have been united. The bays on either side of the outside gallery, for example, were influenced by European style. Each of the rooms in the house serves a purpose; there is a living room, a bedroom, a kitchen and a study for the parson. The servants would take all their meals in the kitchen, which could be accessed through a door at the back of the house. The entrance to the parson’s study was meant for business calls, whereas guests would enter through the living room door. The kitchen has a fire place, cupboards on the walls and benches as on any other farm. Pewter plates, faience and a number of copper pots in the kitchen give an impression of an economic means above the average for peasants. The interior in the living room, on the other hand, is in a more urban style with painted wallpaper under a white painted ceiling. Cupboards and chests are imported. Since tile stoves were uncommon in Norway, this one is also imported. The furniture is placed along the walls, but the dining table is in the middle of the floor. In this way the servants could reach to serve each place setting. A clavichord is placed by the window. This was a popular musical instrument with people of the upper classes in the 18th century. Music was an important part of good breeding. The wallpaper was imported from the Continent, possibly from Holland, but its age is uncertain. Originally it used to hang at Falkensten at Horten. In 1777, however, it was sold at an auction to the parson in Hedrum and remained at that parsonage until it was demolished in 1897. When the adjustment to the living room was to take place at re-erection of the parsonage at Maihaugen, the painter Lars Jorde filled in the missing pieces. The motifs probably tell a story about a day in the life of an upper class family. The people and the scenery are popular rococo motifs from the end of the 18th century. School Built in the 1860s in Øygarden, Skjåk. From 1739, all children in Norway had to go to school and learn reading and religion. In rural districts, there were travelling schools, with the teachers going from district to district. They gathered the children of a village in one of the farms and taught them for a while before travelling on. Most children did not get many weeks of teaching. In 1860, there was a new Schools Act that required every school district with over 30 pupils to build its own school. Thousands of schools were built as a result of this Act. Most of them look just like this one, with a schoolroom and a teacher’s home for a single teacher. The school year, curriculum and timetable were expanded. Science, geography, history, writing and arithmetic became important subjects in addition to reading and Christianity. Children in rural districts encountered a wide and unfamiliar world at school. Not all parents were equally enthusiastic about the knowledge the books and the teacher’s stories brought. They thought a lot of it was unnecessary learning for people who would only work with the soil and animals. Bjørnstad A farmhouse from the end of the 18th century from Vågå. Bjørnstad is a large farm. The average farm usually had 12 to 15 buildings. But here there are 27. The buildings are arranged around two yards, one for people and one for animals. The farmhouses, storehouses and sheds are around the inner yard. The stable is a partition between the yards. The cattle yard is the outer yard with livestock, the cowshed and barns. Each building had its own function. When buildings are built using the cogging technique, it is easier to build a lot of small buildings with walls as long as the logs than to build bigger buildings in which the logs have to be joined to create longer walls. The open hearth house, with a dirt floor and a fireplace in the middle of the room with an open vent in the ceiling to let smoke out and light in, is a type of building that was used since Viking times. The farmhouse built in 1777 was modern when it was built, with windows, wooden floors, fireplaces and two storeys. The fact that the retirement house (where the older generation lived after the younger generation had taken over the farm) was just as big as the main house shows that this was a big farm. Maihaugen, 2609 Lillehammer, +61288900, fax 61288901, [email protected] .

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