Bauernhausmuseum Bortfeld

The Bauernhausmuseum Bortfeld is a rural life museum in Bortfeld, a village in the Wendeburg municipality of Peine district. It occupies a protected 17th-century hall house, a type of Low German farmstead known as a Zweiständerhaus. The building was raised in 1639 after a fire destroyed an earlier house on the same spot in 1566. The museum began in 1911 when Johann Albrecht, then regent of the Duchy of Brunswick, opened the first display of everyday farm tools and rooms. It ranks among the earliest open-air museums in today’s Lower Saxony. Original exhibits from the 19th century showed a parlour, bedroom and kitchen furnished as they would have been, alongside tools such as a gristmill, spinning wheel and reel. A shed held larger machines and vehicles used in the fields. The main building is a timber-frame structure on a low field-stone base, its thatched hipped roof still bearing scars from a lightning strike in 2016. Inside, the entrance passage leads to the central threshing floor with small lean-to rooms on either side. At the far end lies the chamber partition containing three living rooms. Plans drawn up after the fire aim to show how the house’s occupants lived from the early modern period to the present day.