German Hausbarn
What is unique about the German Hausbarn?
German settlers came to Iowa to establish farms and start new lives, but they continued to live in structures that suited their old lives in Germany.
Transcript
(A flag made up of three horizontal color blocks, black, red and yellow, billows in the breeze.)
[Abby Brown] About 40% of people living in Iowa can trace at least part of their ancestry back to Germany. Those families are celebrated at Manning Hausbarn Heritage Park.
(Map marking Carroll County, Iowa, in the west central region of the state.)
Iowa became a state in 1846. The rich soil here made it a great place for loads of immigrants to start a farm and a new life. So lots of people from Germany made their way to Iowa. The townspeople of Manning wanted to keep their German heritage alive and visible. So in the 1990s, they purchased a real German hausbarn and had it set here piece by piece all the way from Germany.
(Authentic German Polka music playing.)
(An etched glass window pane above the door of the German hausbarn includes decorative scrolls. Text etched in the glass reads, “Germany 1660 on the left and America 1999 on the right.”)
(The German hausbarn is a large rectangular building made of brick with wooden beams spaced throughout the brick. The hausbarn has a thatched, peaked roof. The exterior of the hausbarn has a door and large window in the center and two large colonial style windows on the left and right sides.)
This hausbarn was built in 1660. At that time, this was a common way for German farmers to live.
(The interior of the hausbarn is a large open space with wooden cross beams spaced evenly to hold up the roof. A small interior room shows a wooden table under a window with several cooking pots and an oval shaped serving dish on top.)
The family lived in one part of the hausbarn and their livestock and farm equipment would be kept in another part of the hausbarn. That's right! They were all in the same building.
There are other things to see in Manning's Hausbarn Heritage Park like buildings from a farmstead that operated here in Manning soon after the town was created, a church that was established in the town early on and antique farm equipment. But the centerpiece is definitely the ancient, authentic German hausbarn.
Celebrating Iowa's agriculture and ancestry is what this park is all about.
Every county in Iowa has a story to tell about the people who settled there. We learned a lot today about Iowa's German heritage here in Carroll County.
Funding for FIND Iowa has been provided by The Coons Foundation, Pella and the Gilchrist Foundation.