Moheda Hembygdsgård
Open air museum in Moheda
In the northern part of the municipality Alvesta Kommun, the open-air museum Moheda Hembygdsgård in the church village Moheda offers a worthwhile insight into the rural architecture of Småland during the 18th and 19th centuries.
The local heritage association founded Moheda Hembygdsgård in 1935 to preserve buildings for posterity that represent the cultural history of the region. Within the first ten years, eleven buildings had been dismantled at their original locations and rebuilt in the open-air museum, and to this day the very active local history association has increased the number of buildings to 16.
These are residential buildings of various types and farm buildings with different functions, some of which are still completely furnished in the original, others with furniture and objects typical of the period.
The buildings and collections at Moheda Hembygdsgård
The very first building in the museum was the so-called Ryggastuga, a small simple dwelling house with a grass roof, in which there is no ceiling between the living room and the roof truss. The small house, which is largely furnished in the original style, was built in the 1790s and has been in the museum since 1936. An even simpler version of a residential house is represented by the so-called Jordkulan. This is a house that was largely dug into a slope in order to save building materials. Only the roof, the front gable wall and short pieces of the two longitudinal walls are looking out of the earth – the other walls are formed by the soil and the floor consists of clay.
In comparison, the two-storey Mangård, the former main house of a vicarage, is downright luxurious. The house, which is completely furnished in the typical style of the time, originally dates from around 1730 and has a living room, anteroom, kitchen and bedroom on the ground floor and a few guest rooms on the upper floor. In the rooms there are also collections with old objects, such as a coin collection, antique books or historical hunting weapons on display.
A collection of old tools and handicraft products is located in the large two-storey loft shed next to the large residential house. The 18th-century shed is of log construction, covered with a grass roof, has a gallery with two stairways and was originally a warehouse. Other former farm buildings are scattered throughout the grounds. Among them a village smithy completely furnished in the original style, a malthouse, a small watermill, a hayloft or a guardroom with two detention cells.
In the cultural house of the museum, built in 2018, there is the school museum of Moheda. The collection, started in 1968, is housed in a reconstructed historical classroom and consists of school desks from different periods, old maps and display boards, as well as all kinds of historical teaching materials and books from the region.
The museum grounds are open to the public all year round and on Sundays in the summer months the buildings and the school museum are open for visits.
