Today we’re taking a break from Little Speckled Frog week and heading back to 2011 for throwback thursday. My mom came for a visit that summer and while she was here we headed up to the Gammelgarden Museum in Scandia, Minnesota.
I’d driven past this place many times on my way up to a scrapbook retreat in Lindstrom and I’d always wanted to find time to check it out. So with my mom here and no plans for the day, we decided to drive up to Scandia and check it out. Unfortunately, even though I had checked their website and saw that they opened at 10 a.m., what I didn’t realize was that you couldn’t go inside any of the buildings unless you were on a tour and the tour wasn’t until 1 p.m. Drat! So we made do with wandering around the grounds.
Gammelgarden means “old farm” in Swedish, and this is an “open air museum devoted to Swedish immigration in the United States.”
The museum sits on 11 acres and has several buildings including the Välkommen Hus, Präst Hus, Gammel Kyrkan, Ladugård, Immigrant Hus and Swedish Stuga.
Maybe the next time I manage to find time to head up there I’ll try to get in a tour of insides of the buildings!
We checked out the cemetery next door while we were there too and it had some awesome old tombstones and monuments.
On our way back home we stopped at the historic site of the Hay Lake schoolhouse.
This one room schoolhouse was in use from 1896 until 1963.
I swiped this photo from the Hay Lake School Facebook page.
My goodness, just look a those sinister faces! I think these might be the original children of the corn.
I also took the time on the way back home to stop and get a photo of this barn.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve driven by this barn and seen those two red Adirondack chairs sitting there. I’ve always wanted to stop and get a picture, but never took the time. I wonder if the owners of this barn sit in those chairs with a glass of wine on pleasant summer evenings. Or do they just place those chairs there for ‘looks’, because they really do make a very picturesque scene.
Do you have any open air museums where you live? Or have any of you local readers been to this one? I’d love to know!
q is for quandie 
I have never heard of Gammelgarden but it looks like a pleasant distraction for a bucolic summer day! Definitely would check out the tour.
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You should head up there sometime Kim. Are you familiar with the Picket Fence Gals? They have an occasional sale in Lindstrom at the corner of hway 8 and Olinda Trail. The Gammelgarden Museum is just south of there on Olinda Trail, and the schoolhouse is just south of that also off Olinda.
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Ok, a few things…these photos are gorgeous and obviously you’ve had the knack for photography pre-blogging. I’m curious about your photo storage and categorization. Do you have external hard drive backup, cloud…? I struggle with this as it’s not my favorite thing and it feels so overwhelming! The barn with the red chairs is on my normal route driving up to the goat farm where we get milk. One day, there was a free french provincial dresser there (with green glass handles!!!), so of course my car pulls over without my control 😉 The owner was there, a very kind man who helped me load it. I told him I admire the red chairs every time I drive by. He says it’s a seasonal thing. He only opens the doors when warm weather arrives and shuts them once summer and early fall are over. That was a few years ago and I love when I see them because of the symbolism. However, I just drove by yesterday and the doors weren’t open! I’ll keep checking.
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I have an external hard drive. Mr. Q’s brother set it up for me. I don’t have any sort of automatic backup method in place, I just copy things over to the external drive when I think about. That’s probably a mistake, I should come up with a regular schedule for backing up. In my pre-blog days I just organized my photos by year and event (for example, these photos are in ‘2011 mom’s visit’) and I still do this for non-blog photos. When I started blogging in Nov 2013 I had one file ‘blog photos’, bwa, ha, ha, ha. Wasn’t that silly of me? Then I went seasonal, 2015 spring blog, etc. Now I’ve gone bi-monthly. Currently working with 2016 May – June. I may eventually realize that I need to go monthly. I take A LOT of photos.
Thanks so much for sharing that info about the red chairs! But now I am wondering why the doors aren’t open yet. I hope that isn’t a bad sign. Keep me posted on that! And whatever happened to that dresser?
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Q,
Neat looking place! Wow, those kids do look a little scary! Barely a smile to be found! I know times were hard, but it is sad they did not smile or all say cheese for the picture!
Breaks my heart , maybe they were all hungry or living a rough home life.
Blessings
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I took a visual communications class in college and my professor told us that the reason everyone looks rather grim in these old photos is because it just simply wasn’t in fashion to smile for the camera back then. People thought it made you look foolish to have a big grin on your face, so they didn’t do it. But boy, some of these kids look particularly menacing, don’t they?
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We’ll have to go there sometime when we can take the tour.
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I knew you would say that! But yes, we should.
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Gorgeous pictures! Looks like you’ve always known your way around a camera. They’re so pretty, they make me a little homesick for Minnesota! Take care.
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Thanks Cynthia! Minnesota in spring is hard to beat 😉 Well, OK, maybe that isn’t quite true, but I’ll keep telling myself that anyway.
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Great place to choose to visit. I took my mom a few years ago and she was the only one who could answer the “what do think this was used for?” part of the tour of the farmhouse kitchen! The church was rescued from a farm and had to have a wall section replaced. The joke is that the replacement logs are much rougher because they could only find Norwegian timbers to fix it. Current little house designers could take a lesson from the Stuga. The schoolhouse photo is great. May 7, 1937 is the date on the chalkboard. The kids probably wanted to be outside, rather than being stuck inside. Thanks for the fun article.
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I bet you are right Pam, they had spring fever!
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