Friesen Interpretive Centre

The Friesen Interpretive

Centre, a 1 1/2-storey dwelling with attached barn, is set in rural-like environs on Neubergthal's

single tree-lined street. The unified wood-frame structure, built in 1901, occupies a long narrow lot

within a row of period housebarns along the street that forms the traditional Mennonite farm village,

a national historic site of Canada. The municipal designation applies to the structure and its lot.

The utilitarian

Friesen Interpretive Centre exemplifies the combined home/barn units built in farm villages that were

recreated in southern Manitoba in the 1870s and 1880s by Mennonite immigrants from Russia. In its siting,

practical and orderly design, construction methods, basic materials and interior layout and features,

the housebarn is a model of a centuries-old vernacular European building form adapted by Mennonites to

the settlement conditions they found in Russia and later in Manitoba. The partially restored structure,

built for Bernard and Helena Hamm and continuously occupied by Hamm and later Friesen family members

for nearly nine decades, also is integral to the traditional street-village layout in Neubergthal, a

national historic site of Canada recognized for its impressive collection of intact Mennonite housebarns.

Source:

Rural Municipality of Rhineland By-law No. 2002-5, February 27, 2002

Key elements that define the heritage character of the Friesen Interpretive Centre

site, including its traditional linear placement, include:

- the long narrow lot set perpendicular to

the village street, Road 1 West, in Neubergthal

- the housebarn at right angles to the street, with the

living quarters at the front and the barn at the west end

Key elements that define the building as a

model Mennonite housebarn include:

- the combined linear structure, with dwelling and barn joined end-to-end

by an interior hallway or `gang' with doors that separate the living quarters from the barn

- the

long, broad rectangular form, 1½ storeys high, with the barn slightly higher and, on the north side,

approximately three metres wider than the house

- the steeply pitched gable roofs, with a shed-roofed

section on the barn's north side

- the basic construction methods and materials, including the wood-frame

house, timber-frame barn, exterior walls of painted horizontal wood siding on both, cedar shingles, etc.

-

the number, orderly placement and variety of rectangular-shaped windows and doors on all elevations

-

the minimal ornamentation outside and in

Key elements that define the heritage character of the east-end

residence include:

- the large north and south dormers

- the verandah with plainly carved wooden posts

and delicate arched fretwork

- the openings, including the main-floor double-hung sash windows with wooden

shutters, symmetrically placed on three elevations, and the north-side Dutch door

- the main-floor plan

with four large rooms that revolve around a large brick stove

- the three upper-level bedrooms accessed

by a narrow enclosed staircase

- the variety of unpretentious materials, including the mud-and-horse-manure

plaster mixture on the perimeter walls, thick mud-brick partition walls, horizontal wood siding and vertical

wainscotting, board ceilings and floating plank floors laid on hard-packed clay

- modest features and

decorative finishes such as the exterior siding painted white with contrasting trim, the stencilled interior

floor boards, built-in pantry cupboards and living room china cabinet or 'glauss shaup', etc.

Key

elements that define the heritage character of the west-end barn include:

- the south elevation with

its two large doors near the southwest corner, a third door and a set of ribbon windows; also, a north-side

Dutch door and rectangular-shaped windows on three elevations

- the exterior siding painted red with

contrasting trim

- the large interior space, including a loft and main floor, threshing/storage area

or 'sheen' and the 'oswesied' used for grain storage and raising poultry

- the exposed

post-and-beam interior framework, with mortise-and-tenon joinery and wooden pegs securing all major joints,

and the plank floors