The Schroeder Barn

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Mennonite Heritage and

Agricultural Museum

Our Story

Each of the 8 buildings tells a different story.

Open House for the Schroeder Barn face lift was Sunday Aug. 4 at 2:00 p.m. 2019

Schroeder Barn descendants/Goessel Museum

Direct descendants of the original Schroeder Barn family

The Schroeder Barn is well over 100 years old and received a new coat of paint. Also many of the boards were rotten and need to be replaced. See how you can be part of this project.

Museum Support

Cindy Wiens won the original painting of the Schroeder Barn

Fern with Cindy W. winner of the Schroeder Barn painting

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History of Goessel Area Mennonites

Schroeder Barn

The Schroeder Barn was built in 1902 by Jacob J. Schroeder as a wedding gift to his son Jacob H. Schroeder and his bride, Susie Janzen. The couple lived in the two rooms at the end of the barn for eight years. Their four oldest children, delivered by Jacob's mother, (Margaret Schroeder, a midwife in the Goessel area) were born there. In 1910 the Schroeders moved a house onto the farmstead, and the living quarters in the barn were converted to grain bins.

The farmstead on which the barn stood was located about 5 miles northwest of Goessel and remained in the family until the mid-1950s. The restored living quarters displays period furniture and other items as well as sections of the original walls. This barn is an exanple of the barns built in the Goessel community through the early 1900s. It was not unusual to build a barn first, and then live in the barn while building the house.

The barn features horse stalls, an oats bin, a "gangway" on the ground floor and a hayloft on the second floor. The planks for the flooring in the livestock portion of the barn were sawn from local ash and hackberry timber (The original floor was dirt). One of the distinctive features of the barn is the cupola, the small, square-shaped structure on top of the roof. Its primary purpose is to provide ventilation. The original cupola on the barn was one of the few in the Goessel area that survived the tornado of 1906.

Although the Schroeder Barn was not a typical house/barn combination, it was common for people to build housebarns prior to the 1890s. The concept of living in housebarns can be traced back to life in Prussia and Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries and before that, to The Netherlands (the ancestral country of origin for most Mennonites in the Goessel community). So the thought of people living under the same roof as livestock was not considered strange in 1902; but the Schroeders clearly considered that living in this barn, was a temporary arrangement.

The description of the Schroeder Barn came in part from "They Sought A New Land" by Darlene Schroeder

MAKING BUTTER

When the time came for butter making in the summer, the cream had to be gotten from the well where it had hung for a couple of days to cool. The cream was poured in a three gallon crock with a stomper or a wooden churn which also had a stomper. The children enjoyed stomping it up and down until there was butter. The stomping had a different sound when it was almost butter. Mother would rinse the butter with cold water until the milk would all be paddled out.

Some people had fancy butter molds, but Mother made round pats to fit in our round covered butter dishes. She then made a design on top with a table knife. In summer the butter was not molded but put in a small granite bucket with a tight-fitting lid and hung in the well again. How good it tasted if Mother gave us a piece of fresh bread, especially the heel, with fresh butter.

By Mrs. T. P. Nikkel