They started building on a Monday morning and by Friday evening 200 men had completed the framing, the roof was on, installed all windows and doors and locked the place up and went home. That's old fashioned barn-raising.MennoHof was under construction and the building was secure. It took another year and a half to complete the inside.
What is unique is that there are no nails whatsoever in securing the beams. Using a crane they hoisted large beams up and fastened them with pegs in the mortised joints. It took about 1000 pegs to fasten all the beams together. What an undertaking.
The MennoHof building was ready to complete on the inside. This would involve finish work and designing and building all the displays. Next would come all the electronic devices to tell the story about the Mennonites, The Hutterites and the Amish.
The last room on the tour is an Amish kitchen where visitors may try on Amish clothing and feel and touch objects in the kitchen. Amish ladies make most of their own clothes.
The entire Interpretive center takes about 1-2 hours to go through. In future blogs we will show some rooms and explain the multi-media presentations as they depict the history of three groups of people coming out of the reformation: the Mennonites, the Hutterites and the Amish.
No comments:
Post a Comment