A Swedish village built an outdoor museum to revive lost forest trades

Evidence

The history of the forest museum, called Kojbyn (hut village), commenced in the beginning of 1980s, when the village association started to discuss to establish a furnace kiln and to restore an old water slipway that could attract tourists to the area. In 1986 it was decided to locate the museum adjacent to the old slipway and the following year, the first buildings were constructed in relation to a course in traditional building techniques. In 1988 the museum was opened for the public and the village association decided to charge an entrance fee (Isacson 2009). From the late 1980s throughout the 1990s the forest museum expanded stepwise with contributions from a range of funders, and the number of visitors grew. In the 1996s the forest museum was extended with a nature museum and a 300 meter long nature trail (ibid). Today, the forest museum comprises about 25 buildings, all related to forest work from the beginning of the 20th century. Many of them display different kinds of collective management practices from the past, such as e.g. charcoal making, tar and iron production (see Figure 3). — Emil Sandström and Ann-Kristin Ekman and Karl-Johan Lindholm, Commoning in the periphery – The role…, 55

Categorization

• SHARE: This Swedish forest museum reproducing charcoal/tar/iron production as tourist infrastructure is a niche-but-delightful thing for someone into open-air industrial heritage museums (e.g. Skansen-type sites).
• corroborated: 5 independent passages support this claim — Emil Sandström and Ann-Kristin Ekman and Karl-Johan Lindholm, Commoning in the periphery – The role…, 55
• XREF: connects to: Swedish village commons persisted from the Iron Age until 20th-century land reform monetised forests. — Emil Sandström and Ann-Kristin Ekman and Karl-Johan Lindholm, Commoning in the periphery – The role…, 13; Twentieth-century Swedish land reforms dismantled communal extraction commons. — Emil Sandström and Ann-Kristin Ekman and Karl-Johan Lindholm, Commoning in the periphery – The role…, 43; Recovering local history through research and museums strengthens village identity and cohesion. — Emil Sandström and Ann-Kristin Ekman and Karl-Johan Lindholm, Commoning in the periphery – The role…, 57

Related

• Swedish village commons persisted from the Iron Age until 20th-century land reform monetised forests. (similarity 0.86)
• Recovering local history through research and museums strengthens village identity and cohesion. (similarity 0.79)
• Twentieth-century Swedish land reforms dismantled communal extraction commons. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Recovering local history through research and museums strengthens village identity and cohesion. #exemplifies (0.80) — Emil Sandström and Ann-Kristin Ekman and Karl-Johan Lindholm, Commoning in the periphery – The role…, 57