Old World Wisconsin
Relocated farmsteads, workshops, animals, gardens, foodways, and interpreters examine how nineteenth-century immigrants remade Wisconsin—and were changed by it.
Artwork inspired by Schomer Lichtner
The site’s more than sixty historic structures were moved from different Wisconsin communities and arranged in cultural and chronological groupings. That makes the landscape interpretive rather than an untouched village. German, Norwegian, Polish, Finnish, Danish, Yankee, African American, and other stories reveal adaptation through crops, building practice, religion, language, markets, and intermarriage.
Hands-on work is the point: blacksmithing, cooking, gardening, animal care, brewing, and household tasks expose skill and seasonal pressure. But do not let nostalgia erase Indigenous dispossession, land policy, gendered labor, or the fact that “immigrant success” varied sharply by resources and race. The large outdoor site rewards one or two areas in depth rather than a forced march through every farm.
- Landscape
- 600 acres
- Buildings
- 60+ relocated structures
- Period
- 1840s–1910s
Quick guide
- Read buildings as choices
- Materials, roof forms, room use, and outbuildings show what families retained and what Wisconsin conditions changed
- Join a work process
- A demonstration becomes useful when you follow inputs, tools, timing, skill, and who performed the labor
Compare how families adapted land, work, and tradition
- Read buildings as choices
- Materials, roof forms, room use, and outbuildings show what families retained and what Wisconsin conditions changed.
- Join a work process
- A demonstration becomes useful when you follow inputs, tools, timing, skill, and who performed the labor.
- Question the village illusion
- Remember that structures were relocated and curated to create comparisons across communities.
- Name the land history
- Place immigrant settlement beside Indigenous homelands, treaties, removal pressure, and continuing Native presence.
Good to know
This is a spacious open-air museum with gravel, hills, weather exposure, and long distances; the historic buildings were relocated here for interpretation.
Notice these
- Historic farmsteads
- Working gardens and animals
- Hands-on trades