Hi, Ron:

Old Wisconsin is the largest historic restoration museum in the country, I believe. Unlike most Historical Museums, it primarily represents small farms. Each small farm is separated by enough distance to that they feel isolated. You can either walk from farm to farm if you're adventurous, or catch a free tram that runs about every fifteen minutes. All in all there are 8 or nine ethnic communities represented. Because it is so spread out, and we could only spend a couple of hours there, we ended up seeing only a small portion of the farms. The German farm was one of the more complete, with several buildings. There is also a Danish farm (which we wanted to visit because of my heritage... my Grandparents were both born and raised in Denmark.) The most recent addition is an African American community. Not many people realize that there were freed slaves living in Wisconsin. There were two active communities, and blacks and whites got along reasonably well together.

All the buildings on the property (with one exception which was built from old photographs as an exact copy) are from Wisconsin and were transported to the site.

Like most historic restorations, there are workers in costume, doing chores, gardening and caring for livestock, as well as preparing food and makign crafts. Having been to umpty-billion historic restorations, and being Director of a Museum with an early New England farm for many years, it long ago ceased to be a novelty seeing eartly American resorations. The thing I found most different about Old Wisconsin is how distinctive the architecture was. I'm used to Sturbridge Village, Mystic, Hancock Shaker Village, Colonial Williamsburg, Plymoth plantation and the like where the architect is somewhat the same. I found the styles dramatically different at Old Wisconsin, and that made our time there more interesting for me.

Jerry