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Ballenberg, Switzerland's Farm Museum

© Millard Edward Carr

While we in the United States seldom see a cow that isn’t in a commercial for ice cream or a Gary Larson cartoon, the Swiss have retained a more immediate tie to farm life. With gardens and fields surrounding their compact, closely packed villages and towns, it’s a daily occurrence to see sheep, goats, and chickens and hear the melodic music from the bells that the cows and sheep wear as they stroll through the nearby pastures.

The Swiss also seem to realize how important it is to remember our domestic history and pay the credit due the ingenuity and hard work of our forefathers and mothers. Nowhere is it easier to get the intimate feeling of how they lived and worked than at the Ballenberg Farm Museum in Ballenberg Switzerland.

The trip to Ballenberg itself a transition to a more relaxed time. The train to Brienz connects with Swiss efficiency to a bright yellow postal bus that takes visitors, shoppers, and school children up the steep hillside above Lake Brienz, to the bus stop -under a tree in the middle of the road in the town of Ballenberg. A short walk down the road, past individual flower-bedecked Swiss homes and small shops, leads to the Alpenrose Hotel. With modern convenience, but old-world hospitality, the hotel offers delicious Swiss food and rooms that (in the early spring) allow you to go to sleep with the deeply calming sound of bells on the necks of bovine residents right across the street.

The Farm “Museum” is a leisurely ten-minute stroll past the lumberyard and grazing pastures at the edge of town. At 163 acres, Ballenberg is arguably the largest museum in the world. Seemingly designed to give the visitor the feeling of walking from village to village across the breadth of Switzerland, the tree lined forest trails lead through a storybook forest to villages and individual houses from centuries ago.

The approximately 90 buildings are separated into 13 building groups representing the various regions of Switzerland. The different construction techniques of the farmhouses, barns, cheese making and storage sheds, outbuilding, and even operating mills fit the different climate and available materials of the regions. The buildings, some from the 1500’s, reflect the daily lives of both the wealthy and poorer day laborers of the periods. They have been moved to the museum and preserved in natural settings that give the visitor the feeling of actually being able to step back into that period.

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