Friesen Interpretive Centre
Neubergthal

The utilitarian Friesen Interpretive Centre exemplifies the combined home/barn units built in farm villages that were recreated in southern Manitoba in the 1870s and 1880s by Mennonite immigrants from Russia. In its siting, practical and orderly design, construction methods, basic materials and interior layout and features, the housebarn is a model of a centuries-old vernacular European building form adapted by Mennonites to the settlement conditions they found in Russia and later in Manitoba. The partially restored structure, built for Bernard and Helena Hamm and continuously occupied by Hamm and later Friesen family members for nearly nine decades, also is integral to the traditional street-village layout in Neubergthal, a national historic site of Canada recognized for its impressive collection of intact Mennonite housebarns.

Source: Rural Municipality of Rhineland By-law No. 2002-5, February 27, 2002