Who remembers this? Perhaps your grandmother still had a wood-burning stove at home?” The older visitors nod; the teenagers in the group look rather less convinced. At the Musée rural Binsfeld, they are stepping into a world that disappeared only relatively recently, yet already feels surprisingly remote. Tools, farm machinery, kitchen utensils, furniture, clothes and even a dentist’s instruments offer glimpses into everyday life in the Éislek generations ago.
red Huet knows the story behind almost every object – and, more importantly, how it came to be here. He was already involved as a young man in the early 1980s, when the Binsfeld-Holler-Breidfeld local association began collecting old objects that villagers were throwing out as they renovated their homes. For Huet, now a retired CFL employee and chairman of the association, it was to become a lifelong commitment: preserving the region’s cultural heritage and opening it up to the public. “Everyday life in the Éislek was very similar to life in the Eifel and elsewhere in the Ardennes,” he says. That gives the museum a relevance that extends well beyond the immediate area to the Greater Region as a whole.
A risky venture: a private museum
In 1983, the association acquired the „A Schiewesch“ farmstead, a 17th-century sheep farm, in order to create a venue where the ever-growing collection could be exhibited. The purchase meant taking out a loan. “You can imagine that the banks weren’t exactly queuing up to finance a museum that didn’t even exist yet,” Fred Huet recalls. Eventually, one bank agreed to take the chance.
The association restored the building itself. It opened in 1988. Shortly afterwards, the association also purchased the property opposite, known as „bei Glesener“. After six years of renovation, the museum extension opened in 1996; at the same time, a large holiday flat was created there. These were refurbished again three years ago and reopened as the Holiday Home Museum Binsfeld – an important source of income for the museum, which, although it now also receives financial support from the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Tourism, is still not a sure-fire success due to its remote location.
New initiative with LEADER funding
As the years went by, the association also realised that the museum itself needed to change. Simply displaying objects with little connection between them was no longer enough. Today’s visitors expect more: information they can readily understand, a strong narrative, authentic stories, an inviting atmosphere and different ways of discovering and engaging with a subject.
Thanks to financial support from LEADER Éislek, the association was able to completely redesign the exhibition between 2012 and 2015. With professional support, the collection – which had grown over the years – was transformed into a modern permanent exhibition, in which selected exhibits are arranged and accompanied by information in such a way that visitors can gain an insight into how people used to live and work, what they ate, how they celebrated and how they organised their daily lives.
he first step was to take stock. Around 3,000 objects were catalogued, sorted and assessed. Working from this material, the Wieland Schmid design studio in Hattingen, Germany, developed the exhibition themes, devised the spatial concept and exhibition design, and oversaw the entire refurbishment.
The historian Prof. Dr Wolfgang Schmid ensured the depth of the content. For the more than 50 subject areas, he researched and compiled extensive textual and visual material from the region as well as from the collections of the National Archives.
It was also important to the society to continually draw parallels with the present day: What was migration like 200 years ago? What was the relationship between children and their parents like? What moral values prevailed? These are topics that often give pause for thought or spark discussion, as Fred Huet knows.
Why Dutch farmers came to Luxembourg
One of the museum’s more recent exhibitions makes another point clear: the history of the Éislek is by no means only the history of families who have lived there for generations. “Klompen in de Koestal” – “Clogs in the cowshed” – tells the story of Dutch farming families who settled in Luxembourg during the 1950s. Opened in 2023, the exhibition was partly co-financed through LEADER.
In the 1950s, many Dutch farmers were drawn to the Grand Duchy. In their densely populated homeland, farms and arable land were in short supply, whereas in Luxembourg they had the opportunity to lease land and set up their own farms. Most of the immigrants came from the predominantly Catholic provinces of Limburg and North Brabant. They integrated quickly by taking part in the social and cultural life of the villages. „There were already many excellent agricultural colleges in the Netherlands at that time. As a result, the new arrivals often had a very good education and ultimately contributed to the modernisation of Luxembourg’s agricultural sector,“ explains Fred Huet.
In search of people who remembered that period, as well as their descendants, he travelled not only to the Netherlands but as far as southern France to conduct interviews. At the heart of the project is now a digital platform recording names, places of origin and settlement, along with family photographs. The database is designed to keep growing – and to encourage visitors to explore their own family histories. Personal belongings donated or lent by Dutch families add another layer to the exhibition.
It is this section in particular that broadens our understanding of what a local heritage museum can be. It is not simply about preserving objects. It is about people, social change and the question of how a region became what it is today.
Text and photos: Martine Hemmer (the English translation is AI generated, orginal text in German)
