Mennonite Heritage Village at Steinbach

Time Spent: 2 Hour 3 Minutes

Cost: $12 CAD/Person

Rating: Good stop, well set up museum

When you get to the Mennonite Heritage Village in Steinbach you first enter the museum and you pay your fee to get in and there is two museum display areas. One is a quilt area and the other one is the permanent exhibit. In the quilt area, there was a picture frame quilt that had a separate quilt sewn into it that was hanging out of the photo that was really unique that I had not seen before. In the permanent exhibit area, there’s a lot of placards that were telling about the start of the Mennonite village and went through a lot of the history dating back to the very beginning and the religious aspect. There was a lot of artifacts related to items that you would see around the village, there was miniature windmills, there were clothes, beds, and children’s toys and stuff related to that the everyday living. That museum part told a story of the people that came here where they emigrated, where their history was from, places they emigrated to before this places, where they emigrated to after and the reasons why they emigrated and some of the persecution they suffered before they emigrated.

Next you exit out of the main building into the actual Mennonite village. It’s set up with a main street where most of the buildings are set up along. You can go into each of the buildings and roam through on your own. There was a working General Store and also the Mennonite restaurant that you could go eat at which we did not do. There were Mennonite houses that many were one story they had very sparse furnishings where they would have beds, kitchen table and various kitchen items, and a stove that would heat up the entire house.

There was also a barn in the back area that they had animals in. They had a donkey, a cow, some sheep and goats, and chickens. They also had a full size windmill that actually worked that you could go up to the second level and walk around and see the inner workings of it. Then in the far back area, they had two barns one had old tractors in it that were pretty well restored and the second one had old vehicles that were also restored, both cars and tractors appeared to be from around the 1900s.

There was a chunk of the Berlin Wall just for some reason I’m not sure why would is even there. The houses were sparsely furnished with, you know, some of the beds and kitchen implements they had, so it’s probably pretty accurate to what you would have had to begin with 1980s.

Mennonite Heritage Village, if you’ve been to one before, they’re pretty similar. They usually have all the same buildings that you needed to have a town when they first immigrated in the 1880s There’s all the farm implements that they’d use initially to get started and the windmill, blacksmith shop, general store, and some of the barns and houses that they would have had that were typical.

Overall, it was a good stop if you have any interest in the history of the Mennonites or want to know about the immigrants that came to this specific area of Manitoba or their culture. It was really well set up with the different houses and the museum and had pretty good details. It’s probably one of the better set up museum where it’s a very good use of space of how most museum should be set up. They have artifacts and they also have a lot of placards describing the items or certain conditions during that time period. Outside areas kind of like most of your other heritage villages, they did have a working General Store where they have some artists items and stuff you can buy and old fashioned candy and preserves that people have made to sell. There was a working blacksmith there today as well. Sometimes I guess there is a working grainer that runs the windmill for grinding the grain. They did have working farms and gardens where they had things planted in the gardens and they had the donkeys, chickens, and cow for the farm where they probably do some interactive stuff with that on other days.