Antique Mennonite trapdoor now on display in Steinbach

Mennonite Heritage Village has a new artifact on display in their new exhibit, Resurfacing: Mennonite Floor Patterns by Margruite Krahn. 

Senior Curator Andrea Klassen says the trapdoor is an original part of a housebarn.  

“I don't remember offhand where the housebarn comes from, but it's in southern Manitoba, Winkler, Altona area."

She says it’s painted with a floor pattern. 

"But not just one pattern, it's painted with three if you look carefully.” 

Klassen says the reason there are three different patterns is because Mennonites would repaint the floors as they wore out. 

“So on this door, you can see three specific patterns and lots of different layers of paint, and Margruite has recreated that in her artwork. It's kind of like archaeology, but for artwork, so it's very neat.”  

The trapdoor is around 3 feet wide and 4 feet long. It has a rusty metal latch that you pull up, and then it opens to the side. 

Klassen says the trapdoor would usually be in the pantry and lead down to the cellar. 

The one original housebarn they have at MHV, the Chortiz Housebarn, has a trapdoor of its own that is located in the pantry. 

“Ours is a little bit different because it opens on the short end, so it opens the opposite way you would expect a door to open. But that would lead down to a cellar where you would keep the goods that were better off stored cooler.” 

Krahn has been looking at these patterns for the last 20 years. 

Klassen says a lot of what Krahn has found is on the West reserve in the Winkler, Morden, and Altona area. 

“She is based out of Newburgh South, so that's a big hub for Mennonite architecture. She finds these patterns there,” she says. “I think this is probably a bit of a bigger original piece, but sometimes she finds a threshold, sometimes she finds one full floorboard, and sometimes she finds the floorboards that used to be on the floor repurposed in someone's garage.” 

Klassen says it's interesting to see how Krahn has come across these originals, and to see how she's recreated and reimagined some of them.  

“This trap door, she has a floor cloth based on the trap door, and in the floor cloth you can see she's capturing all three patterns and the different layers of patterns.” 

The exhibit, Resurfacing: Mennonite Floor Patterns, showcases some of the patterns Krahn has found in Mennonite house barns. She researches historical Mennonite floor patterns, and then she recreates them.  

They opened the exhibit last week on January 18th. 

You can see the trapdoor in-person on display at the exhibit until April 1st. 

With files from Michelle Sawatzky