‘Deep sadness’: The disappearing Mennonite housebarns of Manitoba

The Friesen Housebarn Interpretive Centre is pictured in Neubergthal, Man., on May 16, 2026. At their peak during the early years of Mennonite settlement in southern Manitoba, an estimated 2,000 housebarns stood across the region. Today, only a couple dozen are believed to remain. (Milan Lukes)

To the passing motorist on a southern Manitoba highway, it might not register as anything remarkable—a barn and a house joined together under one continuous roofline, sitting on a rural lot like countless other old farmsteads across the province.

But that roofline is a surviving link to early Manitoba settlement history. It is a Mennonite housebarn, and for the settlers who built them across southern Manitoba beginning in the 1870s, it was far more than shelter. It was the architectural foundation of an entire way of life.

At their peak in the 1880s, an estimated 2,000 Mennonite housebarns stood across Manitoba, according to Roland Sawatzky, the Manitoba Museum’s curator of history, whose doctoral dissertation centred on the structures. In those first decades of Mennonite settlement in Manitoba, he said the buildings were almost ubiquitous—present in over 95 per cent of Mennonite households.

Today, only a small fraction survive—with calls for more to be done to protect those that remain.

Sawatzky said the design is exactly what the name suggests: a house and barn joined end to end under a single roof, with living quarters on one side and livestock stalls on the other, connected by a door in the shared wall. The arrangement, with some variations, meant families could tend to their animals in the depths of a Manitoba winter without ever stepping outside.

Central to the housebarn’s design was a large brick heating oven positioned at the heart of the structure. Where other architectural traditions placed fireplaces at the ends of a building, Mennonite builders put theirs in the middle—a choice Sawatzky described as a “very efficient” way to heat the structure.

Sawatzky said the oven could burn dried livestock dung for warmth, while a connected wood-burning stove handled cooking. He said rooms were arranged around that central oven with no hallways—occupants moved from one room to the next in a circular flow.

Above them, a second floor served primarily as storage, packed with wheat through the winter months, which also acted as insulation against the cold.

“As time went on, and there was pressure on families because they were having large families, but land was becoming less available, they started renovating those attics into dwelling spaces,” Sawatzky said.

New land, familiar walls

The first housebarns in Manitoba went up shortly after 1874, Sawatzky said, when Mennonites began arriving in the province in large numbers. Fearing the loss of military exemptions and religious autonomy in the Russian Empire, among other factors, approximately 7,000 Mennonites from colonies in what is now Ukraine immigrated to Canada during the 1870s.

The Canadian government designated two large land blocks in southern Manitoba for Mennonite settlement—the East Reserve in 1873 and the West Reserve in 1875, with the latter’s boundaries formally ratified by an Order-in-Council in 1876. Within them, settlers built tight-knit agricultural communities and more than 100 villages.

But the housebarn itself was anything but new. Sawatzky said Mennonites had been living in them in southern Ukraine long before the move to Canada, and the underlying design stretches back far further than that. The configuration of humans and animals sharing a single structure under one roof is more than 6,000 years old in northern Europe, rooted in the Neolithic longhouse tradition of the continent’s earliest farming cultures.

“It’s a very old style,” Sawatzky said. “Changes occur over time as farming changes and people change, but by the time Mennonites arrive on the scene in Europe in the early 1500s, it’s a fairly common structure.”

The distinctly Mennonite version of the housebarn took shape and evolved during the community’s long settlement in northern Poland. It was there, Sawatzky said, that Mennonites adopted a distinct version of the housebarn between the 1550s and the 1750s. By 1852, he said the layout was standardized and published in an agricultural journal, including floorplans and elevations.

In Manitoba, many early Mennonite settlers spent their first year—sometimes longer—living in semlins, rudimentary sod-walled dugouts, while they built log cabins in the housebarn style, according to Sawatzky.

The housebarn continued to evolve well into the 20th century in Manitoba. Later versions were reoriented so the house faced parallel to the main street—mimicking the look of English homes—while the barn extended behind in a T-formation. In some cases, Sawatzky said the two structures weren’t directly attached but linked by a roofed hallway.

The last Mennonite housebarns built in Manitoba went up between 1925 and 1930, he said. By then, the form was already changing beyond recognition.

“They didn’t look like the old housebarns,” Sawatzky said. “I call them barn houses because, from the exterior, they look just like a barn, but there’s actually a human dwelling built inside it… There wasn’t necessarily this definition between the house and the barn anymore.”

The decline of a tradition

The structure’s decline had nothing to do with fire hazard or practical failure. Sawatzky said Mennonite villages had “very stringent” fire regulations, insurance, and centuries of experience managing the risks of keeping animals under the same roof as a family.

“That’s a tradition that’s over 6,000 years long, and it disappears in one generation,” Sawatzky said. “Why is that?”

The answer, he argues, lies in what Canada offered that Ukraine and Poland never had: an open capitalist land market with no limits on how much a farmer could acquire. In the old country, land competition had been constrained by government restrictions and the social pressures of village life. In Manitoba, he said those constraints vanished.

“All of a sudden they find themselves in a very open capitalist society, and they can buy as much land as they want,” Sawatzky said. For some, the land they initially received in Manitoba was enough to prosper.

Sawatzky said Mennonite farmers looked around and saw their English neighbours spread across individual quarter sections outside the village. The villages began dissolving by mutual agreement, families spreading out across their land grants.

When families left the village, Sawatzky said, they often dismantled and moved the structure itself—too significant an investment to leave behind—relocating it onto their new land.

“When they want to make a nicer building, instead of living in a log cabin, they don’t build a housebarn. They build an English-style house,” Sawatzky said.

“Their villages had fallen apart, so the housebarn was no longer specifically relevant to indicating status,” he said.

“The containment of status, that dampening of competition, it ended when the villages dissolved,” he said. “They couldn’t contain their status-grabbing anymore. They were going after land; they were going after status; they were really diving into the capitalist system of Canada.”

In the years following the Second World War, Sawatzky said many of the remaining Mennonite housebarns were torn down and replaced with bungalows.

What remains

From roughly 2,000 Mennonite housebarns at their height, Sawatzky said only a couple dozen remain standing in Manitoba today. Most of those are in the villages of Reinland and Neubergthal, he said, where many remain occupied as private residences.

Neubergthal was designated a national historic site in 1989 by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, recognized as a remarkably well-preserved example of a traditional Mennonite street village. Such villages were typically characterized by a single, tree-lined street flanked by housebarns on narrow lots, with the village surrounded by its fields.

Resident Margruite Krahn said several Mennonite housebarns still stand in the village, founded in 1876, though she’s aware of two complete housebarns that have gone down in the last few years.

“And then there are other portions…the barn is there, but the house is no longer there. Or the house is a garage, and you learn to detect it,” Krahn said.

“As you drive around to the (Mennonite) villages that still exist, if you know what the house looked like and the style of structure, you can pick it up pretty quickly.”

Krahn also chairs the Neubergthal Heritage Foundation’s curator team, which oversees the village’s historic buildings, including the Friesen Housebarn Interpretive Centre. The foundation undertook a restoration project of the then-vacant housebarn beginning in 2001—an intervention she credits with saving the structure from certain loss.

‘When you lose structures, you lose stories’

For Krahn, a 27-year resident of the village who herself has Mennonite roots, the housebarns became a window into a world she hadn’t fully known before moving to the community southeast of Altona.

“It really opened up my world, and I felt I could look objectively at what’s happening here, culturally, and what happens when we lose material culture and we lose built heritage,” she said.

“When you lose structures, you lose stories … In the renovation and the restoration of these buildings—working closely with the contractor—and starting to rip away the new material to discover what’s there, it tells you the story,” she said. “That’s how I knew about the colours.”

Krahn said the interiors of housebarns often featured bright colours, a reality that comes as a surprise to some people who associate Mennonite life with muted tones. According to Krahn, Mennonites were influenced by the colours of local populations in Poland and Ukraine and even painted wooden floors to make dirt and wear less visible while bringing beauty indoors.

She added that many people don’t realize their female Mennonite ancestors were the ones hand-painting the floors of these homes. “It gives something to the younger generation,” she said.

Ray Hamm grew up in a Neubergthal housebarn built by his step-great-grandfather and great-grandmother and later lived there with his wife. He described such structures as a “powerful symbol of the integration and completeness of life, work, food and nature”—a reflection of a smaller, more intensive approach to farming.

The home remained in the family for over a century before Hamm and his wife sold it and relocated to Saskatchewan in March to be closer to family. Over the years, he said it graced book covers, appeared in magazines and municipal brochures, and drew travellers who made special detours just to see it.

“There is a deep sadness in thinking that this symbol of pioneer courage and strength, of food and land, is disappearing,” he said in an emailed statement. “It was a gift to us from those who have gone before us.”

Hamm said the Mennonite housebarns tell a “significant part of the story” of the Canadian Prairies—and that this, he said, was one of the reasons the village received its national historic site designation.

‘An immediate concern’

Preserving what remains is no simple matter. Hamm said it takes considerable time and money to maintain these structures, and even securing basic insurance has become an obstacle. While he never encountered trouble insuring his own housebarn, he said the new owners have been unable to obtain coverage on the barn portion for reasons that remain unclear.

“The current situation leaves them, and any other owners and potential owners of housebarns, trapped,” he said in an emailed statement.

“Insurance companies should get a grip on reality and create some options for the public, for heritage and history. Homeowners should not have to fight for this.”

Hamm questioned why a house with an attached shed, such as a housebarn, should be treated any differently by insurers than a house with an attached garage.

Krahn calls the difficulty of obtaining insurance coverage an “immediate concern.”

She said many insurers are unwilling to cover the structures, citing features such as traditional bake ovens or simply classifying the barns as too high a risk. For those willing to provide coverage at all, she said the cost is often out of reach.

“There needs to be a different way to protect these places,” she said. “For private homeowners, even small businesses, we don’t have the kind of money to keep this up. There needs to be attention paid to this, because more are going to be gone if there isn’t some sort of protection.”

Closer to Winnipeg, the Mennonite Heritage Village in Steinbach offers a rare opportunity to see a housebarn up close. The museum’s Chortitz Housebarn—built in 1892 by Jacob and Justina Teichroeb south of Winkler and home to the couple and their seven children—is one of the more accessible surviving examples.

Senior curator Garth Doerksen calls it an “excellent example” of what a typical housebarn would have looked like.

The site also features a summer kitchen—a traditional structure used for cooking during the warmer months to keep excess heat out of the main house. Krahn hand-painted its floors using a historic pattern she uncovered in a Mennonite housebarn in Sommerfeld, Man.

Doerksen said he recalls the housebarn his great-grandparents built near Steinbach and the challenging choice his family eventually faced, like many other Mennonite families.

“They did have to take it down—it was in such disrepair—but those are difficult choices to make,” he said. “I’m very grateful that people… have had the foresight to preserve these buildings, and consequently, a representation of the way of life of some of the pioneers.”

Manitoba may have lost most of its Mennonite housebarns, but elsewhere the tradition remains more visible. Hundreds of brick housebarns still stand in Ukraine, with many more in Poland, according to Sawatzky. There, brick construction endured, while in Manitoba, he said, he only knows of wooden housebarns.

“Although the numbers of them have dwindled in Manitoba,” Sawatzky said, “worldwide, they’re still out there, and in many cases, people are still living in them.”

His advice to anyone curious—go see the surviving examples for yourself.

For Hamm, losing the remaining Mennonite housebarns in Manitoba is not inevitable, but only if people choose to act.

“Surely ways can be found to preserve and carry forward these icons, these living history realities.”