Trøndelag 1959

The year is 1959 and the place is Verdal in North Trøndelag County. The «Haug family» – mother, father and four children – lives in the nearly 200-year-old farmhouse, a «trønderlån».

The couple had taken over the farm ten years earlier and moved into the main farmhouse which they have adapted as well as possible to modern demands. The husband manages the farm almost on his own, with some help from his 17-year-old eldest son and modern machinery. The wife and younger children also take part in some farm work, but to a lesser degree than earlier generations had done.

The Haug family is imaginary, but still representative of the farming population in Norway and in Trøndelag in the 1950s. The furnishing of the farmhouse is an interpretation, not a copy of one and the same real home. Use of numerous sources has still made it possible to give a realistic picture of how a farm family in North Trøndelag could have lived in the year 1959.