Whole workshops taken apart and rebuilt by volunteers, and century-old machines they start up in front of you.
On this windswept plateau farming barely fed a family: until after the war it was the forest that kept Labaroche alive. The museum is about that work. You follow the journey of timber, from the woodcutter to the joiner, through rebuilt workshops (clog making, wheelwrighting, joinery, the forge, blade sharpening) and machines reassembled piece by piece: a hundred-and-thirty-year-old frame saw from the Orbey valley, a 1912 gang saw, an 1896 steam engine that still drives a whole network of belt transmissions. One room is given over to wooden toys, close to a thousand of them. Visits are guided only, and last about two hours.
It starts in 1989, at a timber inspection meeting, when Georges Claudepierre and Gaby Locicero propose dedicating a place to the village's forestry heritage. The commune joins the project in 1990 and the volunteers go hunting for machines and entire workshops, which have to be dismantled, numbered, stored and rebuilt: ten years of work, forty-seven thousand hours. The grants come through in 1996, the land is bought, and the building goes up in 1997 using 360 m³ of timber from the communal forest, cut and worked by local firms. Work on the grounds starts in 1999 and the museum opens to the public in 2000. Around seventy people are active there today.
What you really shouldn't miss during your visit.
Built in Alsace, at Thann and Bitschwiller-lès-Thann, under American licence. It works like a locomotive, runs at a hundred revolutions per minute, and feeds the workshop machines through a whole network of shafts and leather belts.
The museum's oldest mechanical saw is a hundred and thirty years old and came from the Orbey valley: it cuts at 1.20 metres per minute. Next to it, the 1912 gang saw takes a whole trunk in a single pass at around 3 metres per minute, and the pit saw is a reminder that before all this, two men could turn out twelve beams a day.
Woodcutter, wheelwright, clog maker, farmer, cooper, wood turner, joiner, carpenter, basket weaver: each trade has its rebuilt workshop and its tools, some of them rather odd.
A room of its own, from very old pieces to more recent ones. This is usually where the parents linger longest.
Near the forge, machines the local craftsmen built from parts salvaged off tanks destroyed in the fighting of December 1944.
The rim of the box is shaped on a large plane, the targeuse, which dates from 1856 and runs off a water wheel and wooden gears. Stapling the rim to the lid was the women's job. The workshop ran until the end of the 1960s.
The place from several angles, to prepare your visit.
Our cottage for 9 and our caravan for two are just 5 minutes away, in pure nature.
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