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Day labourer’s cottage
Living in poverty in a hut on the heath.
This day labourer’s cottage was home to successive generations of the Bakker family for almost a century. It is just a single room with a couple of box beds and a pen for the goat. For the family who lived here in 1873 it was something of a squeeze: there were eleven of them! The cottage formed part of a shabby colony of huts on the heathland just outside Nunspeet. Day labourers had the toughest existence of all farm workers. They were hired on a day-to-day basis – assuming there was any work – by farmers in the local area. Every spring the whole family, including the goat, would set off for Drenthe or Friesland to debark oak trees. Everyone would get involved, working from early morning through to late evening. For the rest of the year they would bring in a little extra food and top up their income with some poaching.
1850. Relocated here in 1957.