Gruekedlen får comeback

Resumé

The copper in the wash house
Once town-dwellers did their washing in coppers in outhouses or basements.
In 1974, women in a house in Viborg were still using this method
although semi-automatic and automatic washing machines were common.
The apartment house has now been rebuilt in the district from the 1970s in
Den Gamle By, where visitors can see the homes and the wash house with
a new-built copper.
When the bricklayers were about to reconstruct the copper from
scratch, they had no original working drawings to go on. Trade skills were
normally handed down directly from one generation to another. By breaking
old coppers down, the bricklayers learned precisely how they were arranged
and constructed, with a stoke hole for firewood, flues and the builtin
water tank.
Then, by building a new copper, they learned an old technique and
documented it for the benefit of future generations.
Many people today still have memories of long, hard washing-days in
the past. We hope these memories will be revived at the sight of the copper
in the wash house in Den Gamle By.