Qualla: Ore Mountain Toy Museum, Seiffen

Ore Mountain Toy Museum, Seiffen: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geolina163, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1890 the export duty changed from a tax on value to a tax on weight, and the toymakers of Seiffen responded by making their toys smaller. Much smaller. They began building complete Ore Mountain farmhouse parlours — stove, table, benches, sometimes the family as well — inside matchboxes, on the reasoning that a matchbox weighs almost nothing and a customs officer cannot argue with a scale. When the village staged its first great wooden toy exhibition in the summer of 1914, visitors could buy one at the counter on the way out. That is the local temperament in miniature, which is the only scale Seiffen has ever really needed: presented with a problem, carve your way around it.

Image: Geolina163 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ore Mountain Toy Museum, Seiffen: When the Tin Ran Out

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geolina163, CC BY-SA 4.0. Seiffen sits at 650 metres in the heart of the Ore Mountains, close to the Czech border, and it was a mining village long before it was anything else — first documented in 1324 as Cynsifen, with roughly seven centuries of digging behind it. Then the silver and the tin gave out. A...

Image: Geolina163 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ore Mountain Toy Museum, Seiffen: The Ring of Animals

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stefan Kühn, CC BY-SA 3.0. The technique that made mass production possible is called Reifendrehen, ring turning, and it is genuinely ingenious. A turner mounts a sound, crack-free block on a specialised lathe and cuts a wooden ring 30 to 50 centimetres across, shaping it so that the ring's cross-section i...

Image: Stefan Kühn | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ore Mountain Toy Museum, Seiffen: Fifty Pfennigs, Summer 1914

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stefan Kühn, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Seiffen Wooden Toy and Merchandise Exhibition ran from 9 July to 3 August 1914 in the Albert Salon. Admission was fifty pfennigs, twenty-five for children. It was organised by the parish priest Hermann Härtel, born at Lichtenstein in 1864, who had chaired the district trade a...

Image: Stefan Kühn | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ore Mountain Toy Museum, Seiffen: A Museum Through Several Germanys

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brücke-Osteuropa, Public domain. On 5 December 1920 a proper toy museum opened in the State Trade Training School, built around the collection of older and newer playthings that Alwin Seifert (1873-1937) had been assembling since 1914, enlarged by Härtel's material. For a trade show in 1944 the staff put togethe...

Image: Brücke-Osteuropa | Public domain

Ore Mountain Toy Museum, Seiffen: Fourteen Houses and Five Thousand Things

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geolina163, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 2 May 1973 the Ore Mountains Open-Air Museum opened on the edge of the toy village with fourteen groups of buildings showing how people here lived before 1900, among them a water-powered turning works dating from 1758-60. The toy museum itself was rebuilt and extended in 1999 ...

Image: Geolina163 | CC BY-SA 4.0