Qualla: Museum Het Leids Wevershuis

Museum Het Leids Wevershuis: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Maarten from Netherlands, CC BY 2.0. On a narrow Leiden side street called the Middelstegracht, between rows of postwar concrete apartment blocks, sits a small brick house that came within a city council vote of being demolished in the 1960s. The building is four and a half meters wide, three stories tall counting the attic, and built around 1560. Inside, a wooden loom from 1830 thumps and whirs every weekday afternoon as the museum's resident weaver, Ms. Fennema, throws the shuttle across the warp and produces dishcloths for sale. The cloth she weaves comes from a tradition older than the United States, older than the corporation, older than the modern stock market. The building she works in survived because, in 1976, four local historians cared enough to start a foundation called Het Kleine Leidse Woonhuis - the Small Leiden Dwelling - and start writing checks.

Image: Maarten from Netherlands | CC BY 2.0

Museum Het Leids Wevershuis: The Inscription on the Hallway Wall

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Erik Zachte, CC BY-SA 4.0. Step through the front door and the first thing you see is a 216-by-90-centimeter inscription painted on the narrow hallway wall. It is a list. Every person known to have lived in the house since 1561 is named, with their dates and their profession. Linen weaver Cornelisz Jansz, ...

Image: Erik Zachte | CC BY-SA 4.0

Museum Het Leids Wevershuis: The Refugees Who Built Leiden

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Erik Zachte, CC BY-SA 4.0. The little house went up around 1560 - just as Leiden was being transformed by an arrival the city had not asked for. Tens of thousands of Flemish Protestants fled north across the river borders to escape the Spanish persecution of the Reformation. Many ended up in Leiden, where ...

Image: Erik Zachte | CC BY-SA 4.0

Museum Het Leids Wevershuis: Almost Demolished

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Erik Zachte, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the 1960s, Leiden's city council adopted ambitious plans to modernize the historic core - sweep away the narrow streets and small brick houses, replace them with the kind of poured-concrete apartment blocks then sprouting across northern Europe. The plan never fully materializ...

Image: Erik Zachte | CC BY-SA 4.0

Museum Het Leids Wevershuis: How the Loom Works

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Erik Zachte, CC BY-SA 4.0. The antique loom in the front room dates to 1830 and is the largest object in the museum. It fills the room. The weaver sits at the bench, treadles below, shed open above; she throws the wooden shuttle, threaded with weft, through the gap in the warp, then pulls the reed forward ...

Image: Erik Zachte | CC BY-SA 4.0

Museum Het Leids Wevershuis: The Smallest Museum in Leiden

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Herenld, CC BY-SA 3.0. Het Leids Wevershuis is not a famous museum. It is not large or grand or comprehensive. It is one tiny house, opened in 2005, that takes about twenty minutes to walk through and rewards much longer than that. The Lakenhal across town tells the story of Leiden's cloth trade throug...

Image: Herenld | CC BY-SA 3.0