In a former four-family worker residence at Haakonsgaten 51-53, two authentically furnished apartments show daily life in a Norwegian company town. The ground floor is set up as it would have looked in the 1920s, when up to 15 children and their parents could be packed into two rooms and a kitchen. The upper floor shows a 1960s interior. The museum opened in 1989 and is part of Ryfylkemuseet. A 2019 exhibition called Under røyken, Under the Smoke, covers what it meant to work at the smelter, to be a housewife, and to grow up in the shadow of industry.
The street itself tells a story. Haakonsgaten runs from the factory gate to the director's villa, and the architecture encodes the class hierarchy of industrial society. Nearest the noise and dust lived the lowest-ranking workers; further up, foremen and functionaries in progressively nicer houses; at the top, the director. As author Kjartan Fløgstad, who grew up in Sauda, wrote: along this axis, the social stratification of industrial society received its architectural expression. A walk through Åbøbyen makes this visible in timber and paint.
The darkest chapter is lungebrann, lung fire. During the open-furnace era from 1923 into the late 1930s, workers in the furnace house developed symptoms that began like a cold and ended with a blue-coloured face. Doctors initially denied the connection to factory fumes. Roughly 200 workers are estimated to have died from the emissions, eight times the pneumonia death rate of the general population. The switch to closed furnaces in the late 1930s dramatically reduced deaths. In 1970, 240 furnace workers launched a five-week wildcat strike that became one of Norway's most politically significant labour conflicts, immortalised in Tor Obrestad's 1972 novel Sauda! Streik!.
The street itself tells a story. Haakonsgaten runs from the factory gate to the director's villa, and the architecture encodes the class hierarchy of industrial society. Nearest the noise and dust lived the lowest-ranking workers; further up, foremen and functionaries in progressively nicer houses; at the top, the director. As author Kjartan Fløgstad, who grew up in Sauda, wrote: along this axis, the social stratification of industrial society received its architectural expression. A walk through Åbøbyen makes this visible in timber and paint.
The darkest chapter is lungebrann, lung fire. During the open-furnace era from 1923 into the late 1930s, workers in the furnace house developed symptoms that began like a cold and ended with a blue-coloured face. Doctors initially denied the connection to factory fumes. Roughly 200 workers are estimated to have died from the emissions, eight times the pneumonia death rate of the general population. The switch to closed furnaces in the late 1930s dramatically reduced deaths. In 1970, 240 furnace workers launched a five-week wildcat strike that became one of Norway's most politically significant labour conflicts, immortalised in Tor Obrestad's 1972 novel Sauda! Streik!.
