Restored Prairie
“The future of the natural world, on which we all depend, is in our hands”
Sir David Attenborough
Please note: Due to a beaver dam down stream from the museum, the pond flooded a significant portion of the prairie that was under restoration. As of July 2025, Gammelgården chose to stop the restoration efforts that had been begun by Prairie Restoration until the dam could be eliminated and the pond returns to its normal level.
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Information about the restored prairie prior to July 2025:
Gammelgården Museum of Scandia’s restored prairie was planted and is maintained by Prairie Restorations.
It is a priority of the museum to create an area of the grounds that shows what the land was like when immigrants settled here in the 1850s-1880s.
According to Yale Environment 360, “Prior to settlement by Europeans, prairie blanketed an enormous swath of central North America, from Canada south to Texas, and from Indiana west to Colorado — nearly 600,000 square miles of grassland all told.
“This complex ecosystem was home to a diverse and teeming web of life, including now-tattered bison populations. Farming and development have reduced much of this iconic American landscape, particularly in the wetter eastern areas. There, tall-grass prairie, a habitat dominated by grasses that can grow eight feet high, now occupies less than 1 percent of its former range, putting it among the world’s most endangered ecosystems, according to the U.S. National Park Service.”
By restoring this area at Gammelgården back to a prairie, there are benefits to native wildlife – something that the land could not previously support. There are now sandhill cranes, coyotes, deer, rabbits, owls, raccoons, geese, songbirds, monarchs, dragonflies, and hawks – just to name some of the many types of wildlife that call Gammelgården home.
Below are some of the many native wildflowers and grasses that can be seen in the prairie at Gammelgården Museum of Scandia.
