The homestead No. 57 is usually marked as a halfsection one in the sources. Its lands – fields, meadows, pastures and forests – with 25 ha substantiate a medieval colonization homestead. Pavel Záhora was the first documented owner in1670. In the course of the following 250 years,
the men of the Mrázek family owned the homestead alternatively – Martin (1979, 59, 75); Jiří (1806); Jan (1808); František (1821, 28, 34); Josef (1835); František (1869); Jan (1898) and Ferdinand (1929). Beginning with Josef Mrázek, the family had lived in the house No. 69 and the old house got a new owner.
Although the new homestead was only a part of the original unit, it had kept all the preconditions to be self-suffi cient. Fields, meadows, pastures and forests covered about 10,5 hectares and enabled large livestock breeding – cows and heifers; sows, piglets and some fattening pigs; about twenty hens and gooses; a goat or even beehives. A pair of horses with a foal was needful to farm the land. The large farm required many work-hands originating mainly in the farmer’s family. In our case, we can meet a rich structure of the household comprising of the farmer and his family, the retired farmers (mostly parents, sometimes grandparents) and the single brothers and sisters. Under the normal circumstances, there worked about 6 – 8 adults in the farm. If this number was lower (death, marriage, leaving for service), a service family, hofers, was engaged. They worked for not-high wages and payment in kind. Mostly, they were given a small habitable room in the homestead - it was the retirement dwelling in our case - and a piece of land to grow cabbage and potatoes.
The rich farm and its careful owners succeeded in meeting all their obligations. First, they were to fi ll the duties towards the lords and state, and to every family member, beginning from the old farmers. The retired farmer Josef Mrázek used to live and work in this way for almost forty years, reaching a venerable age of 85 years. It was more diffi cult to satisfy the brothers and sisters whose heir’s shares were increasing in the course of the 19th century. In 1858, the heir’s share of each of the owner’s four brothers and sisters amounted to 220 guldens. It took next twenty years to pay these shares but František Mrázek could manage it. In 1898, his son Jan had to pay 1000 guldens and a cow to satisfy the brother. Five orphans after Jan got even 800 crowns each as their heir’s share in 1914.
With its layout and the constructional elements, the homestead No. 69 belongs to the younger group of folk architecture in the ethnographic area of Zálesí. The house was built as a fully new building in the early-19th century, after the No. 9 had been separated from the mother homestead No. 57. The new green-built homestead was erected in the hitherto garden. Therefore, the builder was not limited in his plans and he could form a layout with plenty of modern elements, which were developing only in the course of the 19th century.
Opposite to the hitherto gable-oriented houses, the building is gutter-oriented and its frontage forms a uniform mass. The yard has an L-shaped plan and the small farming section is attached to the chamber. Behind it are wooden pigsties. The barn on the opposite side closes the left part of the yard surrounded with an orchard.
The uniform frontage integrates some elements, which used to be independent in the past. First, it is the farmer’s dwelling consisting of three parts with a room, a hall with an open-hearth kitchen and a two-storey provisions chamber. A two-room retirement dwelling is attached to the farmer’s house. The developed horizontal partition is completed with an interesting vertical partition. The two-storey chamber is situated in the lowest place of the terrain and its storey continues with the half-storey above the hall, the kitchen, and the room. This half-storey can be accessed from a small entrance hall. A similar half-storey separated with a hall can be found over the retirement dwelling. Both half-stories were used as granaries or as rooms for occasional sleeping in summer. The separate rooms of the retirement dwelling were not very common and – because of the farm size - they were used also as dwelling for the hofer families. Its two rooms – a small habitable room and a chamber - can be accessed only from the farmyard through a narrow corridor. The differences in the farming and the social functions of the individual parts of the buildings are underlined with the decorative façade. The habitable section including the retirement rooms emphasizes the large area and the number of the rooms. On the contrary, the chamber and entrance hall façade pointed-out the vertical elements of two storeys – vertical ventilation windows documenting the economic level and the numerous storage rooms.
