Photo: Hans Lindqvist · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Gisselfors kaggfabrik

Preserved kagg factory from 1905 in Oviken, where the machines still run during demonstrations for booked groups.

Opening hours unknown

Limited operations. Visits take place for booked groups. Snilleriket's opening-times page for summer 2024 stated that Gisselfors was closed until further notice; contact the owner for current information.

About the museum

In 1905 Paulus Persson converted his joinery at Gisselfors in Oviken into a kagg factory, after he had supplied the interior fittings for Oviken's new church. He learned the production during a visit to a kagg factory in Norway, where kaggs (small wooden barrels) were used for herring and other foodstuffs, and he started what became Oviken's largest industry. To obtain water power he dug a 400-metre canal, and he designed new machines himself. At its peak the factory employed about fifteen people and produced 1,600 kaggs a day.

In the 1960s demand fell when plastic came along, and the factory closed. About thirty years later it was renovated by Paulus's grandson Paul-Anders Paulsson, who had himself worked in his paternal grandfather's factory as a young man. The factory's machines remain and are used in the demonstrations.

Visiting groups get a demonstration in which the whole house shakes, the machines roar, and bottoms and lids are turned on the lathe, and the kagg is assembled and fitted with metal bands. The factory is part of Snilleriket, a cooperation on inventors and industrial environments in the southern Storsjö region.

Highlights

Demonstration of kagg production with the machines in their original place
Preserved kagg factory from 1905 with the machines still in place
Guided tour by the owner family on the history of the kaggs and the factory