Karen Toller – housewife, mother, property owner and industrialist

Lecture with the Vestfold Museums, Sunday March 8th

Sunday 8 March, 2-3:30 PM, Eidsfoss hovedgård

Tickets: 100 kr

Tickets, information and contact: vestfoldmuseene.no

Arranged by Vestfoldmuseene

Portrett av Karen Toller, oljemaleriKaren Toller was born in Tønsberg in 1662, heiress to substantial estates in and around Christiania.
She was about 18 years old when she married the Holstein nobleman and military man Caspar Herman Hausmann – half-brother of the stadtholder in Norway, Ulrik Frederik Gyldenløve.

Hausmann had many irons in the fire, and combined his professional life as a soldier with businesses in shipping and lumber trade in England and Holland, clothing manufacturing – and the ironworks at Eidsfoss. The Hausmann couple had eight children who all grew up in Christiania, and married into Danish-Norwegian nobility and clergy. When Karen became a widow in 1718, she moved out to Gamlebyen and “Mulegården” which was hers through parental inheritance. She converted the main house into a year-round residence and bought the surrounding barnyard land from the Crown. Karen lived in Oslo barnyard until she died in August 1742.

In later accounts of Karen Toller, it is often said that she was an “enterprising lady” and that she continued the business and property management that she and her husband Caspar Herman Hausmann had had together.

There are few traces in the sources that can tell us anything personal about Karen’s life and legacy. By looking at, among other things, the estate auction record after her death, old maps of Oslo and the surrounding area, and other sources of women’s history, you can learn a little more about Mrs. Karen and her life, with duties and room for maneuver as a housewife, mother, property owner, and industrialist, in the decades around 1700.