Flawil Museum of Local History
The museum in Flawil invites visitors to immerse themselves in textile history and local life.
The Lindengut villa, once owned by textile industrialist Huldreich Ottiker, has been both a residential and local history museum since 1989. With its surrounding park featuring a water basin and tuff grotto, it bears witness to Flawil's textile past. For more than 200 years, Flawil carters transported goods for textile manufacturers in eastern Switzerland within Switzerland, to Frankfurt am Main, to Lyon, and even as far as Marseille and beyond. With the construction of the railway, they lost their livelihood. Textile businesses such as weaving mills, bleaching mills, dyeing mills, embroidery factories, and embroidery houses shaped the village landscape and working life in the Untertoggenburg municipality of Flawil for decades. The museum has a considerable collection of historical film material, including the oldest film in the canton of St. Gallen, dating from around 1905.