The Irish Workhouse Museum

We recently posted a picture of the front door of the Centre on our Facebook page. It got some of us wondering about the significance of the colour green. We've heard it said  anecdotally that the colour had a specific association with the building. We've tried to find out more about this but nothing has popped up so far.  The front door at the Irish Workhouse Centre, Portumna Some of the staff here know that the colour was a popular one in the Victorian period. This seems to be particularly true in relation to clothing and soft furnishings. In the early 1800s, a German company began producing a new hue, the ' Schweinfurt green', named after where it was produced. It became so popular that soon carpets and wallpapers were reproduced in the same green colour, alongside the fashionable dresses of the time. One of the key ingredients in the vibrant  emerald  green was arsenic, so perhaps this is where some of the distaste for the colour comes from.  In...