The emigration was restricted partly because of new working occasions in the construction of the railway track Veseli nad Moravou - Myjava - Nové Mesto nad Vahom, because of which there were conditions for further economic development of Myjava.
The rich history of Myjava is connected with mentality of its people that have preserved their industry, implacability with oppression, purity of the national consciousness, as well as a preservation and an anxious protection of the own traditions arisen in the territory of the Myjava Hill-Country. The mentioned characteristic whole known by clean-cut shapes and temperate colours of the national costume nad houses, by a typical dialect and way of life preserving traditional manners and customs attracted the attention of ethnographers and folklorists already in the past. At the beginning of our century, a Swiss aesthete William Ritter came to Myjava and became an admirer of the folk-architecture and art of Myjava. In the thirties, an outstanding Czech ethnologist and photographer Karel Plicka records Myjava manners and customs, songs, music, dances and folk-costumes. However, a complex research of the material and spiritual culture of the people of that region was carried out in the sixties and seventies of our century, patronized by the Institute of Ethnography of the Slovak National Museum in Martin, and by the Department of the Ethnography and Folklore of the Faculty of Philosophy of the Comenius University in Bratislava. Because of that, the authors of this publication could use studies on the material culture of the people, folklore and dialects in this book.
The geographic conditions of the Myjava Hill-Country had an effect on the preservation of traditional forms also in the agriculture, that was the main source of the nutrition of a prevailing part of the population. Hard and tough work is characteristic for the agriculture of Myjava (when trying to gain a new land by grubbing and cultivating it, when ploughing with wooden or semi/iron ploughs with teams of horses or cows, or when sowing corn manually). Corn was also threshed manually with so called flails. Not earlier than in the 20th century, threshing machines were used, first driven by people, later by animals using transfer mechanisms so called ”geple”. Fruit culture and breeding of cows, sheep, pigs, horses were an important part of the agriculture. It helped make better prosperity of a badly productive tilling of the land.
The modest life conditions provided by a relatively overpopulated Myjava territory forced the inhabitants to develop, apart from the agriculture, also home/produced crafts and a peddling. It followed up with the domestic base in raw materials - abundance of wood, hemp, sheep wool and hide. It secured a prosperity of various craftsmen - wheelwrights, joiners, weavers, tailors, sack-makers, furriers, tanners and shoemakers. There worked also other craftsmen there - millers, black-smiths, butchers, dyers, bricklayers, carpenters, etc.