The Frontier Culture Museum: Outdoor Living History in Virginia

Story and Photographs by Tom Straka

History buffs will love an interstate stop that chronicles Virginia's (and America's) cultural history. It's located about a mile from the intersection of Interstates 64 and 81 in Staunton, Virginia. The Frontier Culture Museum touts itself as the biggest open-air living history museum in the Shenandoah Valley, as well as one of the highest rated family-friendly attractions and one of the top tourist destinations in Virginia. Costumed historical interpreters show the life and customs of the indigenous Native American tribes in Virginia, the arrival of the German, English and Irish settlers along the Great Wagon Road, and the painful journey of the enslaved Africans to the first permanent British colony in North America. Visitors may also interact with a blacksmith at an Irish Forge, woodworkers, tailors, and yarn spinners, and learn how the early settlers of America cooked and worked the land.

The museum is about cultural origins. Its purpose is to tell the story of the thousands of people who migrated to colonial America, and of the life they created here for themselves and their descendants. These first pioneers came to America during the 1600s and 1700s from communities in the hinterlands of England, Germany, Ireland, and West Africa. Many were farmers and rural craftsmen set in motion by changing conditions in their homelands and drawn to the American colonies by opportunities for a better life. Others came as unwilling captives to work on farms and plantations. Regardless of how they arrived, all became Americans, and all contributed to the success of the colonies, and of the United States.

A trail leads the visitor through two sections: Old World and American exhibits. In the Old World exhibits, you can experience daily life in farm households in the 1600s and 1700s in England, Ireland, Germany, and West Africa. The emphasis is on the culture from the Old World that was the basis of developing an American culture. It shows people living by farming, local trade, and skills such as spinning and weaving, blacksmithing, or wood-working. Their labor and available resources were dedicated to providing the needs of the household and meeting the obligations imposed upon them by their community, landlord, or ruler. An extraordinary turn of events brought people born England, Ireland, Germany, and West Africa together on the frontier, where American Indians had lived for centuries. Over time, all of these different groups created American frontier culture, a distinct culture which to this day shapes American identity.

The American exhibits take the visitor through Virginia and American history and culture from Native Americans to the Valley of Virginia in 1760s, 1820s, 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s. Exhibits also include an 1840 schoolhouse, an 1860 African-American church, and octagonal barn. One of the most interesting aspects of the American exhibits are costumed historical interpreters, especially those showing the crafts and trades. I especially enjoyed peppering the Irish blacksmith with technical questions, as he was using an active forge. The American section is frontier culture from beginning to end.

Old World Exhibits

The trail begins with an eighteenth century West African farm reproduction from Igboland, a region located in modern-day Nigeria. West African peoples were linked by an extensive trade network which covered large areas of the continent. West African societies were structured around trade and manufacturing, agricultural production, family kinship and ancestor worship. The arrival of Europeans on Africa's Atlantic coast in the 1400s brought great change to them and their neighbors. Due to the slave trade, over the course of five centuries, more than ten million Africans were taken from their homelands and forced to another continent.

Approximately 30,000 Igbo were shipped to Virginia between 1716 and 1755. Race-based slavery soon became a central feature of life in Virginia. Unfree, African labor contributed to the growth and success of the local economy and the wealth and status of enslavers. As settlement expanded westward, enslaved Africans and African Americans in the backcountry participated in the cultural exchange on the frontier. Contributions to American culture are found in foodways, music, folklore, and religious worship. When permitted, Africans influenced the form and function of the pottery, basketry, wood-work and textiles they produced for others.

A group learning about West African culture in a covered West African pavilion.

The second Old World stop is 1650s England. The period between 1500 and 1700 was a time of great social change in England. Much of the rural population was uprooted as a result of enclosure (or fencing), which  accelerated during the 1600s. English colonists started to permanently settle in North America in Jamestown in 1607. Over the next century they established other English colonies along the Atlantic coast. By 1700, almost 250,000 people lived in the colonies. Most of them had English roots.

European settlement slowly crept westward into the piedmont, and by the mid-1700s Anglo-Virginians crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains and began to settle in the Valley of Virginia. English culture and traditions were dominant in England's North American colonies due to the numbers of English settlers, and the role the Crown and English proprietors played in establishing those colonies. Based on the English model, in Virginia this culture quickly took the form of a patriarchal and hierarchical society led by the "gentlemen" of the colony.

The timber-frame farmhouse on the English exhibit was originally built by an independent farmer in Worcestershire, England, in the 17th century.

The inside of the English house contains all kinds of everyday items. 

 A 17^th century English bedroom.

 Near the English house was an interesting English garden.

The third stop is a late-18th century Irish Forge and blacksmith shop that stood in County Fermanagh in the Irish province of Ulster, in what is now Northern Ireland. Like their farming customers in Ulster, blacksmiths and their skills immigrated to colonial America along with other Scots-Irish. Immigrants with special craft or trade skills were recruited by colonial merchants and governments in the early years of colonization and intermittently when the colonies needed specialized labor. These artisans provided labor, services, and goods to ensure the success of the colonies. Blacksmiths in particular possessed skills which were needed to produce and repair tools for the cultivation of land and the building of houses and infrastructure.

The 18th-century blacksmith in Ireland was a businessman. Although the smith might be engaged in farming, their primary function in the local economy was blacksmithing. They provided important services to their community. The smiths' primary job was to repair broken items. In rural villages they also made new items when needed since access to merchandise was often limited.

The Irish forge was operating with red hot coals and a blacksmith that knew all the details of forging iron.

The fourth stop was an 1750s Irish farm. Irish Protestants from Ulster, often called Scots-Irish, started to move to the American colonies in 1718. Most Ulster immigrants came to the colony of Pennsylvania. Competing with the Germans for land in southeastern Pennsylvania, many Irish families made their way through the Great Valley of the Appalachians to settle in western Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and the piedmont of North Carolina. By the end of the 1700s, their culture was the dominant English-speaking culture in the colonial American backcountry.

At the time of the American Revolution, more than 100,000 Ulster immigrants had arrived in America, representing the single largest movement from the British Isles to British North America in the 1700s. Scots-Irish were often found in newly opened areas on the western edge of settlement where they served as a buffer between Native Americans and older, established eastern settlements. Due to their numbers, they emerged as the dominant cultural group in the backcountry and they shaped frontier culture in many different ways such as in architecture, language, music, education, religion, and in libation through the introduction of whiskey.

 The Irish Farm at the Museum originally stood in County Tyrone in modern-day Northern Ireland.

Inside the Irish house, with a talkative inhabitant.

Adjacent to the Irish house were sheep grazing. There are plenty of agricultural animals in the exhibits.

The last stop in the Old World is a 1750s German farm. Traditional peasant farming became increasingly difficult during the 1700s in Germany. Population growth, and the practice of dividing farmland among all family heirs resulted in smaller farms and forced many families to practice a part-time craft to survive. Textile trade, blacksmithing, and woodworking were common crafts practiced in peasant households. By 1775, roughly 100,000 German-speaking immigrants, mostly tenant farmers and rural artisans, had arrived in the colonies in the 18th century. Germans were the largest group of non-English speaking Europeans to settle in colonial America.

The chief port of entry for German immigrants was Philadelphia, from where they spread into the countryside in search of land. Many of the early arrivals settled in southeastern Pennsylvania near Philadelphia. Others pressed further west to settle near the Susquehanna River or south to the colony of Maryland. Over time, German-speaking colonists found their way into the Great Valley of the Appalachians and pushed into western Maryland and, by the 1730s, across the Potomac River into the northern Valley of Virginia. In the decades that followed German settlers and their American-born descendants continued moving south and west, leaving a distinctive mark on American culture wherever they settled.

The German Farm was originally located in the Rhineland Palatinate in modern-day Germany. The timber-framed style is typical for 18th-century farming villages in southwestern Germany.

Inside the German house.

An interesting lecture hall complex separates the Old World and American sections.

New World

The Old World influences met on the Virginia frontier-- English, Scots-Irish, German, Native American, African, and other groups. They were brought here by global forces beyond their control. The struggles, cooperation, and conflicts they experienced created a unique frontier culture. The frontier experience is a vital element of the broader American experience which shaped a distinct American identity. Elements of these cultures remain clearly visible among the foundations of the American identity today. They are apparent in the New World exhibits.

The New World section begins with the Native American exhibit. This exhibit at the Museum represents a small Eastern Woodlands Indian community in the Great Appalachian Valley in the early 1700s. The Eastern Woodlands cultural region covered a vast area from the Atlantic to the Mississippi river, and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. The diverse American Indian groups in this region shared some cultural characteristics, but were distinctive in housing, foodways, language, and social structures.

American Indians played a crucial part in the development of frontier culture. Some European settlers were ill equipped to survive in North America, but access to American Indian knowledge and practices aided them in establishing and expanding England's North American colonies--often to the detriment of American Indians and their cultures.

The rapid decline of American Indian groups and communities from eastern North America in the 1700s did not diminish their deep and enduring influence on the American frontier culture that formed there. European immigrants and the American-born men, women, and children, who settled the colonial frontier, encountered Native peoples, and adopted some of their ways to succeed in frontier conditions. This was a major contribution to the emergence of American frontier culture.

The edge of a Native American community.

The second American stop was the Valley of Virginia in the 1760s. Settlement of America's Appalachian river valleys began in the late 1720s, and the early settlers typically built one-room log cabins like the reconstructed building at the Museum. The earliest settlers in Virginia's backcountry were German and Scots-Irish farmers from Pennsylvania. The colony of Virginia enacted generous land policies to attract settlers to its frontier areas. The colonial government intentionally used these settlers to create a buffer zone between American Indians and French in the interior and the developed areas in eastern Virginia. These early settlers on the frontier were soon joined by Anglo-Virginian settlers and African and African-American slaves from eastern Virginia. Settlers were motivated by a common desire to obtain a freehold farm capable of supporting their families and providing extra land to sell or pass on to the next generation.

The earliest settlers arrived on foot, leading packhorses carrying a few tools and possessions over paths established by Native Americans. Later settlers traveled by wagon over the same routes after they were widened and improved. Most settlers intended to farm, and they sought land that featured a reliable water supply and a mix of forest and open ground. Native Americans intermittently had lived on the land before the arrival of Atlantic settlers, and they had established home sites and fields on the best available locations. Shrewd early settlers selected these sites, leaving poorer land for those who followed. After selecting a parcel of land and securing legal title, the settlers built a shelter and cleared land for crops. Their first house was often a one or two room log cabin, built by family members with the assistance of neighbors, and possibly an indentured servant or slave.

 Reconstructed 1760s one-room log cabin homestead.

 Inside the 1760s log cabin.

 No, this is not a dead pig. This is a porcine reenactor on a hot day taking a nap. It attracted a lot of attention from the kids.

The third stop was the Valley of Virginia in the 1820s. The 1820s American Farm was originally built by a German immigrant farmer in 1773 in Rockingham County, Virginia. Anglo-American influences entered the Virginia German lives slowly. By the 1820s, English furniture forms, such as the chest of drawers, began to appear in their houses. They became tea and coffee drinkers and began using imported English dinner plates and teacups. This exhibit shows how the various cultures merge over the 50 years which span the periods of the American Revolution and the Early Republic. By the 1820s, the different peoples who settled the Valley of Virginia had lived together for several generations. They were shaped by the common experiences of settling on the frontier, the American Revolution, the founding of the United States, and the market revolution. As a result of these shared experiences, ethnic differences began to fade.

Farmers in the Valley of Virginia were engaged in mixed farming dominated by grains and livestock. The main cash crop was wheat, which was ground into flour at local mills for export to eastern markets. Other crops included corn, rye, barley, and oats, which were used as animal feed or distilled into liquor. Livestock included horses, which were used as draft animals, cattle, swine, and sheep. Cattle and swine were particularly important. Cattle were driven to eastern cities for sale, while hogs were raised primarily for home consumption.

 The quality of the homes increased between 1760 and 1820.

 Inside of the 1820s house.

This reconstructed barn is modeled on a three-bay bank barn in Winchester, Virginia. It is considered to be a variant of the Pennsylvania barn.

 There are many smaller structures scattered about, like this bake oven. 

The 1850s close out the trail's timeline with the Valley of Virginia in the 1850s. The 1850s American Farm was originally located in Botetourt County, Virginia. A farm like this would have been owned by a family of "plain folk." The farmhouse is modest. New forms of technology and methods of construction were being used to build it and the other buildings. Different floor plans and architectural styles reflect different cultural influences.

By the 1840s, Euro-American settlers were venturing ever-deeper into the trans-Mississippi West. The settlement of Texas began as early as 1822, when it was still a Mexican province, and many of the early founders and leaders of Texas were Virginians. After Texas, the next important destinations were Oregon and California, particularly after gold was discovered in California in 1849.

 The quality of the houses increased by 1850.

Inside the 1850s house.

This ground barn (ground-level access) was common in Botetourt County, Virginia. Before finding its way to Virginia, this style was likely introduced to Pennsylvania in the 18^th century by German immigrants. The large barn was built with oak and yellow pine timber.

 The inside of the tinsmith's cabin showed some interesting tools.

 There is a small schoolhouse from the 1840s transplanted to the museum. I thought the stern schoolmaster inside was more interesting than the building itself.   

If you are on Interstates 64 or 81 in Virginia, this museum is certainly worth a stop. From the intersection of the two interstates, the driving distance is less than two miles. It's a high-quality living history experience. Its also a lot of fun.

Author/Photographer. Tom Straka is an emeritus professor of forestry at Clemson University in South Carolina. He has an interest in history, forestry and natural resources, natural history, and the American West.

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