Chasing the Family Ghosts: Frontier Culture Museum

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Frontier Culture Museum

My Father and I made a recent trip to North Carolina ‘chasing ghosts’ in search of our direct ancestors … more on what we found will be in a future post. On our way back to DC, while traveling I-81N near Staunton, Virginia … we stumbled upon the Frontier Culture Museum. What a great place where history has been so well preserved. These few acres of real estate capture the essence of our Colonial culture, as well as, the blended European, Native American, and African cultures that make-up our modern American culture. It only took a few hours to discover and visit vastly dispersed geographical locations all while traversing several centuries.

The Frontier Culture Museum website provides all the additional information you need and captures its core purpose as follows:

The Frontier Culture Museum tells 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.

To tell the story of these early immigrants and their American descendants the Museum has moved or reproduced examples of traditional rural buildings from England, Germany, Ireland, West Africa, and America. The Museum engages the public at these exhibits with a combination of interpretive signage and living history demonstrations. The outdoor exhibits are located in two separate areas: the Old World and America. The Old World exhibits show rural life and culture in four homelands of early migrants to the American colonies. The American exhibits show the life these colonists and their descendants created in the colonial backcountry, how this life changed over more than a century, and how life in the United States today is shaped by its frontier past.