Tracing Virginia’s Heritage at the Frontier Culture Museum

Up a hill in Staunton, Virginia, stands a West African mud building. Around the corner lies a 17th-century English estate home and, a few hundred yards away, a German peasant farm. This collection might seem like a strange hodgepodge, but each of the dozen buildings at the 200-acre Frontier Culture Museum represents a crucial contribution to Virginia.

The open-air living history museum in the Shenandoah Valley offers an interactive slice of the past, telling the stories of the people who came to America in the 1600s and 1700s from communities in England, Germany, Ireland, and West Africa, as well as those of the Indigenous people already here.

The museum includes a replica West African village and buildings relocated from Europe that represent the homelands of immigrants and slaves who came here, as well as original Shenandoah Valley buildings and a reconstructed Native American village to show how early Americans lived.

Costumed interpreters enrich the experience, which reveals insights into how these cultures came together to form present-day Virginia.

Jean-Claude Hatungimana drumming for a group of elementary school-age kids

Interpreter Jean-Claude Hatungimana drums for a school group while explaining West African Igbo culture.

The best place to start is at the West African Igbo village, where interpreter Jean-Claude Hatungimana welcomes guests by tapping out a steady rhythm on a drum.

One morning, visitor Theresa Norman joined him with her 3-year-old daughter Marina, who picked up a pair of drumsticks and began drumming too. Quickly, they fell into sync. It was the family’s second visit, and Marina seemed mesmerized by the drumming. “Everyone’s super nice here,” says Theresa. “They go over a lot of detail.”

Visitors learn that the Igbo people incorporated music into daily life. “When you harvest your yams, when you have weddings, even at funerals, you’re going to have music,” Hatungimana explains.

The Igbo came to Virginia as slaves, bringing their culture and crops from an area that’s now in southeastern Nigeria. “These were the people who were forced to come over here. It’s not like the Irish or German, who made a choice,” says Hatungimana, a native of Burundi, in East Africa, who has worked at the museum for 10 years.

European influence

Over at the English farmhouse, Alex Tillen prepares to brew beer in a copper kettle from hops he grew on-site. He also does his share of construction, which has proven to be a crowd-pleaser: A 9-second TikTok video showing him splitting a chestnut oak log into planks with a wedge and hammer has garnered more than 92,000 views and counting.

Last fall, he used the lumber to build portable fencing to keep sheep corralled. (Other animals on the museum’s payroll include pigs, goats, and a cat.)

A bedroom inside a 17th-century home relocated from England.

Tillen says guests are surprised by the relative comfort of the 17th-century yeoman’s home, which was relocated from Worcestershire, England. But few settlers from England enjoyed such fine surroundings: most lived in poverty and came to North America as indentured servants.

Interpreter Henry Goodson demonstrates blacksmithing.

Around the corner is an Irish blacksmith forge manned by A.J. Graham. He heats an iron rod in coals to 2,000 degrees, and then bangs the glowing red tip into a candlestick holder. This low-tech manufacturing enthralls visitors, making the forge the museum’s most popular area. “We’ll have people camp down here with their kids for an hour,” he says.

Eventually guests move along to a 2-room farmhouse relocated from Ulster, northern Ireland, which was then the home of a family of Scottish descent. An interpreter shows how these farmers once supplemented their income by harvesting flax plants and teasing out the fibers to make thread, which was then woven into a rough-hewn Irish linen. But a series of crop failures in the 1700s pushed these families out of Ireland and into the Shenandoah Valley.

A visitor explores a 2-room farmhouse relocated from northern Ireland.

For some visitors, the buildings are as intriguing as the demonstrations. Chris Baker of Bedford County says that because he’s a carpenter, he is fascinated by the intricate process required to make the Irish home’s waterproof roof with layers of sod and straw.

“They had to make their tools back then,” says Baker, who is on a return visit with his family. “It’s crazy. My job just uses power tools. We love having the hands-on opportunities for kids to see history in action, and how it has shaped our culture today.”

Interpreter Lorelei Pferrer tailors a petticoat.

In a nearby German farm building, an interpreter sews clothes and notes that the sheep grazing outside provide the wool. Germans, she says, came to the Shenandoah Valley from Pennsylvania. As with other Europeans, they seized land originally occupied by Native Americans, whom the museum honors in an Indigenous village partially inspired by Virginia’s Monacan tribe.

Wigwams in the Indigenous village.

Like other Eastern Woodland Indians, the Monacans grew corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers, and lived in wigwams. An interpreter leads the way into a cozy shelter to show how the Monacans would hang slices of pumpkin near the top of the home; smoke from a fire in the center of the living quarters would dry out the slices for storage throughout the winter and spring.

Coming together

Senior interpreter Ray Wright stands inside an 1850s Botetourt County farmhouse.

The pieces come together in the museum’s final sections, showing how the diverse groups became Americans. Instead of a melting pot, “we like to call it a salad,” says Ray Wright, a senior interpreter at the museum. Even centuries later, you can identify specific influences from each of these cultures in everyday life.

Interpreter Abby Jacobsen talks with visitors outside a 1760s Virginia log cabin.

Visitors wander through a cramped Virginia log cabin from 1760, followed by increasingly larger and newer farmhouses. A volunteer shows how an 1820s building relocated from Rockingham County grew from a simple German-style house. Later additions included an English-style parlor and a long front porch reminiscent of an African or Caribbean home.

At a schoolhouse built in 1840, interpreters often put young guests through the paces of an old-fashioned lesson, having them spell out words on a slate board or stand up for a tongue-twisting lesson in elocution.

New Hope’s Mount Tabor congregation donated the Mount Tabor Church, a log structure built by slaves in the 1800s and reconstructed here in 2015. Inside, a handmade broom is tucked away by the door. Because slaves could not legally wed, couples would “jump the broom” in a ceremony to symbolize their marriage.

Senior interpreter Ray Wright walks near an 1820s Rockingham County building.

The last stop is a spacious 2-story 1850s Virginia farmstead and outbuildings relocated from Botetourt County. Its gardens would have been planted with crops from across the globe: flax and wheat from Europe, yams and melons from Africa, and tobacco and corn from North America. In the evening, the residents might sit on the porch to sing a Scotch-Irish ballad played on a banjo, an instrument that originated in Africa.

And that, notes Wright, is the museum’s message. “In 1850, unbeknownst to them or not, a farmer’s typical day involved all the cultures that came before.”

If you go

A paved loop stretching nearly 2 miles, which can also be accessed by golf cart, leads visitors through the African, Indigenous, European, and American sections of the museum. Adults, $12; hours vary by season.

Virginia native Larry Bleiberg is a past president of the Society of American Travel Writers, and wishes his fourth-grade history class could have visited the Frontier Culture Museum.