Frontier Culture Museum, Where the Valley's Roots Are Rebuilt

Just outside Staunton, Virginia, the Frontier Culture Museum spreads across one hundred eighty-eight acres as the largest open-air living history museum in the Shenandoah Valley. The Virginia General Assembly established it in nineteen eighty-six, and it opened to the public in nineteen eighty-eight. The museum's central argument is that the Shenandoah backcountry was shaped by a collision of cultures: actual historic farm buildings were relocated from Germany, Ireland, England, and West Africa and re-erected here alongside reconstructed American Indian and African American sites.

Working farms demonstrate daily life across centuries and continents. It is essentially a physical answer to the question of who crossed the Atlantic and the mountains to settle this valley, and what they brought with them.