Frontier Culture Museum: Reflections on America's Heritage

This is a wonderful guidebook to a remarkable and extraordinary museum. It consists of three farmsteads that have been physically brought from three European countries and reconstructed on the museum grounds in Staunton in the central Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. They are a Scotch-Irish farmstead from County Tyrone, Nothern Ireland, a German farmstead from Hortd in southwest Germany and an English farmstead from Worchestershire in the English west Midlands. The larger focus of the museum is to show how immigrants from these three countries of Europe contributed to the developing, uniquely American frontier culture, which took shape first in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and spread westward. This blending and adaptation of European cultures is demonstrated beautifully in the early American farmstead, which has been moved from farther south in the Valley and reconstructed on the museum grounds. The museum not only preserves these four farmsteads for posterity. It has well trained staff wearing period costumes from the respective countries of origin who carry out daily tasks on each of these farms--caring for livestock, cultivating gardens, preparing food, operating a blacksmith shop, processing and weaving flax and wool and making everyday items of all sorts. This book does a great job of representing all of this, including spelling out future plans for the development of the museum. I noticed a few points of historical confusion in the text in speaking about the various groups of immigrants. For instance, Mennonites and Brethren are spoken of together as Pietist sects. The Mennonite (Anabaptist) movement began in Switzerland in 1525 during the Reformation along with the Lutheran and Reformed movements. Nearly two centuries later in 1708 the Brethren movement was formed in Germany as one expression of the Pietist movement, which had been developing there in recent decades. The Mennonites began to migrate to Pennsylvania in 1683 and then on to the Valley of Virginia. The Brethren migration began three or four decades later.The stories of Brethren and Mennonites are related but not identical. The museum was created to help us understand developing American culture in the whole central East Coast of the United States. Both the book and the museum are treasures we can all benefit much from.