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.