Welcome to the Frontier Culture Museum

Welcome to the Frontier Culture Museum. . , The Frontier Culture Museum , This outdoor living history museum has two sections: "Old World" and "America." The Old World exhibits explore rural life and culture in Western Europe and West Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries. During this period, European immigrants and enslaved Africans started to arrive in North America. The American exhibits show the life these people and their descendants created in western Virginia, how it changed over more than a century, and how the United States today is shaped by its frontier past. The Frontier Culture Museum shares the stories of Native Americans, West Africans, and Europeans on an early American frontier., What is a "Frontier?" , Early colonial settlers defined the frontier as the edge of European settlement. A more modern definition describes the frontier as a borderland between two or more cultural groups. It is a place of interactions, exchanges, and conflicts between distinct groups of people. The history of America's frontier is rife with stories of conquest, violence, and exploitation, but also with stories of survival, perseverance, and cooperation between peoples and cultures. All of these stories contributed to the formation of a dynamic new American identity., , British North America , Before Europeans colonized North America,it was home to millions of Indigenous peoples and their distinct cultures. Starting in the 17th century, a steady stream of Europeans and enslaved Africans arrived in what is now the United States. Gradually, they pushed the frontier westward into the homelands and hunting grounds of American Indians. While Irish, English, Germans, and West Africans were predominant in western Virginia, they were only some of the cultural groups that crossed the Atlantic in the 17th and 18th centuries.