The American Frontier Culture Foundation is supporting a meaningful expansion of historical interpretation at the Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia through a new signage project funded by the Americana Corner Preserving America Grant program.
Interpretive signs play an essential role in helping museum guests connect with the past. At the Frontier Culture Museum, where outdoor exhibits span centuries of transatlantic migration, cultural blending, frontier adaptation, and agricultural life, signage offers a vital layer of context that enhances every visit.
The upcoming installation of fifteen new interpretive signs will provide deeper insight into two important exhibits: the 1820s American Farm and the 1850s American Farm. These signs are designed to help visitors understand not only what they see, but why it mattered within the broader story of early America.
This work has been funded through Americana Corner's Preserving America Grant program, a philanthropic initiative that supports organizations dedicated to preserving and sharing the story of America’s founding era through its first century. The program helps museums, libraries, historic sites, and educational organizations bring history to life through meaningful projects that engage their communities. Each year, grant recipients are announced on George Washington’s birthday, a fitting tribute to our nation’s earliest history makers.
Americana Corner was founded in 2020 by Tom Hand to help people rediscover the extraordinary events, ideas, and individuals that shaped the United States. Through accessible storytelling, biographies, and digital resources, Americana Corner explores our nation’s arc from the American Revolution to westward expansion. Its content covers pivotal documents, key turning points, and foundational figures such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, while also explaining why their legacies still matter today.
Americana Corner's Preserving America Grant program extends this mission by supporting projects that deepen public understanding of the nation’s origins and early growth, including the Frontier Culture Museum’s new signage project.
Located in Staunton, Virginia, the Frontier Culture Museum is the largest open-air living history museum in the Shenandoah Valley and one of Virginia’s top family-friendly destinations. Costumed interpreters tell the story of Indigenous peoples, European immigrants from Germany, England, and Ireland, the forced migration of enslaved Africans, and the ongoing evolution of American society along the frontier.
Visitors can walk through historic farms, interact with tradespeople at an Irish Forge, watch woodworking and blacksmithing demonstrations, see tailors and yarn spinners at work, and learn how settlers cooked, farmed, and built their communities.
The new signage will strengthen the Museum’s educational mission by providing additional context for two significant exhibits that explore frontier life across time.
Originally built in 1773 by a German immigrant farmer in Rockingham County, the 1820s American Farm tells a story of cultural blending in the Shenandoah Valley.
By the early nineteenth century, Anglo American influences began to appear gradually in Virginia German households. English furniture styles, such as the chest of drawers, became more common. Families adopted tea and coffee drinking, and imported English tableware began replacing traditional forms.
This exhibit highlights how these cultural shifts took place over several decades shaped by the American Revolution, the founding of the United States, and the development of new markets.
Although German language and customs persisted, distinctions among Germans, Scots-Irish, and English settlers became less pronounced as intermarriage, shared labor, and changing economies drew communities closer together.
At the same time, the harsh realities of slavery continued to define life for African Americans, who made up roughly 25 percent of the Valley’s population in 1820. Many were forcibly relocated through the expanding domestic slave trade, and both free and enslaved African Americans contributed labor and skill to farms and trades across the region.
Originally from Botetourt County, the 1850s American Farm represents the daily life of plain folk, a social class of land-owning farmers who produced enough to sustain their families with the possibility of modest surplus. While some may have held enslaved laborers or rented enslaved workers from others, many relied on a mix of family labor, hired help, and enslaved African Americans to manage the demanding agricultural cycle.
By the 1850s, the Valley of Virginia was deeply connected to a growing national economy. Improved roads, rail lines, and waterways allowed farmers to send wheat, livestock, and other goods to eastern cities, while manufactured products from across the United States and Europe became increasingly available at home.
Ethnic distinctions among white settlers faded as communities embraced a shared American identity shaped by mass communication, revivalist religion, and expanding markets. Meanwhile, enslaved African Americans continued to endure profound hardship, family separation, and the constant threat of the domestic slave trade, even as they built communities and carried forward cultural traditions under unimaginable conditions.
The new interpretive signs will help visitors engage more deeply with these layered stories, connecting the built environment of the farms to the people who lived and labored there. Visitors will:
• Understand how cultures merged and changed over time
• See how global and national events shaped daily life
• Recognize the human stories within historical structures
• Explore the Valley’s diverse heritage, including the lives of immigrants, free and enslaved African Americans, and frontier families
• Connect what they learn on the museum grounds to the broader development of the United States
By funding this project, the Americana Corner Preserving America Grant program is helping the Frontier Culture Museum continue its mission of sharing America’s early story with depth, accuracy, and compassion.
To explore the Preserving America Grant program and the work of Americana Corner, visit:
https://americanacorner.com
To support the work of the American Frontier Culture Foundation or plan a visit to the Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia, please visit:
https://www.frontierculturefoundation.org
https://www.frontiermuseum.org
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