The Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton, Virginia is a living history site and an educational agency of the Commonwealth of Virginia.  The Frontier Culture Museum has achieved the highest recognition for a museum, accreditation by the American Association of Museums (AAM).   The Museum features five historic, reconstructed working farms from Germany (1710), Northern Ireland (1730), England (1690), Botetourt County, Virginia (1850), and Rockingham County, Virginia (1773).  The farms represent the daily lives and agricultural heritage of the peoples who immigrated to the new world and formed a unique American culture.  The Museum’s mission is to educate the public about the lives, reasons for immigration, and cultural synthesis of the ethnically diverse peoples who arrived in western Virginia and the mid-Atlantic backcountry during the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries; as well as the native peoples who made the area their home. The immigration cultures include the Germans, Scotch-Irish, English, and West Africans. 

Germany:

From the late-17^th century to the late-20^th century, the German farm at the Museum stood in the small village of Hördt in the Rhineland-Palatinate. A village location for farmhouses and barns is common in many German-speaking lands. The Museum’s timber-frame farmhouse is typical of those in the Palatinate, Baden-Wurttemberg, and Hesse, the western German states from which the greatest emigration to colonial American occurred. There were approximately 250,000 German-speaking colonists in America by 1775.

Ireland:

The Frontier Culture Museum’s Ulster Farm was originally built near the town of Drumquin in County Tyrone in what is now the British province Northern Ireland, but was historically known as Ulster, the northern most of Ireland’s four provinces. It is included to represent the type of farms left behind by the people who emigrated from Ulster to England’s American colonies in the eighteenth century. These people, who came to be known in America as the Scotch-Irish, were prominent among the earliest settlers of the colonial frontier.

Irish Forge:

Forges were indispensable features of the Irish countryside in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Each forge served the inhabitants of about ten surrounding town lands. Town lands, units of land measure unique to Ireland, usually ranged in size from 100 to 500 acres, though some were larger or smaller. Most town lands contained many small tenant farms. A blacksmith might provide his services for a population of one or two hundred families living near his forge.

England:

The English house is the oldest structure at the Frontier Culture Museum. It originally stood near the town of Hartlebury in Worcestershire, in England’s West Midlands region. This house belonged to a yeoman. This class of independent farmers sent many younger sons and daughters to Virginia in the mid-to-late 17^th century to begin new lives in the colonies.

American Farm:

The Museum’s farm was built by a family of German descent named Barger. The grandfather of the farm’s builder, John Barger settled in Rockbridge County in the 1790s, and his father moved south to Botetourt sometime later. In 1832, five years after his marriage, John Barger bought 187 acres along Little Patterson’s Creek. Barger began work on his house in 1835, a date establish by dendrochronology, a technique of determining the age of log sections by an analysis of their rings. By 1839, property tax records for Barger indicate that he was building supporting to his farm at a rapid rate.

Bowman House:

The Bowman House originally stood in northern Rockingham County, Virginia.  The oldest section of the house dates to 1773 and was built either by or for a naturalized German immigrant named Georg Baumann who purchased 260 acres of land in what was then Augusta County in 1772.  Baumann arrived in America in 1751, and lived in Berks County, Pennsylvania until the early 1770s when he relocated to Virginia with his son John.  Early in Georg Baumann’s time in Virginia his name began to appear in official records as George Bowman.