Virginia Frontier Culture Museum German Farm

Backcountry Notes ^ | August 18, 2009 | Jay Henderson

[jay1949]

Beginning in the late 17th century, an estimated one million Germans pulled up stakes and went looking for better places - - including more than 120,000 who migrated to the American colonies. The Frontier Culture Museum's German Farm, originally built in the Rhineland-Palatinate, exhibits their way of life and the timber-frame construction of houses and barns.

[SouthDixie]

An interesting article, the homes were very primitive and rustic yet extremely functional, like stepping back in time.
It reminded me of the Russian Doukabour farms where upon every table sat a loaf of bread, salt and a pitcher of water symbolizing peace and hospitality.

[Houghton M.]

I don’t get it. There’s no evidence that German settlers in Pennsylvania and Virginia (my ancestors were among them, arrivinng 1727 from the Paltinate) built in the half-timber style. They had access to plentiful timber, unlike in German, and they built with timber and stone. Sure, of course they used mortise and tenon, pegs etc. But one can find indigenous Pennsylvania and Virginia examples, if that is what one wishes to illustrate.

Why import these buildings from Europe and set them up here where they don’t fit? There are wonderful open air museums of these sorts of farm buildings in Germany and I always recommend to friends going to Europe that they visit one of them (my favorite is in the Black Forest near Haslach/Gutach, where the farm buildings were occupied by farmers, were working farms, until the 1960s and then were turned into museums, not reconstructed and moved from somewhere else.

But this makes no sense in the Valley of Virginia, except as a tourist trap.

[jay1949]

Thanks - - I thought the house was quaint - - but the barns are truly impressive.

There are Doukabour living history museums in Canada - -

http://www.doukhobor-museum.org/

http://www.worldisround.com/articles/200285/index.html

[SouthDixie]

I've actually lived in Castlegar and have visited that museum...thanks for the link and a blast from the past !