Home Equals Culture

Last weekend we spent a few hours celebrating a belated May Day at the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton.  (Pronounced Stan-tun for all those of you non-locals.)  The "museum" is actually a collection of homes from the "old world" and a few from the "new world" and the point is to show how homes here in Virginia are actually just conglomerates of the home designs brought from other countries.  I smiled at one point realizing that this museum is dedicated to showing how homes are representations of culture.  How often we think of culture as being manifest in the arts and in politic thinking. 


I love that the prevailing thought here is that these houses, these homes, were the culture that people brought with them.


Museum guides were inside each house in their period dress demonstrating cultural traditions--cooking, spinning, weaving, chopping wood.  I didn't get to listen to all the details but enjoyed the smells of smoke and manure and wood.

The English House

(brought over piece by piece from Great Britain)

The upstairs

 The Irish House

(I didn't take any photos inside because we were all distracted by the house chicken Abigail and the pigs, and I was busy being amazed by the construction of that roof--a framework of two inch branches, two layers of sod, thatch on top, all held together by wooden "staples".  Amazing.)

 The German Farm

Loved this house.  I have ancestors who moved to Wisconsin from Germany to be dairy farmers.

 The 1850s Frontier House

 Just before entering this house we spotted a four-foot long black snake hanging out by the sheep.  The guide reminded us that those snakes keep rodent populations down--and they steal eggs.  I guess no one is perfect.

The 1820s Farmhouse and Barn

 (Meet the resident cat of the 1820s house.  The museum keeps her there as a mouser.)

All the time Dan and I were thinking how soft we are.  Our home is so plush compared to these.  Our life has so many conveniences compared to the people of those time periods and places.  And yet something about the hardness of their lives and the simplicity of their days is so appealing.

Still, I'm so grateful for my life in my home with my family and my days full of "culture".