Saturday: Frontier Culture Museum features Ancestral Skills Day

It's fall in the central Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and this weekend the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton will be featuring Ancestral Skills Day showcasing the day-to-day survival skills from an earlier time.

On Saturday, October 15th, costumed historical interpreters will offer demonstrations of flint-knapping, pottery-making, soap-stone bowl-making, fire-starting, natural cordage-making, and other pioneer arts.

With special reduced rates, why not bring the whole family to enjoy a day in the Valley? Students 18 years or younger will be admitted for $5 each and adults are $7. All students must be accompanied by an adult.

The Frontier Culture Museum offers a unique hands-on opportunity for young and old alike. Few can better tell the story of the people who came before us, and no one can describe the museum better than they can. From their website:

The Frontier Culture Museum tells the story of the thousands of people who migrated to colonial America, and of the life they created here for themselves and their descendants. These first pioneers came to America during the 1600s and 1700s from communities in the hinterlands of England, Germany, Ireland, and West Africa. Many were farmers and rural craftsmen set in motion by changing conditions in their homelands, and drawn to the American colonies by opportunities for a better life. Others came as unwilling captives to work on farms and plantations. Regardless of how they arrived, all became Americans, and all contributed to the success of the colonies, and of the United States.

To tell the story of these early immigrants and their American descendants, the Museum has moved or reproduced examples of traditional rural buildings from England, Germany, Ireland, West Africa, and America. The Museum engages the public at these exhibits with a combination of interpretive signage and living history demonstrations. The outdoor exhibits are located in two separate areas: the Old World and America. The Old World exhibits show rural life and culture in four homelands of early migrants to the American colonies. The American exhibits show the life these colonists and their descendants created in the colonial backcountry, how this life changed over more than a century, and how life in the United States today is shaped by its frontier past.

This Saturday, come on out and spend your day at the Frontier Culture Museum in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley.