Frontier Culture Museum -- 1600s English Farm

Backcountry Notes ^ | August 10, 2009 | Jay Henderson

[jay1949]

The Virginia Frontier Culture Museum's English Farm installation features a yeoman farmer's house that was built in 1692 in Worchestershire, in west-central England, and more recently reconstructed in Virginia. Many yeoman farmers and other English commoners migrated from the western shires to America during colonial times, although their numbers most certainly did not include the builder of this house, who had to have been successful enough to own a small parcel of land on which to built a nice home.

[nathanbedford]

The article refers to the first settlers of the Shenandoah Valley and describes the English houses which the English would have built up there. Of course, the first settlers in the Shenandoah Valley were Germans, the first having arrived and settled in 1726.

Not far from my home here in upper Bavaria there is a Bauernhaus (farmhouse) Museum which has actual 17th-century structures open for inspection. The interiors look not unlike the picture shown with this article. An interesting feature of the German construction is that they built a single chimney for a fire in the middle of the cabin and the family would sleep right around that chimney. In my home here in Germany I have a similar arrangement with very large shelves which could accommodate people to sleep in cold weather.

The English houses on the other hand featured a chimney on either end. This is a convenient way to determine the origin of the settler by the residential architecture.

[Dudoight]

An interesting book along those lines “Robert Cole’s World-Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland”, supplies documents, maps, and a plethora of life style in this colony through the life of Robert Cole (1628-1663).

I love this stuff! (of course, Cole is genealogically tied into my family).

[jay1949]

Thanks - - it must be a good book; it’s still in print - - http://www.amazon.com/Robert-Coles-World-Agriculture-Maryland/dp/0807843415

I’ll give that one a read soon.