You're standing in a German village, circa 1710.
The women wear dirndls, the men are in woollen knee-breeches and lederhosen.
Walk a hundred metres and you're in rural Ireland, watching a blacksmith forge a horseshoe. Ask him what year it is and he says 1730. A bit farther on you stop to admire an English herb garden as it was planted and tilled in 1690.
They're all part of the Frontier Culture Museum, an outdoor living-history lesson focusing on these three groups of immigrants: Rhinelanders, Scotch-Irish from Northern Ireland, and English.
They brought their old-world cultures, skills and traditions here to the Shenandoah Valley in the 18th century. The museum shows how, by the 19th century, these disparate roots had morphed into the all-American culture of the Shenandoah today.
The signature buildings - homes, barns, piggeries, forges - were brought from their original locations and rebuilt, stone by stone, on 110-hectares of rolling meadows here. The German peasant farmhouse once stood in the village of Hordt, in the Rhineland. In Germany at that time, we're told, farmhouses were right in the villages, not in remote rural surroundings as in Britain and Ireland.
The Irish buildings - the most primitive of the "imports" - came from County Tyrone, and the English ones from Worcestershire and Sussex Each house is surrounded by a smallholding where farming methods of the 18th and 19th centuries are practised.
Costumed interpreters and workers on the sites, and a video in the visitor centre, explain how the three immigrant groups ended up together in the Shenandoah. The English and the Scotch-Irish had moved west from coastal Virginia and the Germans came south from Pennsylvania.
(The Scotch-Irish are known in Canada and the United Kingdom as Ulster-Scots because their ancestors, mostly Scottish Presbyterians, had immigrated to Northern Ireland in the 1600s to take land seized by the British Crown from the Catholic population).
There's a fourth set of historic buildings on the site. It's called American Heritage, and these buildings, and the little farm that surrounds them, show how elements from the other three strains meshed to become a typical American farm of the 19th century.
The farmhouse here - moved from elsewhere in the valley - is the most luxurious, relatively speaking, of the four homes, with wooden floors, porches, cellars and upstairs bedrooms.
At the other end of the scale, the Ulster house has just two rooms and a floor of hard-packed clay. In some such houses, the guide says, the family lived in one room and the animals in the other.
Coastal Virginia (called The Tidewater) was the site of the first permanent English colonization of what became the United States, following the landings in Jamestown in 1607.
"Jamestown was the cradle, but it was here (west of the Blue Ridge) that America took root," one historian/guide tells visitors.
More information
Staunton (pronounced Stanton), population 24,000, is just off exit 222 on I-81 and about 15 km west of the Blue Ridge Parkway's northern end. I-81 runs from the Canadian border at the Thousand Islands to Knoxville, Tenn.
Information on the Frontier Culture Museum is available at frontier museum.org.
For general tourist information on Virginia, visit virginia.org.
Searching for the Holy GrailThe BMW Baby Racer II Motorsport
