Frontier Culture Museum Spotlight: Ray Wright, Senior Living History Interpreter

Ray Wright has spent more than 36 years helping visitors connect with history at the Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia in Staunton, VA. Over the course of his career, his responsibilities have extended well beyond living history interpretation to include staff training, historic preservation, and restoration work throughout the Frontier Culture Museum.

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Wright's path to the Frontier Culture Museum was not one he had originally planned. A local resident and history major, he was attending college in Indiana while following the development of the Frontier Culture Museum through newspaper clippings his father sent him from home.

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"I'm a local guy, and while I was in college up in Indiana, my dad was sending me the newspaper. Through the newspaper, I was keeping up with this. I was a history major in college, and I kept up with the museum, its construction, and what was going on with it. So, I graduated from college and went to work in construction, which was fine. I grew up doing that. While the museum was still under construction, I answered an ad for part-time interpreters and was hired in April of 1990. So that's how I got started."

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At the time, Wright was working full time in construction and viewed the part-time position as a way to help save money so he and his wife could buy a house. It quickly became something much more meaningful.

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"Once I got into it, I got kind of hooked, and I was like, you know, we can do this. I can do this and be successful at it."

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Part of what drew Wright in was the level of professionalism and curiosity among the people around him. He credits those early colleagues with helping establish the standards that have guided his own work throughout his career.

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"I was working with some really great people at the very beginning, very professional people. We kind of hold ourselves to a relatively high standard. Many of us have advanced degrees in subject matter. Of the most successful interpreters, every one of them is a self-motivated learner. I liked being around these types of people. I kind of cut my teeth with these folks. Those folks have set the standard to which I try to work, even today."

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Wright also discovered that interpretation brought out a skill he had not necessarily expected to use professionally.

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"Secondly, I found out that I had a talent for talking to people. I was kind of an overcompensating introvert. And I had some success there. I just kind of melted into it pretty easily."

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That ability to connect with visitors became an important part of his work. Wright believes the strength of the Frontier Culture Museum's interpretation lies not only in knowledge of an individual site, but also in understanding the larger historical context surrounding it.

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"I've got to believe that part of the success of the museum, a large part, is because the interpreters, the living history interpreters, are way more than just simply knowledgeable about the particular site where they are, but rather, the historic significance of it."

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Wright's background in construction also became an important part of his career at the Frontier Culture Museum. His experience eventually led him to take on restoration responsibilities for many of the historic buildings, a role he approached with the same seriousness he brought to interpretation.

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"I took this kind of newfound role seriously and earned a master's degree in historic preservation. I was curator of buildings and architecture up to about 10 years ago. I'm really proud of some of the work that I've been involved in."

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For Wright, historic preservation is closely connected to the way the Frontier Culture Museum tells its stories. While the field encompasses many disciplines, it is often most visibly associated with the preservation of historic buildings and landscapes. Open-air living history museums played an important role in the development of historic preservation in both the United States and Europe, using historic architecture not simply as something to observe, but as an essential part of interpreting the lives, work, and traditions of earlier generations.

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That approach is fundamental to the Frontier Culture Museum. Unlike historic sites where buildings remain in their original locations, open-air museums such as the Frontier Culture Museum preserve historically significant structures by relocating and rebuilding them within carefully interpreted settings. The Ulster-American Folk Park in Northern Ireland, itself an open-air living history museum, served as an inspiration for the Frontier Culture Museum's development.

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The result is a collection of historic architecture that plays an active role in interpretation. Each farmstead provides an authentic environment in which visitors can encounter the skills, routines, and material culture of the people whose experiences the Museum interprets. A blacksmith working in an actual historic shop, hearth cooking demonstrated within a period kitchen, or wheat being threshed inside a barn built for that purpose provides context that cannot be recreated through explanation alone. As Wright explains, the historic buildings themselves help visitors understand how people lived and worked.

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For many visitors, a trip to the Frontier Culture Museum may also be their first meaningful encounter with historic preservation itself. Learning that they are standing inside an actual historic structure that was relocated from elsewhere in the Shenandoah Valley or, in some cases, from across the Atlantic can fundamentally change the way visitors understand what it means to preserve the physical evidence of the past.

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That combination of interpretation, research, preservation, and hands-on experience has given Wright a particularly broad view of the Frontier Culture Museum's mission.

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Spanning nearly three centuries, the Frontier Culture Museum explores the cultures and experiences of people whose lives contributed to the development of the Shenandoah Valley and the broader region. Its sites include Irish, English, German, African, and Native American stories, allowing visitors to encounter multiple perspectives within the same visit.

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"I don't think visitors really fully appreciate that until they actually come here and see. We span about pushing three centuries, and we're here to tell the story in total. And that's what we try to do."

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Looking Toward Retirement

After more than 36 years at the Frontier Culture Museum, Wright is now approaching retirement. When he considers what he will miss most, he returns to the conversations that have been central to his work.

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"You know, I'm on the verge of retirement. That won't be too far away. And I was telling my wife, one of the things that I'm going to miss is the level of intellectual conversation and discussions I have with my colleagues over the work that we're doing, how that applies to current events. And that's one of the things that I'm really going to miss. I'm also going to miss having those types of intellectual conversations with visitors. It's a big plus."

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For Wright, those exchanges with colleagues and visitors have been among the most rewarding parts of his career.

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"These types of experiences are the ones that I enjoy the most. And that's what I'll miss."

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About the Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia

The Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia in Staunton, VA, is the largest open-air living history museum in the Shenandoah Valley and one of Virginia's leading family and cultural tourism destinations.

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Through historic buildings, demonstrations, exhibitions, and living history interpreters, the Frontier Culture Museum explores the cultures and traditions of Indigenous peoples of Virginia; German, English, and Irish immigrants who traveled through the Shenandoah Valley; enslaved Africans and their descendants; and the generations of people whose experiences contributed to the development of the region and the nation. Visitors can also experience historic trades and aspects of daily life through demonstrations involving blacksmithing, woodworking, tailoring, spinning, foodways, agriculture, and other forms of work and craftsmanship.

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To learn more about the Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia, visit frontiermuseum.org.