Description of Frontier Resources and how it got started

Frontier Resources is a traveling museum that was developed to provide a supplement to other museums, schools, historical societies and events for presenting programs on the history of the Midwest. We have tools, animals and people not normally available to most sites and more importantly the skills to use them and teach students how to use them. Our principal focus is "Hands on History".

We believe that involving young people in the activities of our past is one of the best ways to gain and keep their interest in History. We also believe that History is an important preparation for the future. At present, the organization, like any other museum has full time employees, a part time staff and volunteers. We also have access to wagons, plows, spinning wheels, and butter churns as well as most of the other tools of frontier living.

Frontier Resources was formed in 1994 by Gerry Barker. He recruited three other people who were equally interested in using Living History as a teaching method. Over the years we have presented the history of the Midwestern frontier to hundreds of thousands of school children through a series of hands-on programs as well as taking part in numerous living history projects such as building homesteads, stations and fur posts. We have taken part in military campaigns, herded cattle, built roads and gone on pack trains and wagon trains. In all of these activities the purpose has been research or teaching.