Frontier House

Frontier House
Genre	Historical reality television
Country of origin	United States
No. of seasons	1
No. of episodes	6
Production
Running time	60 min.
Release
Original network	PBS
Picture format	480i (SDTV)
Original release	April 29 – May 1, 2002
External links
Website

Frontier House is a historical reality television series that originally aired on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the United States from April 29 to May 3, 2002. The series followed three family groups that agreed to live as homesteaders did in the state of Montana on the American frontier in 1883. Each family was expected to establish a homestead and complete the tasks necessary to prepare for the harsh Montana winter. At the end of the series, each family was judged by a panel of experts and historians on their likelihood of survival for each group.

The success of The 1900 House (which aired in 1999) and The 1940s House (which aired in 2001) inspired PBS to commission a similar historical reality television series set in the United States.

The budget for the series was $4.1 million, which included $3.3 million for the production itself and $800,000 for promotion and the website. Most of the funding came from PBS, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and British public service broadcaster Channel 4.

More than 5,500 families applied to be on the show. Three families were chosen to be on the show:

The participants spent two weeks in classrooms and kitchens, learning about the history of the period and gaining expertise in animal husbandry, carpentry, chopping wood, clothes washing, cooking, farming, gardening, harvesting skills, personal hygiene (without the use of toilet paper), sewing, soap making, and other skills which the average person in 1880s Montana would have known. The participants spent their days learning skills in Virginia City, Montana—a restored ghost town, open-air museum, and National Historic Landmark. To reduce culture shock, the participants were permitted to sleep in a modern hotel and enjoy modern activities (like television and bowling) at night.

...
Wikipedia