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 Montana Territory 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.
Cast Three families were chosen to be on the show:
The Clunes – The Clune family consisted of Gordon (age 40), his wife Adrienne (age 39), their daughter Aine (age 14), son Justin (age 12), son Conor (age 8), and Gordon's niece, Tracy (age 15).Shaw, Peavy, and Smith, p. 23. Gordon owned an aerospace and defense manufacturing firm, and the family was very well-off financially.Owen, Rob. "'Frontier House' Reality for Highbrows." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. April 28, 2002. Accessed 2012-05-12. Adrienne was born and raised in County Wicklow, Ireland.Shaw, Peavy, and Smith, p. 24. Gordon Clune said that his family was best suited for the show because they had dinner together every night, conversed well, Adrienne was an excellent cook, and Gordon and the boys enjoyed hiking and were good marksmen. The Glenns – The Glenn family consisted of stepfather Mark (age 45), wife Karen (age 36), daughter Erinn Patton (age 12), and son Logan Patton (age 8).Shaw, Peavy, and Smith, p. 25. Mark Glenn was the chair of the department of medical and pharmacy technology at Draughons Junior College in Nashville, Tennessee."Tennessee Man Rewinds to 'Frontier' Life." Associated Press. June 28, 2002. Karen was a school nurse, and she pushed her family to apply for the show because her father grew up in a log cabin in Maryland.Wenner, Susan. "'Frontier House' PBS Reality Series." Family Tree Magazine. September 28, 2009. Accessed 2012-05-05. Karen Glenn said her family was best-suited for the show because they worked well together as a team to solve problems.Shaw, Peavy, and Smith, p. 26. The Brookses – The Brooks family consisted of student activities coordinator Nate Brooks (age 27), his social worker fiancée Kristen McLeod (age 27), and Nate's father, Rudy Brooks (age 68).Shaw, Peavy, and Smith, p. 20. Rudy was not originally part of the applicant family. He was brought in on the show only at the last moment, leaving his wife behind in Massachusetts.Shaw, Peavy, and Smith, p. 39. Kristen joined Nate and Rudy in the third episode of the show, at which point Nate and Kristen were married and Rudy left. Nate Brooks said that they were best suited for the show because of their communication skills, faith, courage, resourcefulness, creativity, and patience.Shaw, Peavy, and Smith, p. 21.
Production 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.Deans, Jason. "Channel 4 Goes 'Upstairs, Downstairs' With Edwardian House." The Guardian. May 21, 2001.
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.Fischer, Theodore. "Families Try Homesteading for Spring 'Frontier House'." Current. September 10, 2001. Accessed 2012-05-12.
Casting More than 5,500 families applied to be on the show.Shaw, Peavy, and Smith, p. 2.
Preparation 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.Johnson, Kevin V. "'Frontier House' Rebuilds Past." USA Today. April 28, 2002. Accessed 2012-05-12. 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.
Participants agreed to abide by a set of rules, which included the following:Shaw, Peavy, and Smith, p. 16-17.
Wearing period-appropriate clothing. Preparing and eating period-appropriate food. Using period-appropriate equipment, and using it in period-appropriate ways. Communicating with the outside world (including series consultants) only through the postal service at the remote country store, or via telegraph. Buying initial goods and supplies based on a period-appropriate budget set by series consultants, and then using the barter system during occasional visits to the country store. Using only period-appropriate medicines. (For a serious medical emergency, participants could talk to a member of the production staff and seek the assistance of the show's physician.)
Anyone was free to leave the show at any time, although participants were asked to consult the production team first and record the decision on the video diary.Shaw, Peavy, and Smith, p. 17.
In preparation for leaving for the homestead site, participants were allowed to purchase whatever items their budget could afford—so long as it could fit into the single horse-drawn covered wagon provided to each family for hauling goods. The wagons were, in fact, quite small and held few goods. Each family packed and repacked their wagons repeatedly to get more goods into them.Shaw, Peavy, and Smith, p. 55.
Departure for the homesteading site, where the three families would live for five months, occurred on May 21, 2001.Shaw, Peavy, and Smith, p. 53.
Production notes The three families were on site from June to October 2001. Filming ended on October 5, 2001. More than 500 hours of footage were shot.
Dissent was a common occurrence on the series.Odenwald, Dan. "Back to These Old Houses." Current. April 21, 2003. Accessed 2012-05-12. Karen and Mark Glenn were shown repeatedly attacking one another verbally. Rob Owen, writing for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, noted that the Glenn marriage "begins to disintegrate as holier-than-thou Karen harshly harps on Mark for everything and anything. Karen comes off as gleefully despotic and her behavior sometimes makes Frontier House painful to watch, especially when you consider how her children are affected." David Zurawik of the Baltimore Sun questioned why the show focused so much on the Glenns' marital problems. "Is [the series] about seeing a strained marriage crack up with a husband calling his wife 'Hitler,' while she mocks him for 'whining' constantly?"Zurawik, David. "PBS Tries Reality TV With Trip to 'Frontier'." Baltimore Sun. April 29, 2002. The Clune family, too, was singled out for constantly complaining. Viewers of the show routinely attacked the Clunes for being "the overprivileged Black Hats" of the series. Gordon Clune and Karen Glenn also clearly disliked one another. Gordon Clune accused the producers of goading Karen Glenn to anger by telling her about critical things that the Clunes said about her, and vice versa. But the producers denied that. A reviewer from the Baltimore Sun, however, said it was apparent that the producers edited the series to make the conflict appear worse than it was.
The Clune family was caught cheating on several occasions. They secretly put a box spring mattress beneath their bed, sneaked off the homestead to sell baked goods, stole fish from a neighbor's lake, and smuggled in shampoo, soap, and cosmetics.Miller, Martin. "Attack on the Clunes." Los Angeles Times. May 21, 2002. Due to state hunting laws and regulations, and based on the opinion of the production's safety experts, none of the homesteaders were permitted to hunt for game. Gordon Clune voiced his intense dissatisfaction with this rule repeatedly during the production.Shaw, Peavy, and Smith, p. 102. Clune and some of the other men on the show stole video cameras from the production crew and "hunted" deer with them in an attempt to prove that they could have shot the animals. Clune and the other men asked for meat to be given to them, but the producers denied their request.
Competition among all three families was intense. The producers later said that the decision to have the homesteaders prepare to survive a Montana winter led to this competition, which was a regrettable and unintended side-effect.McCormick, p. 116, fn 20.
During production of the series, the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, and on the Pentagon in Washington D.C., occurred. The producers discussed whether they should tell the participants and decided it was appropriate to do so. Local newspapers from nearby towns were given to the participants to read so that they could learn about the attacks.Shaw, Peavy, and Smith, p. 184. The participants were permitted to read the newspapers for several days in a row to stay abreast of what happened. Nearly all the homesteaders expressed their satisfaction with the way the situation was handled, and appreciated being isolated again.Levesque, John. "TV Gathering Makes One Long for 'Frontier House'." Seattle Post-Intelligencer. January 9, 2002. Accessed 2012-05-12. Kristen Brooks was not happy at the time with this decision. She said she was convinced that the production should have shut down for a few days to permit the participants to learn more and to determine if any friends had died in the Twin Towers disasters.Brooks was permitted to mail a letter to friends and family asking if anyone she knew had died in the attack. See: Wardrop, Josh B. "Kristen Brooks: 'Frontier' Woman." Dedham Transcript. April 20, 2002. Accessed 2012-05-12.
The site of the homesteads Filming of Frontier House occurred in an undisclosed valley on a ranch approximately south of Big Timber, Montana, owned by Ken Davenport. The Montana Film Office spent weeks trying to locate an appropriate site for the production. The site had to be isolated and only rarely overflown by aircraft, but also had to be accessible via automobile. The area had to be viable for agriculture as well. This turned out to be a problem, as many of the sites investigated had such poor topsoil that they could not be used.
The Davenport ranch was a historic one. The Crow Nation had originally been given the area as a reservation, but they ceded it back to the United States in 1882 in favor of a larger parcel of land to the east. This historic fact would lead the series producers to hire Dale Old Horn, Crow tribal historian, as a consultant on the show (he would also appear on-camera) and to have Crow hunters arrive to help feed the participants.Shaw, Peavy, and Smith, p. 102-103.
Each family was given an plot of land to farm, graze animals on, and build a home on.Shaw, Peavy, and Smith, p. 3. All three "homesteads" had easy access to a creek, and were within a 15-minute walk of one another. The country store run by the fictional Hop Sing Yim (played by local Montana historian Ying-Ming Lee)Shaw, Peavy, and Smith, p. 130-133. was away, and required hiking on foot over two mountain passes.