Evening on the Green

When I first heard about evening on the green I had no idea what it was supposed to be about. Apparently no one that I work with did either, and that's why they called it that. It's basically just a day when the Homestead stays open until 9 pm and we try to put on some kind of interprative programming. We had a few activities going on for visitors, and I was assigned to stay on the porch and interpret the boone house. This was the first experiecnce at the homestead where I felt comraderie for with my co-workers, and overall I think that workers, volunteers, and visitors enjoyed the program, and maybe even learned something.



We had a plethora of activities for guests at evening on the green, spread out over the rather expansive grounds of the Daniel Boone Homestead. We ran the Sawmill at 7pm, this is water powered, and if you're curious you can look at my past blog entry about it. Ryan, another intern, orchestrated a game of rounders that Jim Lewars, his son, and a few volunteers demonstrated for visitors. The amity colonial dancers performed in our visitors center, clothed in 18th century garb. Their costumes were very pretty, a lot fancier than any of the stuff I get to wear. The Boone house was the site of most of the action though. There the Past Masters demonstrated traditional needlework, and ladies in traditional dress poked around in the garden and interpreted it to guests. A highschool aged volunteer demonstrated various colonial children's games and allowed kids to take part. We had a strawberry rhubarb pie baking on the hearth. There were volunteers inside of the house itnerpreting it, and a musician playing various traditional instruments in the parlor.

My role in all of this was to sit on the porch of the house, clothed in 18th century garb, (notice I did not take any pictures) and give people an introduction to the house as they came by. This was about a 4 minute thing that I threw together as I went along. I baiscally told them a little about Daniel Boone, and then I went into the history of the house, becuse that's what they were staring at, and what they seemed most interested in. Most people seemed pretty interested and asked me questions. A few were so enthusastic that I even walked with them to the cellar to make sure they saw it. I would end by letting them know about all of the things they were able to see around the site.

Although I was dreading evening on the green becuase I didn't want to dress up and stay at work very late, I felt that overall it was a very worthwhile profram. All of the volunteers were very nice, and many of them were knowledgeable, or at least liked history an awful lot. I began to realize that those re-enactor people were not so bad after all. And what's more, I realized that it's kind of fun, and very uninhibiting to dress up in a colonial costume. You aren't yourself. You can be whatever charecter you'd like. There was a certain comraderie that developed among everyone in costume that night. We were putting on a program for the public, and we were the ones who were different. Yet all of us were alike. It was heartening. Volunteers were sitting around on the porch even at 9:30 when I was leaving, talking, eating pie, and having a good time. Even ryan and I, who on some normal workdays hardly speak to each other got along on that night. The visitors too seemed to sense that we were a happy bunch. They were thrilled to be around people in costume, and to see the house and garden being put to use. I had a wonderful vantage point on the porch where I could watch the families experiement with the various colonial games. Everyone from little kids, to fickle teenagers seemed to be laughing and having a good time.

Learning to Spin

Today I learned to do something that a woman my age in the eighteenth century would have already been an expert at. Spinning. I already knew quite a bit about textile production because I have to interpret our spinning room, but I'll go over it again so everyone out there reading this understands (if anyone is reading this). Then, I'll talk about my own experience spinning and how I relate to the women of colonial America.

To spin wool you first have to sheer the sheep, clean the wool, and then card it. Carding it is basically just combing it so all the fibers are strait and there aren't any knots. You have two brushes that look like wire dog brushes. You lay some wool on one and you draw the other brush over it, away from you. You repeat until the wool is fluffy and easy to get through. Then you roll the wool off of the brush, and it's ready to spin.

I spun on two different aparatuses. The first was a drop spindle. This is just a shaft with a disk around it, kind of like a short fencing sword. You just attach the wool to the spindle, let go of it so it's hanging in mid-air, and give it a spin. The fibers tighten into yarn. You continuously pull the wool tight so you get a nice thin, tight thread.

I also got to spin on a spinning wheel. This was much harder. First I just sat there and pumped the pedal to familiarize myself with the rythm. There was already some yarn on the spinning wheel, so I attached my wool to it. To do this I took some carded wool and overlapped it with some of the already spun thread. Then I gave the wheel of the spinning wheel a push and the spindle began to spin. By keeping the thread taught with your fingers you can get it to wind up like it does with the drop spindle. This is a lot harder than it sounds. You have to be consistent or else your yarn will be thicker in some places than it is in others. You also have to be able to pump with your foot, pinch the thread with your one hand, and pull the thread with the other. All the while if you let go for even a second your thread will break and get pulled through and wound up onto your spindle.

Women in colonial America spun A LOT. Sometimes eight hours a day. It was a symbol of femininity. Spinning was considered women's work. It was something that was done in the home, as opposed to weaving which was done professionally in some places. Nowadays it's just a hobby for most people. How do I feel about it. Well, someday when I move off of the grid I might want to make my own clothes. But for now, it just seems like too much work. I'd rather just buy my own clothes and have time to study history.

You can Bring a Six Year Old to a Historic Site, but You can't Make Him Listen.

The other day I had a tour with a woman and her six year old grandson that made me start to think about representing history to young children. I've had a few other tours like this one they go something like this:

I meet the visitors in the front yard of the Boone House and the kids are running all over the place and not paying attention. Once gramma and grandpa get them to calm down and stand next to them they start covering their faces or hiding behind their grandparent's legs. I go into a dumbed down version of my regular introduction. I want to both keep the kids interested and give the adults something to think about. I ask the kids questions like "Why did the quakers start moving to America?" "Why Pennsylvania?" Was America an independent country yet? If they are 8 or older they can answer these questions, if not they have no clue. They won't answer me when I ask them anyway. The grandparents have to repeat what I am saying to them to get them to answer. This pattern contnues for the entire tour. The most I can stress to them is that people in the past had no refrigerators, electricity, or playstations like we do today. They had to grow their own food and make their own clothes. And their beds weren't very comfortable either.

After these tours I usually ask myself how? How do you talk to a six year old about colonialism? How do you get them to understand religious persecution when they don't even have a firm grasp of what religion is yet? How do you tie the house you are presenting to them into a history that they have not learned in school? How do you talk to them about different ethnic groups, and why the pennsylvania germans did things differently from the english in the oley valley?

I don't know how to answer these questions. When I was very young I didn't have much of a concept of history either. I divided time into three periods. There was now, or modern day,which began around the time that my parents were born. Then there was the Olden Days as I called them, where people were peasants who made their own clothes and lived in dirty quaint little houses. Then there was Bible times, which was nearly incomprehensible it seemed so long ago, but during which time all the stories that I had heard in Sunday School had taken place. It wasn't until I was in second or third grade that this all started to change.

How do you get a child to understand the past? Maybe you can't. Maybe you just have to try harder to relate it to their everyday life. Maybe you just have to wait until they are older.

Reading Material in the Eighteenth Century

Today I worked on another interprative Sundays project that is scheduled to by unvieled August 10. That Sunday is on leisure activities in the eighteenth century and so Marcia suggested I do something on popular books. That is an intersting and tricky topic. Certainly there was popular literature, the kind that was designed for mass consumption, in colonial cities. Maybe some of it even made its way to the country. I don't know and I am certainly not an expert. I researched the Oley Valley in particular and found that most of the things people were reading there were works on religion. Quakers, like the Boones, for instance, had works by other quakers like Chalkley, or Fox, as well as Bibles.

I researched this topic by delving into primary sources almost from the beginning. I wanted to see what people who were really living in the Oley Valley had in their houses. So I looked at copies of estate inventories that we have at Boone. We actually have a lot, almost the entire Boone clan that was living in the Valley at the time, as well as the DeTurks, and Maugridge/Druries. What I found was that a lot of inventories don't specify. They say "a parcel of books" or "three books." So I know that people were reading. Just not what. The inventories that listed the books were the ones that had a substantial collection of them. These were the Quaker Boones, one of whom was a school teacher. So right now I have no information on other ethnic groups. It looks like I may have to look at more inventories, or some secondary sources.

In the end I hope to make a tri-fold with some books and maybe a few other objects on display.

iron conservation

This morining before the Homestead opened at noone the other interns and I started this summer's iron conservation project. I will have to apologize once again for not having any pictures, but my camera is not functioning and I have no idea when it will be back to normal. I will try to describe as best I can this project.

In our collections room in the Deturk eduaction center we have a lot of iron stuff that is old and a little rusty. It is mostly hoes, hammers, axes, stuff like that. Us interns were assigned to clean it up and help preserve it. To do this we first wipe it down with acetone to get the first layer of dirt off. Then we loosen up all the rust by going over the object with a wire brush. Next we wipe it off with acetone again, and a lot of the rust usually comes off at this point. You can see it on the rag that you are wiping your piece with. Next we apply a stove polish with a brush. This makes the piece look really nice and black and shiny, and it provides a waxt coating that protects the iron. This also allows us to buff the iron periodically and it makes it look shiny and new again.

I did three pieces today, just cleaning them, not aplying any polish. I did two ordinary hoes, and one ditch hoe. A ditch hoe was used to clear out the stuff that would grow in the ditches farmers used to irigate their meadows. Tomorrow I will probably be polishing.

Interprative Sundays

Every Sunday after the fourth of July at the Homestead we do a program called interprative Sundays. We open up the Berolet Log House, and let people come inside for once. We also try to do something interprative, like showing them how to spin, weave etc. Each of us interns was assigned an interprative sunday in which we had to come up with something all on our own. This is really what I have been waiting for right? The chance to do something academic and for the public at the same time.

So I threw around a lot of ideas and finally settled on naming. I was originally thinking of doing something with women, but I think the spinning, hearth cooking, activities do better justice than what I could. I decided to try to analize the naming practices of the various ethnic groups of the Oley Valley. I realized I couldn't do all of them, so I just picked a few prominent ones: Germans, English Quakers, Scotch Irish, and Native Americans.

The Germans were the hardest ones to find information on. Eventually I had to resort to googling it! (Gasp!) I found that it was pretty typical for Germans to name their kids after a parent of grandparent but that most people went by their middle names. The First name was usually the name of a Saint.

The quakers, being all about equality in the eyes of the Lord, probably have the most interesting naming tradtions. The really tried to divide the names equally between the mother's relatives and the father's relatives. For instance, the first son would be named after the mother's father, the second son named after the father's father, etc. I found this information in Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer.

The Scotch-Irish do things a little differently. Each first born son gets named after his grandfather. Therefore when you look at scotch irish families over times, the names tend to alternate. For instance, generation 1 would be John, generation 2 would be William, generation 3 would be John again, etc.

The Lenape have a tradtion that is not to different from the Germans. Each person gets a spiritual name from a shaman or a family member who has a vision. You're never supposed to say this name because the spirits can get wind of it and kill you. Only your close family members know your spiritual name. Everybody else calls you by various nicknames. Kind of like the Germans with their Saint's name and then a middle or nickname.

Right now I am in the process of deciding if I should do more ethnicities or just keep it at that. I should really keep Anglicans in mind, and also Swedes. My dilema is that I want to give a lot of information but I don't want to overwhelm people. They are there to have fun after all, not have a history lesson.

Roads: So Important, So Confussing

I spent a good portion of today once again researching roads in the oley valley in the eighteenth century. Jim gave me a map towards the end of the day which was very helpful, because I had been trying to understand roads that everyone reffered to with different names, and I could not for the life of me orient myself with all of them. It doesn't help that I'm not very familiar with the Oley Valley to begin with. Basically I have learned this:

There was a road called the Great Road to Philadelphia, or the King's Road, or now the Old Philadelphia Pike, that ran from Philadelphia to Reading. This was the most important road for the area for reasons I talked about in the past blog. This road forked at Amityville, then called New Store, and the other road, sometimes called the High Road, or the OleyPike ran from Moselem to Oley. This is Route 662 today, which I drive to work everyday! Daniel Boone Road, or Weavertown road at that time was just a little trail.

I know this road stuff is really riveting.

Besides that at the end of the day I really did get to do something fun. I drove to Wilmilsdorf's paper mill with Jim. It's just outside of Amityville on the Manatawny creek. The mill no longer exists, but the person who owned with was the father of the person that Wilmilsdorf is named after. There were a lot of beautiful old stone houses along the way, but as usual I didn't bring my camera.

The Paid Researcher: Driving tours of the Oley Valley

I like Mondays at the homestead because we aren't open to the public and everyone who works gets a chance to catch up on things that have been needing to get done, and also to work on research projects. Today was one of those days. Last night before I left Jim gave me a list of locations that I was supposed to research today. The whole point is that we're making drivng tours of the Oley Valley. Basically, people will come to us who want to know about the other important historical places of the oley valley. And there's a lot of them. So we make borchures with directions that people can follow and information on the sights they're going to see.

The brochure I got assigned was entitled "communities and crossroads." Listed for me to look up were places like Douglassville, Amityville, Yellow House, Lobachsville, Limkiln, Birdsboro, Pleasantville, etc. Basically it's a bunch of towns that served as crossroads or communication hubs during the eighteenth century.

The research was slow going. There's a book that would be very helpful for this sort of work, called A History of Berks County by Morton L. Montgomery. The Homestead doesn't have it. So I used alternatives. The Journals of Henry Melchoir Muhlenberg were a big help. So was Oley Valley Heritage by Phil Pendleton. (If you haven't noticed that book is slowly becoming my bible). I also resorted to googling a few things, not that I really like to do that, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

Here's what I found. Johannes Mouns, a Swede, was the first person to settle in what is now Douglassville in 1704. There was a road that linked Reading to Phildelphia in the mid-eighteenth century, and Douglassville was on that road. The White Horse Tavern in Douglassville was a stopover and meeting place for anyone travelling, the first major stop from Reading on your way to Philadelphia. Amityville used to be called New Store. There was a church, tavern, and store there, and it too was also on that Reading/Philly road. Edward Drury owned a tavern there which also served as a meetingplace and communication center. Yellow house was again on that road. The yellow house hotel was establsihed in 1801 as a stopoever for stagecoaches.

Oley valley is nearly ancient when you're speaking in relative terms in American history. I think it's silly when interns grumble that they are assigned a research project. You're getting paid to pull information from primary documents, sythesis it, and make it into something people can use. You're a professional historian! Sort of.

Linen Production

Today Jim showed us how to prepare the stems of the flax plant in order to create linen. I forgot my camera this morning, and it would have been mighty helpful to have some pictures to illustrate this process, but alas. The other interns will be demonstrating it later this summer anyway so I'll add some pictures then.

The first thing you have to do when you want to make linen is pick some flax. The average farmer in colonial Pennsylvania had about three acres of flax under cultivation for this purpose, that's about three football fields. Textiles were so expensive in the eighteenth century because they took so much time and resources to produce.

Once your flax is ready to be harvested in late July or early August you can't just cut it down like you'd do with hay. You have to pull it out of the ground BY HAND because most of the fibers are closer to the root. Jim tells us this is hard work. I'm taking his word for it.

Now that you have your flax you have to rot it or, eighteenth century speak, ret, it by soaking it in water for two weeks. This will soften up the coarse outer layer. After that you pull the flax through a big wooden contraption that kind of looks like an enormous hair crimper, called a flax break, in oder to break up the outer layer. Once the outer layer starts falling off you scrape by of it off by beating it with a big wooden scraper. Then finally, you comb it through hackles, which are pieces of wood with big iron spikes, until you get a substance that looks and feels a lot like hair. In fact flax resembles blonde hair so much that an eigteenth century term for it was "flaxen" hair.

After that you have to spin it and finally weave it to get linen. Quite a production! The most desierable flax fibers were the longer ones because you could produce fine linen with it. The shorter fibers we called toe, and they would produce a coarser fabric.

And there you have it!

The Keim House

If you ever looked at the cover of Phil Pendleton's book, Oley Valley Heritage, you've seen the Keim House. From afar it looks like any other big old stone Oley Valley House with an auxillary building, but really it's one of the best preserved houses in the valley. There are preservation efforts going on in the house right now to get it back to an even more prestine eighteenth century condition.

Jim, another intern named Dave, and I went to the Keim house in 100 degree heat one day. It was quite an experience.

The place has beautiful herring bone doors, one of which is original

The porch wraps around two side of the house. There were people renting this place up until the 90's. There is still no running water or plumbing in the house! I would rent a gorgeous place like this even if it didn't have running water too!

This is the fire place. There is a scar around it a few feet up the wall that indicates to is that there amy have been a raised hearth here at some time.

A Bedroom. You can see the Queen Anne's posts poking through the ceiling in this room.

Upstairs fireplace.

The Auxillary building. Once thought to be the house that the original settlers built, it is now believed to be a joiners workshop that was built later.

Barn. It has an overhaning bay on BOTH SIDES. I think this is the only banked barn ever to have this. Jim thinks its most recent use was as a pig stye.

And now for the peice that was worth braving the 100+ degree heat....

The cidar mill. So big it was built into the building that houses it. It's actually attached to the walls. Eighteenth century assesors considered it part of the real estate. That's a lot of apple jack!

Eighteenth Century Barns and Roofs:Ethnic Origins and Mixing

This morning Jim decided that it was a good time to talk to us interns about roof construction in the eighteenth century, and also a little bit about the architectural history of the barns that the Oley Valley is so famous for. First lets start with the roofs.

There are a few basic ways that roofs were constructed in the Oley Valley, and the mode fo construction was divided along ehtnic lines. British people did things one way and Germanic people another. The English way was meant to hold up a roof that was not that heavy, because the English cover their roofs with wooden shingles which are relatively light. Basically you have rafters which lay on a horizontal beam called a perlin, the perlin being supported by Queen beams that are either attached to a summer beam that runs paralell to the perlins or some other architectural structire particular to the type of building. The summer beam and perlins run from gable to gable of the roof. It kind of looks like this.

This is our barn roof.

In Germanic roofs the system is much more complicated becuase they typically used clay tiles for thier shingles. Since I don't have any pictures of that I'm not even going to try to describe it.

Another odd feature of the Germanic roof is the kicked roof. This happens when you need to support a heavy roof by driving a heavy beam at the gable ends of the structure into a beam that sits atop the walls. Kicked roofs sort of flair out on the ends like this:

This is our blacksmith shop.

In addition to the talk on roofs we also got a talk on barns. I had always been under the impression that the Pennsylvania Germans had the monopoly on the distinctive banked barn, but aparently this was not so. Swiss and Germanic people did build them in Europe, but so did people living in the British Isles. Plus, ground barns, something that the English were only supposed to build, show up in Germany and Switzerland. And Germans also built ground barns when they lived in Pennsylvania. Who knew?

This is our barn at the Homestead. Note the overhang in bottom left corner of the picture. This was a tradition that all ethnic groups in Pennsylvania would adopt. Some barns don't have the gable-end wall extend all the way out to the overhand like ours does.

Oley Valley Heritage

Oley Valley Heritage by Phil Pendleton was recomended to me as the most comprehensive social history of the Oley Valley in print today. I was not disapointed. Based on a plethora of original research, the book details every valuable aspect of life in the Oley valley during the eighteenth century.

The work beings basically enough with a description of the land. This is crucial to understanding the Oley Valley during this time period becuase the limestone soil in the northern section supported agriculture, while the red shale in the South left settlers with little choice but to work in industries like milling, iron, weaving, or smithing. Pendleton then moves on to structures, exploring housing styles, outbuildings, and the way they were used by various peoples. Next is religion, in a chapter entitled "Soul." Pendleton's treatment of the tension between denominations and the Moravians in the area is sound, and his discription of the New Born Sect is informative. The last chapter, on community, details how the diverse Oley Valley residents got along with each other.

Overall, Pendleton uses a great deal of primary documents for this study. Friends meeting minutes, legal documents, notices in newspapers, and court proceedings are all uniltized. The result is that the reader feel an intimacy with the members of the community, and gets a glimpse into their day-to-day lives.

Another result of so much field research is the overwhelming amount of pictures that Pendleton has on nearly every page of his book. Pendleton spent time in the Oley Valley for this study, and the imagery of this beautiful area is conveyed in the book. The unique architecture of the settlers of the Valley is not lost to the reader because photos of the buildings that happen to be still standing abound.

Overall, Pendleton has produced a thorough piece on a small area of Pennsylvania. The narrow geographical range does not limit the scope of the work however, as Pendleton links issues like econics, immigration, religion to the larger colonial scene. This book is a worthwhile read for anyone seeking to study colonial Pennsylvania.

The Sawmill

Daniel Boone Homestead is home to one of the few operational water-powered sawmills in the country. Today I got to see the sawmill running for the first time, and I learned quite a bit about how it actually operates. Conveniently, I have also been reading a little about the economy of the Oley Valley in Pendleton's Oley Valley Heritage, and so I know how the sawmill fit in to the economic scheme of the valley.

The Oley Valley was a thriving region in colonial Pennsylvania. The valley can be split in half in terms of soil, with a rich limestone in the northern portion, perfect for farming, and a less fertile red shale in the southern half. The Oley Valley also became a seedbed of early American Industry. It was home to iron furnaces, and a lot of mills. The two most common types of mills at the time were grist mills and saw mills. Grist mills grind up wheat or other grains into flour. Saw mills cut logs into boards, which I guess is pretty self-explanatory. The sawmill may seem like a pretty basic idea, but processing lumber without one can be a real pain. If a sawmill was unavaliable typically what one would do was use a pit saw. One person would stand inside of a pit, with another person standing over top of it on a support that they had rigged up. They would lay the log over the pit and each would hold an end of the saw and move it up and down. It was pretty backbreaking work, not to mention the person who was on the bottom was eating sawdust all day! So the sawmill was a true inovation and people were glad to have them.

Jim Lewars and Jeff Becker were the two who gave us the talk about the sawmill today. They explained that it worked by diverting water from a stream and storing it up in an underground tank. Once the tank was full a lever was pushed and a small door in the side of the tank was opened. The energy expended from all the water in the tank trying to squeeze through the whole is what makes the wheel turn. The wheel is attached to an arm that moves up and down and consequentially moves the saw up and down. The log that is being cut is laid hozontally onto a sort of holder that is also attached to a small wheel and operated by the force of the water. As the blade is moving up and dawn the holder is pulled by the spinning of the wheel slowly from left to right. This makes the log move as it's being cut, and allows it to be cut completly down the middle. The boards that are cut at the sawmill are rarely perfect. Usually they vary about a half inch from one end to the other, but the ease and time saved with the sawmill made up for any inacuracy in cutting, and with a pit saw the boards were rarely perfect either.

The sawmill we have at Daniel Boone was used commercially until the 1940's. This had important consequences for historians and preservationists. Usually historians can tell that a board in a house is old by looking for saw marks charecteristic of a sawmill. But if some water-powered mills were used up until the twentieth century, the marks on many boards can be deceptive. A piece of wood may have been made in the 1890's but an unknowing historian could date it from the eighteenth century if they were unaware that a water-powered sawmill was still used in the area.

It just goes to show that history is not as concrete as we may think.

Gardening for the Historian

For the past two days my supervisor, Marcia, and I have been working intermittently in the garden outside of the Boone House, planting a new set of crops (rather late in the season) for this year. Marcia had an idea to make the garden more historically accurate, so we started out by removing a few things that really would not have been in the Boone’s garden, like an ornamental flax plant. Next we began planting some things that they would have grown.

But before we did any of that we had to pull weeds.

These are so pretty, why do we consider them weeds?

Okay, so the first project we talked was erecting bean poles and planting our beans around them. These are the beans I was planting. Apparently they were a popular food item back in the 18th century, but they aren’t beans that I was familiar with.

Next we scattered buckwheat and flax over patches of the garden.

We also planted carrots, spinach, and cucumbers, all of which Marcia thinks the Boones or other people living in the Oley Valley would have planted.

In addition to all this we also have some herbs that have already sprouted up. They include leeks, dill, camamille, sage, and chives.

All in all gardening was a nice break from giving tours and running the cash register in the gift shop. It also made me feel a little bit like I was taking part in something that the Boones would have been doing in the 18th century. I think it would be a good idea to have a program on interpretive Sundays on plants, gardening, and herbal remedies of the 18th century, but I think I will leave the task to Marcia, as she is one of the most knowledgeable gardeners I have ever met. I'm glad I worked with her for these past two days because I really learned a lot about plants and plant care!

The First Pennsylvania Regiment

I am suspicious of reenactors. I have a problem with people trying to replicate the past. I don’t think it can be done, and I don’t see the point in it anyway. Recreating a battle in a modern world, and getting obsessive about little details like footwear, buttons, and using the right material in clothing does not make me feel closer to the past. For me it makes me feel like there is less continuity in history that the people of the past were radically different from all of us dwelling in the present. Still reenacting is extremely popular, and there must be a reason for it. Maybe it gives people a sense of history that they did not once have. Maybe it makes them feel more connected to a past that was once something intangible and worse incomprehensible. Maybe in this world of globalization, mass media, and mass culture, it makes them feel like they are carrying on cultural traditions that are really unique against a world where little else is.
These are the feelings and thoughts I had when I observed the First Pennsylvania Rifle Regiment hold their monthly target practice at the homestead on Sunday. The men were very personable, they invited me to stand close by while they shot, and several talked to me for about an hour answering all the questions I had. Unfortunately I forgot my camera that day, so you’ll just have to be content to imagine the men in their colonial garb with their muskets and rifles.
First things first, what is the First Pennsylvania? They’re a group of volunteers who get dressed up and shoot guns just for the fun of it. They participate in a lot of battle reenactments, and they get around. They’ll be in Maryland in a few weeks and at Washington’s Crossing next weekend. All of the men I talked to were very mellow, and no one seemed to be younger than forty. There was not a lot of the bravado and machismo that I expected from a group of younger men. These guys were doing it for the sheer enjoyment of it. They have a leader, who they called a commander, who was running the target practice as far as I could tell (all this included when I was there was telling the shooters when the range was closed because they were checking targets). I did not get a sense of the rest of the organization of the group from the time I spent with them. I don’t know if they have any other officers, or who they are if they did.
The men in the First Pennsylvania were very concerned with shooting traditional weapons in a traditional manner. Some of them make their own led balls, and they were dressed in full colonial garb just for target practice. The men I talked to were very knowledgeable about their weapons, and they explained to me at length the difference between the rifle and the musket. (I still don’t really understand what the difference is though! I’m just a girl). When I interjected with a commonly held notion that the Americans were the ones with the rifles and that’s why they were able to beat the British in battle they corrected me. The middle colonies had the rifles, but in New England the musket was typically used. However, they did show me why a rifle is so much more accurate than a musket. The barrel of the rifle is grooved and it makes the ball spin when it is shot, and this makes the ball go in a straighter line. They let me touch the riles and even offered to let me shoot them (I declined).
Overall my experience with the First Pennsylvania Regiment was an informative one. I still think reenactors are trying to connect with a past and a culture that they feel is lacking from their day to day lives, but is that really such a bad thing? The men of the First Pennsylvania Regiment were very knowledgeable, even more so than me, and I’m the academic. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I am going to join a reenacting club, but I do think that it is possible to learn a lot from this phenomenon called reenacting.