Posted on 08/07/2003 6:35:46 AM PDT by stainlessbanner
GETTYSBURG, Pa. -- The Confederate and Union forces that clashed here 140 years ago were dust-covered and weary from a long, hot march.
The trip will have been more comfortable for the soldiers arriving Friday morning. But once they reach the 1,200-acre site of this weekend's anniversary event they will go to great lengths to recreate 1863 conditions.
Fifty dump truck loads of wood will fuel their cooking fires. Most will spend the night under period-authentic canvas tents. All will have to answer to men acting as generals George Gordon Meade and Robert E. Lee.
An extremely wet spring forced organizers to postpone it from the actual anniversary in early July, but they still expect about 14,000 re-enactors and 65,000 spectators over three days.
The Gettysburg re-enactment has recently become an annual event that draws several thousand people, but five-year milestones such as this year's 140th anniversary are far better attended.
It's being held this year on several adjoining farms just north of Gettysburg, about two miles from the edge of the sprawling national military park, which plays no official role in the event.
The logistics include 3,000 hay bales for the 500 cavalry mounts, a 940-foot stone fence trucked in from last year's battle site south of town, eight 6,000-gallon drinking-water tankers, and 325 portable toilets.
Firearms are carefully checked, following the inadvertent shooting of a re-enactor in 1998 by a French salesman, Christian Evo, who later pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment.
On a field before a 10,000-seat grandstand, the two armies will recreate a series of scripted battle scenarios that include the first-day prelude, Confederate Gen. James Longstreet's attack, a cavalry battle in nearby Hanover, and the Sunday afternoon climax, Pickett's Charge, complete with 100 pieces of artillery.
Organizers have installed drainage culverts, cleared brush for campsites, put in new roads, built new fences and torn down some existing ones.
The Gettysburg Anniversary Committee Inc., a private corporation, is spending nearly $1 million to put it on, said partner and operations manager Randy Phiel.
Many spectators, paying $20 per ticket, will no doubt remain on the site all day, spending their money among the 100 vendors hawking everything from books and war relics to pizza and funnel cake.
The long tradition of re-enactments can be traced to the late 1870s, when members of the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veterans' group, camped on the battlefield's Cemetery Hill and put on what they called a "sham battle" with Roman candles and rockets.
Around the time of the 1963 centennial, a number of writers and cultural critics inveighed against re-enactments, calling them tasteless and inappropriate.
But now, 40 years later, that controversy seems to have faded completely, said Jim Weeks, author of the new book, "Gettysburg: Memory, Market and an American Myth."
"There's no commemorative activity at Gettysburg or any Civil War battlefield that doesn't involve re-enacting," said Weeks, a fellow with the Papers of Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, Ill.
"Let's be honest and say this is a hobby. They're enthusiasts, like people that play golf," he said. "And it's acceptable nowadays, but half a century ago there were people ... that thought it was ludicrous."
Have fun gents, wish I was going!
I have to go up there anyway. I need to see reenactor friends and do some shopping. In any case my children would make my life a living hell if I don't go--the boy wants to see the soldiers and the cannon and play war with the other boys, while my teenage daughter wants to flaunt her fine gown and see her teenage friends from all over the US. I plan to bring a heavy tow chain in case I get stuck in the boundless mud. Tere's been enough rain that life preservers wouldn't be inappropriate either.
Anyway, if people are interested in reenacting, this sort of event isn't where you should go to get a taste of it. This kind of thing is like a circus with people in ridiculous, inauthentic get-ups, cotton candy being sold, and troops firing at each other from 20 yards but everyone refusing to fall down. It's pretty stupid. There are other events that are far more realistic. I tend to stick to those unless the children drag me to one of these, which reenactors refer to as "farb-fests."
I was wondering if you were going to this - didn't know how near you are to Gettysburg. My husband and I went to a (much smaller!) re-enactment at Vermont's Hubbardton Battlefield earlier this summer - the only Revolutionary War battle to take place on VT soil. It's truly inspiring to witness these battle re-creations; the re-enactors do a wonderful job with research, costume, and drama.
Is that a true story, and if so, why would anybody have turned that down?
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