In light rain, Arn Kind, a member of the First Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment drilled his new soldiers on turning, about facing, and how to hold their 1861 Springfield muskets in the LeDuc lawn.
Kind chided the line for turning on the wrong foot, sloppily holding their muskets and not responding loudly enough to his orders with “Sergent yes Sergent!”
For the weekend, the LeDuc Historic Estate opened its doors to union soldiers, wartime photographers and reenactors from America’s bloodiest war during its annual Civil War Weekend.
Among the union troops were members of the re-enactment group for Battery I, 1st U.S. Artillery, often simply known as “old one I.” Members of the re-enactment group demonstrated firing cannons and Gatling guns which echoed across Highway 61 all weekend.
The real Battery I is the oldest battery from the 1st regiment dating back to 1798. The unit fought in a number of battles in the Civil War from the Battle of Bull Run to Antietam to Gettysburg and in turn boasts some of the highest casualties of any unit in the civil war.
Readers might actually have seen members of old one I from famous Civil War movies like the 1982 film “The Blue and Gray” and 1989 film “Glory,” which founding member of Battery I Bill Dalin was part of.
It is still common practice for largescale Civil War movies to hire reenactors who bring their own uniforms and understanding of drilling and how the units actually fought.
“We have our own officers and non-commissioned officers and we’d say ‘okay’ and move in. They didn’t have to train us,” said Dalin about working with Civil War movies.
Since the Battery I re-enactor group was founded in 1995, much has changed about Civil War re-enactments.
Re-enactments broadly have become more accurate, said Dalin: “Just the stitching of the uniforms to the accuracy of the equipment used to drill manuals being followed more precisely […] the accuracy of the impressions is really going up.”
Even beyond the soldiers, the “ancillary things to the army,” like recreations of the sanitary commission to medical practices of that time have gotten more period accurate, said Battery I member Steven Gates.
Another change from that time is that interest has declined. “Younger people are still coming into the hobby but not at the rate they were 20 years ago,” said Dalin. Competition even from other areas of re-enactment, especially World War II was cited as potentially pulling away would-be new members.
Other re-enactors like David Rambow, who shoots photos onto metal and glass plates with a 1860s-era camera, said that the re-enactment field has burgeoned in the decades he had been in it.
“When I started doing this, you could count the number of practitioners on two hands in the whole country,” said Rambow.
Now as Rambow travels to re-enactments and fairs and festivals across the country, other antique photographers will bicker over territory and events.
“It’s a good problem,” said Rambow.
From his tent pitched on the LeDuc lawn, equipped with a portable darkroom, Rambow plied his trade taking photos of soldiers and families with fingers blackened from a silver nitrate solution that makes the plates light sensitive.
Taking a photograph this way only takes 8-10 seconds, but within that three-second timeframe is a lot of leeway.
Conditions like humidity, light, rain all affect how dark a photo will get, from barely dark enough to make out its figures, to the vignette-ringed overexposed photos that often characterize photography from this era.
“It’s like a Rubik’s Cube. You just gotta get it just the perfect fit to make it work even once,” said Rambow.
The now decades-long tradition of the Civil War Weekend at the LeDuc started as a way to showcase William LeDuc’s involvement in the war in addition to raising funds for the site.
Since then, it has become an annual touchstone to history not just for those who work to bring it to life but for residents who come to cook over an open fire, learn how to roll hoops, or how medicine looked like some 160 years ago.
According to Gates: “What you hope for this is it creates questions that someone wants to follow up on. It opens the door.”
