By Amanda Schwarze, Staff Writer

During the second weekend of February, people had the opportunity to walk into a tiny cabin in Medina and hear news of newly elected President Abraham Lincoln and fret with the cabin’s inhabitants over fears of a civil war.

While warming their bodies next to a stove with simmering pots of potato soup and cobbler that the women of the home were cooking, visitors could talk about states leaving the union, listen to an Army man playing a harmonica or a bugler playing one of the nearly 50 calls he knows or chat with a chaplain who happened by the cabin.

From Feb. 9-11, the Charles Woldsfeld cabin, which sits at the side of the Medina City Hall parking lot, was the site of a winter 1861 reenactment sponsored by the Western Hennepin County Pioneers Association. Reenactors traveled from cities like St. Paul, Mound’s View, Red Wing and Houlton, Wis. in an attempt to teach people what the pioneer life was like in 1861 Minnesota.

While the trip back in time might be a fun and interesting weekend excursion for the visitors, the reenactors take their duty as living examples of the past seriously. They want people to walk into an environment that looks, feels, smells and sounds as authentic for the period they are portraying as possible.

“I just love it,” said Margaret Gilbert-Myrick a Civil War medical reenactor who participated in the Medina event. “I love the history, the camaraderie and I can teach. I can’t stand up in front of a classroom and teach, but here I can,” she said.

Like classroom instruction, reenactors must prepare before bringing a lesson to the public. Much of that preparation is research. Reenactors must study topics like the people in the region they are representing, the conditions in which they lived and worked, the tools and utensils they used and the clothes they wore.

Reenacting is not only time-consuming, it can also get expensive. The participants at the Medina event brought along their own period appropriate dishes, school books and home decorations to set the mood. Nothing was borrowed from Long Lake’s Pioneer museum for the event. They either made the clothes they were wearing or had them made from patterns of the time.

William Crowder was portraying an infantry bugler. While his uniform and bugle weren’t made in the 1860s, they are both authentic reproductions. Each detail is meticulously reproduced; even the buttons on Crowder’s uniform are designed to look as the originals.

Crowder doesn’t just carry the instrument around as decoration, he is well known for his ability to bugle. Crowder started bugling in 2002 and now he can treat reenactment visitors to 49 different calls and tell them what each one was used for. Gilbert-Myrick said other reenactors from around the country contact Crowder in hopes he will bring his talents to their events.

Gilbert-Myrick is also a respected reenactor. She said she began reenacting “by accident” in 1982. She was helping her husband with some research at Fort Snelling and she kept going back and getting deeper into the history and reenacting. Now Gilbert-Myrick has found her niche as a Civil War medical reenactor.

She’s just as committed as Crowder and the rest of the reenactors at the Medina event. She spends time hand-making surgical sponges that have been mistaken for the real thing. Gilbert-Myrick said she remembered one event where a medical professional complimented a fellow reenactor’s suture ability and she replied that he hangs drapes for a living.

“We don’t try to upset people, but it’s a bonus when we do,” she said of medical reenactors and their goal to make events as realistic as possible. Gilbert-Myrick also said that some people get sick watching Civil War medical portrayals.

For these reenactors, their passion lies in depicting history as realistically as possible in the hopes of giving people a deeper understanding of the past.

Gilbert-Myrick summed it up when she said “We do things right.”

source : www.waconiapatriot.com