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Notes From Freedom Festival

Lewis Case, a Civil War re-enactor from Osawatomie, had an 1841 Mississippi rifle on display during the festival. The rifle got its name because it was issued to U.S. volunteer units from Mississippi that were to fight in the Mexican War (1846-48) including the First Mississippi commanded by Col. Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederacy.

Union re-enactors Mary Beth Menold and Matt Walker of the Colorado Volunteers were married Saturday at the gazebo in John Brown Memorial Park. The ceremony was conducted according to Civil War-era customs, and the wedding party was clad in period attire.

Florella Adair, sister of John Brown and wife of the Rev. Samuel Adair, died of exhaustion at age 48 at Fort Leavenworth.

Robert E. Lee, future commanding general of the Confederate armed forces, oversaw the hanging of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, Va., as a junior officer in the U.S. Army.

President Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, actor John Wilkes Booth, also was present at the hanging of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, Va. Booth disguised himself as a soldier so he could attend, because soldiers were keeping the public at a safe distance from the hanging for fear Brown’s men would try to liberate him at the last moment.

Baseball players, clad in replica uniforms for the re-enactment of an 1870-era game on Saturday, represented the Wichita Red Stockings and the Wichita Bulldozers – two authentic Wichita teams from the 1860s and ’70s. Team member Toby “Hoosier” Ortstadt explained the Bulldozer nickname: “A bulldozer in those days meant a person who liked to come into town and stir up trouble – a brawler or ruffian.”

The cannon roaring during the re-enactment of the Battle of Osawatomie on Saturday and the Civil War skirmish between Union troops and Confederate partisans on Sunday was a 12-pound Mountain Howitzer operated by McLain’s Independent Battery, which fought with the Second Colorado Cavalry. The cannon was mounted on a “prairie carriage” for greater mobility on the plains. A canister load resembled a tin can full of large caliber musket balls, and was lethal up to 500 yards.

Union re-enactors at the festival represented McLain’s Independent Battery and the Colorado Second Cavalry. That Colorado cavalry contingent actually patrolled this border area during part of the Civil War and fought in the Battle of Mine Creek on Oct. 25, 1864, in Linn County.

Confederate armament supplies were so scarce that brass church bells were melted to use in the making of weapons.

President Theodore Roosevelt, a graduate of Harvard in 1880, once said: “A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education.”

— Doug Carder

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Posted by Doug on Sep 22 2010. Filed under News and Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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