A stretch of Rolling Meadows Road was hemmed with canvas tents poking through the morning mist on Saturday, October 8. Shadowy figures in Civil War garb moved between them, the smell of wood smoke was in the air. Behind the tents, the stately old brick mansion slash poor farm slash old folks’ home, known these days as the GCHS Museum stood at the heart of this impromptu village, its wood fired kitchen oven already lit. The 2022 Harvest Festival was about to go live.
Visitors crunched gravel underfoot as they pilgrimaged through the gate, past the Civil War camera set up to make historic photographic plates, past a barefoot Lenape warrior wrapped in bearskin and carrying a musket, past big hooped ladies in shawls out for a stroll. Right on time, Waynie, the old steam engine that once ran the narrow-gauge rails from Waynesburg to Washington, rolled out of its shed and blew its whistle at 10am. Like Brigadoon, this village and its people had emerged once more from the mists of local history, jumping centuries to live life as it once was, before magically disappearing for another year. And like the legend of that village in the Scottish highlands that appears once every hundred years, those who stopped by for a visit were made welcome. And like Brigadoon, some of those visitors would fall in love with this life and choose to stay.
“All you have to be is a history geek.” Willy Frankfort’s eyes twinkled behind his round wire framed spectacles. The two log cabins with their connecting porch behind the museum morphed into a frontier trading post, tavern and hostel, every detail hand made, restored and assembled with a real life story to tell. Ask any reenactor what they do when they return to the future and you might find a rocket scientist, a doctor, a professional tradesman he added with a grin. “This is what we do to decompress.”
Frankfort, who started engraving ivory and bone knife handles at age 12, makes his living as a master scrimshaw artist. Years of frontier reenactment with the 1st Virginia Regiment, Washington’s troops on the frontier from the 1760s through the Revolutionary War, has left him steeped in the artistry and history of goods bartered for furs and hide, whiskey, and bear fat on the Western Frontier. In the early 2000s his group turned the museum cabins into Colonial History 101 and invited the public in to taste, touch and listen. “Bear fat was rendered with beeswax for candles. Don’t be afraid to ask stupid questions. Ask the right stupid questions and you learn!”
Delving into trading post receipt books from Ft. Pitt and elsewhere paints a portrait of longhaired boys to men purchasing the bone and horn combs needed to manage it while dodging ambush and living off the land. A good carver would put a certain flaw into his finished product that guaranteed a return purchase when the comb broke, Frankfort noted. The third time a replacement comb was bought was recorded with the charge of an obligatory purchase of whiskey to go with it – a tidbit gleaned from a receipt book found at a trading post in Delaware. In Colonial times, every skill daisy chained with other skills that allowed a community to form and thrive and that’s how America was built. Innovation was the driver. The biggest change happened when men learned to make nails and turned it into a local trade. “Real estate happened when settlers didn’t have to burn down their cabins to recover the nails when they moved.”
Relaxing in the shadows of the Bloody Dirk Tavern as visitors wandered in to inspect the flintlocks and taste the fruit brandies of Washington’s day, fellow regiment veteran Peter Stevensky admitted he was also drawn here by the paranormal. “Our first team came here in 2000 and they saw people caring for people on the front porch.”
Stevensky and his group bring their sensory equipment to many of the places they reenact at, including the LeMoyne House in Washington County and other historic sites. Interest in the paranormal attracts a public that is looking for their own doorway into the past and reenactors like Stevensky have become the musket packing gatekeepers of that doorway. “If you hook them with the ghosts, then you can tell them about history.”
The chairs in the open doorway of the print shop were front row seats to the indigenous history that was being reenacted by Todd Johnson, aka Ghost in the Head, with his collection of hand made trade goods spread in front of his encampment. Lenape warrior Doug Wood described and demonstrated to wide eyed families the real facts of the war path during the time both before and during the territorial wars on the Western Frontier as the Eastern Woodland tribes were driven west. This history is baked into every old settlement land tract in the county – this is where it happened. When Barnet Rinehart built the brick farmhouse that is now the oldest part of the museum in 1789, massacres and ambushes were still front-page news and the most common dwellings were log cabins.
When the museum opened its doors and got caught up in the national mood to be ready for the Bicentennial of 1976, two log cabins were rescued and resettled here, along with whatever piece of the past that was able to be moved and refurbished in time for the big year. Early curator Mary Childs remembers getting a Department of Education grant to write, produce, and create costumes for an award-winning play “The Muddy Creek Ledger” based on an account book kept by merchant Thomas Seaton at his store on the south bank of Muddy Creek, Cumberland Township from 1793-1796. (When she told me this I had a powerful urge to see that play be restaged!)
Faces change but the village so many helped build from stone, timber, and salvaged artifacts remains, waiting for those who return to be part of the hands-on family reunion it has turned out to be, year after year after year. Jumping centuries for a weekend with friends and hunkering down over a fire to swap stories is a powerful incentive to return.
I came as a participant this year for the first time in dog years, as they used to say. It was great to spend the weekend visiting with old friends while helping out at the print shop as board member Joe Kinney inked up one of the old presses and got it rolling making prints of old advertisement engravings in his stash of type and font blocks.
Some of the scenes I drew for the Greene Country Calendar have already been made into engravings that Joe runs on the press and gives away to visitors. My every memory of being part of festivals past have their own happy stories to tell, stories that I’ve added to this year and am sharing here with you. So yeah, a corner of the village of Brigadoon already has my name on it. See you next year!
