Gearing Up for Civil War Days

This is how we study the Civil War. 🙂

Anna and I went and picked out dresses to borrow from the Wilder Pageant for our upcoming reenactment roles at Wasioja’s Civil War Days.  The dress I like best is apparently far too scandalous for the times since too much skin shows, so I may wear it for the ball (ladies were allowed to show more skin at night) or improvise something with a shawl and long gloves.  Or I might wear the more respectable dress.  We’ll see!

We’ve been to Pipestone’s Civil War days but this event is a new one for us.  Daryl will be playing old time music and the boys will be teaching children’s games like rolling hoops and the game of graces.  The girls and I are mostly “atmosphere girls” — our job is to make the scenes look that much more authentic.

That’s sort of what we did at Pipestone’s Civil War Days last summer.

(Speaking of which, I must go off on a tangent and rant for a moment!  See the fabulous hotel rooms we were in while we were in Pipestone?  That’s the historic Calumet Inn, which we fell in love with.  It’s got vintage furniture, sweeping staircases, period wallpaper, stories of hauntings and a blood red carpet throughout that just gives it so much character.  We found out today that the Calumet Inn is being featured on Gordon Ramsey’s hotels from hell show!  They’re filming this week and I will be horrified if they modernize that fantastic old place too much.  I’m very curious to see what the show looks like, since we absolutely love that place and the food is divine, which is quite rare in this part of Minnesota.  It’s possible that some of the other rooms were pretty dreadful.  We were in two rooms and one was certainly a lot more charming than the other.  Still, I hope they don’t change too much! Time will tell!)

Anyway….

We have two weeks to finish getting everything in order and get all the research we want done.  I’m going to find some good reading materials on the time to add to it, too.

It should be fun!