Another re-enactment?

Saturday Tom, Peter, John and I visited the Historical Indian Agency House in Portage. There was a small re-enactment going on, representing the early 1830s. The other three are gun aficionados and were interested in the musket demonstrations and explanations by the men representing soldiers from the Black Hawk War of 1832.The guys doing the demonstrating and explaining made it interesting even to someone like me who knows little about firearms.

We visited the museum and the house itself, which is undergoing some restoration work in preparation for another grand re-opening next spring. As a result, there was no furniture in the house at all. This may have been a good thing, because the tour guide had so much to tell that it took 55 minutes (and I am not making that up) to go through the first three rooms. I can only guess what it would have been like had she tried to describe in such detail every bit of furniture. It reminded me a lot of childhood visits to the Sam Houston Museum in Huntsville.

Besides the house and museum, there were a few re-enactors explaining medical practices of the day and women demonstrating some of the daily tasks of women on the frontier at the time. Our friend Roberta, with whom I worked in the railroad's store, used to do demonstrations of this sort at the Chicago History Museum, and she would have fit right in carding wool and spinning.

This time, for a change, I remembered to bring my camera, but I got no pictures of Tom, John or Peter. So you will have to take my word for it that these are photos from last Saturday, not some I borrowed from the web. As you can see, it was a beautiful day for it.