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The sights, sounds and smells of garrison life during the Civil War will be come back to life this weekend at Fort Ontario State Historic Site, 1 E. Fourth St., Oswego.
Members of the re-created 12th U.S. Infantry Regiment, Company A will conduct living history demonstrations and recruit new members inside the old stone fort from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 27 and from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 28. Regular admission will be charged.
Fort staff and volunteers will also take part in interpretive activities. They will help children master playing with Civil War era toys and games such as bat and trap, cat and mouse, croquet, cup and ball, hoops and graces, quoits, stilts, and more.
Soldiers will set up tents with campfires on the parade ground to simulate life in the field during the Civil War. Guards not watching prisoners will march posts as patrons observe recruits drilling.
Women interpreting laundresses and servants with scrub boards, sponges and large tin pots will clean shirts, socks, undergarments, and uniforms for the officers and soldiers. Two men on 10-day kitchen police rotation may be found roasting and boiling coffee as they attempt to convert bland army rations into palatable entrees for the infantry company.
When the bugler sounds, sick-call soldiers with aches and pains and a desire to avoid drill and fatigue duty will report to a Civil War medical team headed Dr. Mary Walker who will be interpreted by Fort Ontario State Historic Site Assistant Danielle Funiciello. Oswego native Dr. Mary Walker was a Civil War contract surgeon and the only female recipient of the U.S. Medal of Honor.
Visitors are invited to have their heads examined by a traveling phrenologist interpreted by Dan Petty. Popular before and during the Civil War, phrenology is a process that involves observing or feeling the human skull to determine a person’s psychological attributes.
Practitioners of the “science” would run their fingertips and palms over the skulls of their patients to feel for enlargements or indentations. From measurements and relative sizes of the skull and using a “craniometer,” a special type of caliper, a phrenologist would assess the character and temperament of a patient.
In a whimsical tale said to have occurred when he was ten years old, Ulysses S. Grant was examined by a phrenologist who declared, “It is no common head! It is an extraordinary head! It would not be strange if we should see him president of the United States.”
Friends of Fort Ontario board member Dave MacLean will exhibit and demonstrate the use of calcium lights. Calcium or ‘limelight’ is a type of stage lighting once employed in music halls and theatres. An intense illumination is produced when an oxyhydrogen flame is directed towards a cylinder of quicklime (calcium oxide), which can be heated to 4,662 degrees Fahrenheit before melting.
Replaced by electric lights long ago, the term “limelight” has survived as a term for someone in the eye of the public eye. MacLean will demonstrate other Civil War era optical entertainments in the dark dungeon-like confines of the west artillery casemate.
Fort Ontario State Historic Site is located at the north end of East Fourth Street in Oswego, N.Y. For more information on the event contact Paul Lear at paul.lear@parks.ny.gov or 315-343-4711.
