INTO THE BREECHES

Το hat it takes to be a Revolutionary War reenactor

- BY CAITY WEAVER

Benedict Arnold had been growing hunkier all afternoon.

Incarnated, at the moment, by Cameron Green, the director of interpretation at historic Fort Ticonderoga, Arnold had spent much of this May Friday on horseback. Sixty rain-numbed Revolutionary War reenactors had sloshed in his wake, marching up forest trails and past a Texaco station, in period-correct leather buckle shoes (not engineered to withstand repeated impact with modern Vermont's asphalt highways) and period-correct wool coats (now ponderously wet, stinking of sheep). “Give ‘em hell, boys!” a local resident had hollered from his farmhouse.

Saturday morning would mark the 250th anniversary of the fort’s seizure in 1775 by the Green Mountain Boys—a rumbustious militia of proto-Vermonters who spent years violently defending their bite-size territory—but so far the rain was at best blighting and at worst obliterating every enriching activity the Fort Ticonderoga staff had dreamed up. A plan for the reenactors to sleep under starlight when we'd arrived on Thursday had been downgraded to a plan to shiver in a barn all night. A plan to shoot muskets had been canceled. A plan to teach elementary-age children how to cook a meal over an open fire in a town green had devolved into a horde of famished, filthy adults flooding into a schoolroom; propping their dripping muskets against shelves of picture books; and scavenging pencil-shaped cookies leftover from Teacher Appreciation Week. Everything was going less smoothly than it had in 1775. If the partially defrosted reenactors under Cam Green's supervision—individuals who had come from as far away as North Carolina; who had had to submit color photos of themselves in 1770s-era clothing and proof of insurance to be granted the privilege of portraying 18th-century guerrillas—camped out again tonight, there was likely to be a mass hypothermia event.