During Burton Century Village’s Civil War Encampment event this weekend, spectators could find history at every corner throughout the museum.
Located at 14653 E. Park St., the Civil War re-enactment event took place on May 25 and was set again for May 26. According to Stefanie O’Connor, curator and an archivist for Century Village, the re-enactment has been taking place for the last 20 years.
The event is intended to be an educational experience for between 700 to 1,000 people O’Connor is expecting throughout the weekend, she said.
“You get history from the elders,” O’Connor said. “The elders are like your grandfather and your grandmother. To see their children come in with their children and then their children come in, it’s fantastic that history is being passed down.”
O’Connor came back on board at Century Village back in February and since then, it has been a whirlwind, she said. In the past two weeks, 25 houses were cleaned and 25 areas were staged in order to prepare for the weekend event.
“We had a little dedication yesterday to our treasurer,” O’Connor said. “His mom and dad donated an exhibit case, and they have passed away. They were big in the community and into history, and they loved Century Village. We’ve been doing things in the past three months to get to where we are now. Everybody has been putting time in to help Century Village and getting it to where you’re looking at people walking into the gates.”
Between the volunteers and the docents, everyone has been coming together to work as a team for Century Village, O’Connor said.
“Everything’s open,” she said.
In attendance at the re-enactment was John King, who was portraying Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States.
This is an event to teach everyone and remind them of history, King said.
“We did fight in a Civil War,” he said. “It lasted longer than we wanted, but we get together at events like this with the understanding that it did happen and it was not pretty, but had we not won the Civil War, we would’ve been two countries.”
King became a re-enactor in the 1980s after he grew a beard and after someone told him he looked like Lincoln. After borrowing a coat and a hat, and after putting it on in front of a third grade classroom, that was the beginning.
Since then, King has participated in hundreds of different programs, speeches or re-enactments, sharing Lincoln’s history.
“It’s humbling,” he said. “I’m blessed and as time has gone on, I’ve learned a lot about him.”
Meanwhile, Barbara Tonscheff was portraying Belle Montgomery, a fictitious spy.
Tonscheff enjoys enlightening women to show how much women have contributed to the world.
“They helped the soldiers and did a lot of spying,” she said. “I’ve been researching for years and always thought it was fascinating.”
A retired cardiac tech from the Cleveland Clinic, Tonscheff has been re-enacting for the last eight or nine years. However, she has studied women in history for much longer.
“There’s a lot of espionage women went through and run the gamete from who they were,” she said. “When I do my presentations, I talk not only about the Confederate female spies and smugglers, I talk about the Union gals who are just as clever. That’s why I was just arrested and had to get out of the slam that they have in the train depot here at Burton Village.”
Portraying Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy when the nation split, was David Walker.
This year was Walker’s third year attending Century Village’s re-enactment.
“I’m an educator at heart,” he said. “Whether or not people like politics, you have to understand that politics control your life. You can’t change what people did in the past. We can only change our future and those who refuse to learn by history are forced to repeat it. You got a lot of young people who don’t have a clue how this nation was founded and that’s a shame.”
Walker got into re-enacting in the 1980s as well.
“It was extremely popular,” he said. “You could go to a re-enactment in Gettysburg and there will be 12,000 re-enactors. When my son was born, I got out of the hobby for a while. When he got old enough, I got back in.”
No matter who is being portrayed, re-enactors have to take the good with the bad with whoever it is they’re portraying, Walker said.
“It isn’t like they’re perfect,” he said.
There was a reason why Lane Smerglia decided to portray Miss Darcy Mae St. James for the event.
“My grandma used to call me Darcy Mae as a kid,” she recalled. “I came to find out that I actually had a cousin named Darcy Mae Pickle. I chose the last name St. James because a lot of prostitutes didn’t really have a last name. St. James became the name of a lot of women.”
In character, Smerglia said that she runs a high class establishment with the finest beer, wine and bourbon.
“Men love to come and see me after a long day of battle,” she said in character. “We have cigars, drinks and horizontal refreshments from time to time. We have to make our money somehow. We do bathe, see doctors and are licensed. We have women who come through who have lost everything — their husbands, children and so, they come to work for me.”
Smerglia finds importance in educating what women were going through during the Civil War.
“Women made about $1 a week,” she said. “Rent would run about 50 cents a week, so now we’re at 50 cents. There’s an average of three children, so if I have three kids at home and coal is already about 40 cents a week per person, I’m at 10 cents. We haven’t even talked about food.”
As a result, streetwalking and brothels became rampant, Smerglia said.
“Men were not sending money home,” she said. “They were spending it on food, clothes and hookers. Per capita to this day, it was the height of prostitution in the United States.”