Living history: Recreating the Battle of Waynesboro

Story by Chris Graham

You want to be a re-enactor, spend a weekend with Fifth Virginia, Company L, out of West Augusta, where the guys take it to the extreme by living and eating like Civil War soldiers for two days.

“You come to the realization that they were some hearty people in those days. If they lived to adulthood, survived all those childhood diseases, they could survive off hard tack and soft pork for four years. Probably longer than that. We’re soft as a society today. We’d probably die from heart disease at 20,” said Bruce Houle of Staunton, who has been on the re-enactment scene for 23 years now.

He does 10-12 Civil War-related events a year, including the living history organized by the Plumb House Museum around the marking of the March 2, 1865 Battle of Waynesboro, which involved a major historical figure on the Union side, George Custer, of Custer’s Last Stand fame.

Custer availed himself well in Waynesboro, outflanking Confederate Gen. Jubal Early in the rebels’ final defeat in the Valley Campaign that helped set the stage for the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox a month later.

The weather for this year’s living history was a sight better than it was 144 years ago. It was in the mid-70s on the March Saturday for this year’s 13th living history, but was sleeting and raining in March 1865 when Custer led a 4,500-man force under the ultimate direction of Gen. Philip Sheridan into the River City to finish off Early.

It was a “cleanup operation,” said Ted Hughes, a National Park Service historian who lives in Stuarts Draft. “The importance of the Battle of Waynesboro was it was something that Sheridan saw that needed to be done to just clean it up, so to speak,” said Hughes.

Bringing what happened along the South River and on Main Street to life is a labor of love for people like Houle and Hollie Drobinski, a re-enactor with 19th Virginia, Company G, out of Nelson County. “Somebody will pick up a book and say, This is what I found out. The Internet is a great source,” said Drobinski of the sharing of information among the re-enactors. “Movies are a great source. Documentaries. We watch a lot of documentaries. And then going to the battlefields and the battles themselves. Whatever battle we’re going to do, we read up on it and get as much information so that when the folks do stop by, we can give them a good history lesson.”

“The neat thing about this,” Houle said, “is with a large group like this, everybody has their own little niche of history that they’re interested in, and as a group, it’s a wealth of information. Everybody has their own little interest in that time period, and that’s what they study. Or when they read something, that’s what sticks in their mind. It’s neat to sit around the campfire and talk about the different things and get different perspectives. History is one of those things where nobody knows everything, and it’s neat to rationalize, What did they mean by that? What was going on? And then sit around with a bunch of people, and it comes to life sometimes,” Houle said.