Living history: Turner Brigade members eat, sleep and breathe Civil War history

The half-dozen men who sat in costume under the canvas awning at the annual Fort D Days celebration looked a lot like the men who served in the engineering corps and whose turn-of-the-century photograph hung inside the fort.

Sweating in wool pants and straw hats while they swatted at gnats, the men of the Turner Brigade even discussed a topic that would have been familiar to their forebears: dinner plans.

"That's usually one of the first questions that we get people asking when they see us," said Joe Roberts. "First they ask us, 'Did you really sleep out here?' Then they ask, 'Did you really cook that?'"

And the answer to both is typically yes.

The men of the Turner Brigade have spent the past decade or so demonstrating at historical sites and events what life might have been like for Civil War-era soldiers.

Ruth KastenGlenn Landberg

"It's called living history," Roberts said, explaining that he began as a garden-variety history buff, but eventually realized books would not satisfy his curiosity.

"There's nothing like experiencing history like seeing living history," he said. "After a while you want to see how that person would have actually lived. What it would be like to be wearing the wool jacket, even if you wouldn't want to be wearing a wool jacket in the summer."

For more than a few of the re-enactors, the connection with the time period is personal.

"My great-grandfather served in the Civil War and enlisted at Fort D," said Chris Wessel. "He was part of the march to the sea and made it back up through the Carolinas. Made it back home."

But August Wessel landed in a state mental hospital immediately after the war.

Hope EddlemanGlenn Landberg

"They think he had what we would call now post-traumatic stress disorder," Wessel said, adding that he only learned the real story after joining the Turner Brigade.

Fellow re-enactor Bill Eddleman pulled Wessel's great-grandfather's pension file while visiting the national archives and found record of testimony from men who served with August.

"At one point, a cannonball come skippin' through the ranks and barely missed him," Wessel explained. "We always just thought that was a family story, but here's men who saw it happen saying the same thing."

Eddleman, whose great-great-grandfather also served in the Union Army and nearly died in the infamous Confederate P.O.W. Camp Andersonville in Georgia, said most people don't know just how much history was made in Cape Girardeau.

"It amazes me," he said. "People think that nothing happened here."

Bill EddlemanGlenn Landberg

Instead, Cape was known at the time as one of the best places to wind up stationed. Being on the river, it was well-provisioned, it was far enough away from the fighting to be considered safe, and preserved journal entries abound with references to Cape's reputation for having beautiful young women.

Plus, the nearby German settlements meant there was always beer, too.

"The men when they were reassigned to other places would joke that, 'We would have fought on this line all summer,'" said Scott House, the Turner Brigade's highest-ranking member.

In a tent nearby, the brigade's youngest member, Andrew Porter, not yet a teenager, was teaching another young boy how to drill with a toy rifle.

"One of our young men teaching another 10-year-old about the thrill of history, that's what it's all about," House said. "That's the beginning of the next generation. If I'd had one of those wooden rifles when I was a kid, I'd never have put it down."

Jerry KastenGlenn Landberg

The allure of history, Roberts said, doesn't tend to wane with time.

"It is addictive if that's what you do," he said. "Some people buy bass boats and $500 fishing rods. We buy equipment."

tgraef@semissourian.com

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