The Blue, the Gray, and Living History at Pioneer Museum

Living History at Pioneer Arizona

A bugle blares, followed by the crackcrack of scattered gunfire and the sound of pounding hoofbeats. Between the blacksmith shop and the lumberyard, Union cavalry troops charge from the north, flags flying, carbines and revolvers firing, sabers flashing. Dust rises near the cemetery south of town as Confederate soldiers ride out to clash with the Federals.

The battle is joined. Well, not exactly. Call it battle theater-drama at its most exciting, performed on Nature's stage at Pioneer Arizona Museum. That's where the Blue and the Gray meet periodically to reenact parts of that wrenching chapter in American history, the Civil War.

But all through the year Arizonans are getting together to "create a time warp," as Sedona sculptor James Nathan Muir puts it. Muir is a member of the Arizona Civil War Institute, an educational group formed two years ago to produce authentic living-history events. A lifelong historian, Muir sculptures Civil War bronzes, mostly of mounted soldiers.

"We're historians first," echoes Gary Roberts, a Phoenix photographer and printer, who claims to have learned more history as a child by touring old military posts and museums than he learned in school. "Some reenactors go more for the Hollywood version, but we thrive on being meticulous in our research."

You'll find no sleeping bags or ice chests, wristwatches or sunglasses in these men's camps. Uniforms, even undergarments, are true to the times. And there's never a beer can or pop bottle in sight: all beverages are placed in "period containers," usually sturdy canteens or tin cups. Cooking is done on cast-iron skillets over campfires. (They don't go so far as placing the legs of their cots in kerosene, however, as soldiers in Arizona Territory once did to keep crawling insects out of their beds.) The public can talk history with the "soldiers" between skirmishes and drills. And from inside an infantryman's tent, visitors can even imagine themselves preparing for battle.

The spot often chosen to reenact the struggles of Johnny Reb and Billy Yank is Pioneer Arizona, a 551-acre living-history museum off Interstate Route 17, about twenty minutes north of Phoenix. The museum is dedicated to preserving and portraying the frontier way of life of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Pioneer Arizona, a 551-acre living-history museum off Interstate Route 17, about twenty minutes north of Phoenix. The museum is dedicated to preserving and portraying the frontier way of life of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Founded in 1956 by Joe Schmitt, Jo Ann Graham, Newman White, and Robert Weaver, Pioneer Arizona Museum opened in 1969 after historic buildings from throughout the state had been purchased or donated and moved to the site. The Robert Lockett family, whose members had ranched in territorial Arizona, gave Pioneer its land; Lockett died last April at seventy-four. Graham, retired after twentyfive years spent building Pioneer, said recently she "had a time convincing Bob it wouldn't turn into a tourist trap. We all agreed we wanted an educational center, a living-history museum. And that's what we have: the Smithsonian still points to Pioneer Arizona as a model."

The Blue, the Gray,

Some 300 to 500 schoolchildren a week come to see everyday life as it was between 1860 and 1912. To date, a quarter of a million young people have experienced Pioneer's depiction of a village in the old Southwest. They gaze wide-eyed at the town's two dozen buildings, including a bank, a schoolhouse, the austere "teacherage" next door, the tinsmith and gunsmith shops, some cabins, a wagonmaker's and carpenter's shop, and a tiny sheriff's office and jail.

There's a Victorian home with velvet loveseats.

St. Paul's, the steepled white church, was reconstructed from a church built in 1879 in Globe. Now nondenominational, it's a nostalgic chapel for Sunday services and old-fashioned weddings. One couple, both Civil War buffs, walked beneath a long arch of crossed sabers when they left the church as newlyweds. On Sundays visiting children announce services by ringing the heavy old church bell. Several Pioneer Arizona volunteers and staff members have been married at St. Paul's. Moreover, Pioneer Director June McNabb says weddings are an important source of income for the tiny town: there is one nearly every weekend, at an average charge of 175 dollars for fifty guests.

Television commercials also are filmed on the premises.

There's an old-time restaurant, and a saloon called "Whiskey, the Road to Ruin." Another historic building is the opera house. Copied from one which started life in Prescott as that town's first Goldwater's store, it now provides the stage for twice-weekly melodramas and, in December, again will be the scene for a Civil War reenactors' annual ball. And, like all frontier towns, Pioneer Arizona has a cemetery, complete with several dozen simple picket-marked graves. But no one is buried there.

Pioneer Arizona exists today with the help of staff and volunteers, including the Glendale Women's Club and other groups and individuals who've visited, "gotten excited at the concept," says McNabb, and decided to come back to help. Vince Valumas, volunteer bartender, is a retired Michigan steelworker, living in nearby Glendale. On the staff are twins Tom and Terry Brown of New River, maintenance workers. Now twenty, they've worked at the museum for seven years. Blacksmith John Cochran, one of Pioneer's few residents, doubles as night security guard. During the day, he manufactures such articles for Civil War enthusiasts as tent stakes and tin cups. And there's Slim, the wagon-driver, a bearded older gentleman. "You here with the weddin'?" he calls out cheerfully to visitors. "No? Well, we're fixin' to have one."

In a community known for its colorful characters, Charles Hartwell and Marcia Byrom-Hartwell are more the town's scholars. Both are antiquarians, collecting books, guns, furniture, and cooking utensils of the nineteenth century. They've been at Pioneer Arizona since 1980; she's the food historian, and he's the gunsmith and self-taught tinsmith. For the last few years, they have spent their summers with the Shakers in western Massachusetts. Charles proudly shows his fascinating collection of antique guns to Pioneer visitors and welcomes questions. Marcia enjoys cooking on an old wood stove and demonstrating such time-goneby chores as churning butter and canning preserves. "I'm able to talk with children about history through food, which is a great common denominator," she says.

She's also a talented actress, but even the most skillful have their difficult moments. "We laugh about the time a visitor came through while I was literally slaving over a hot stove, and she said, 'Are you really making that bread, or just pretending to make it?' When it's over a hundred degrees, and you're soaking in your long cotton dress, it's hard not to be sarcastic. You just have to smile."

The Hartwells enjoy introducing young people to the past and discussing aspects of history with older people, who often can add to their knowledge of what yesterday was like. They find, too, that European visitors sometimes hold exaggerated ideas about life on the frontier.

"Some tend to think that dangerous Indians were everywhere, and there were constant gunfights; that things were always rip-roaring," says historical interpreter Susan Kuecker. "And one woman complained that it's so dusty out here. I tried to explain that we dust all day, but it is the desert. 'But,' she replied, 'it's always clean on TV!' "

Susan tends the Victorian house, baking such traditional treats as hot cross buns and gingerbread on Wednesday and Saturday mornings, and sharing them with visitors. During the Harvest Festival on Thanksgiving weekend, she cooks a turkey in the wood stove and distributes samples of fig preserves made in the summer. At times of Civil War encampments, she sometimes bakes hardtack, a thick, firm cracker-like bread that served as a mainstay of the nineteenth century military diet in the Southwest.

mer. At times of Civil War encampments, she sometimes bakes hardtack, a thick, firm cracker-like bread that served as a mainstay of the nineteenth century military diet in the Southwest.

Authentic though they are in details, the members of the Arizona Civil War Institute actually focus mostly on events that happened in the East, rarely portraying the limited action of the war that took place in Arizona. Another group of reenactors, the Arizona Civil War Council, also uses Pioneer Arizona as a backdrop, but tends to concentrate on Civil War events of this region. ACWI and ACWC have about fifty members each.

Andy Masich, director of the Arizona The old-time smith played an essential role in the Southwest and elsewhere, creating "from scratch" everything from nails to plowshares.

Historical Society's Central Arizona Muse-um, summarizes this area's Civil War record: Soon after the war began in April, 1861, the regular Federal troops left forts here-this was still part of the Territory of New Mexico-to return to the main theater of the rebellion in the East. In Feb-ruary, 1862, the Confederate Territory of Arizona was proclaimed. By March a large volunteer force from California was en-listed to drive the rebels out of Arizona and New Mexico. That April, Arizona had its best-known Civil War skirmish at Pica-cho Peak, with twenty-six Federals against ten Confederates. Three Union men were killed and three captured.

About sixty of Arizona's Civil War time travelers meet in March at Fort Lowell Days, at Tucson, adds Masich, himself a reenactor. That camp was a major supply depot during and after the war. The Arizona Civil War Institute uses Pioneer Arizona with its desert flora as the stage set for its November encampment; earlier in the fall, the piney woods of Flag-staff provide a setting more typical of Civil War battles fought in the East. The reenactors march and shoot at various other encampments throughout the year; one infantryman recalls walking right through a brand new pair of shoes on a hike near the Mogollon Rim. "An experience I can treasure," he says ruefully. Others tell about trudging down a Forest Service road near Flagstaff when they were overtaken by a man in an auto-mobile who continued to stare at them until he drove into a ditch. They helped push his car back on the road, saying not a word. "He must have thought he was in a 'twilight zone'," one laughed.

They are a hardy bunch, these part-time soldiers. And they come from every kind of background. Brent Brown is a captain at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson; William Mitchell is a former stuntman; David Read is curator of the State Capitol Museum. Larry Stewart is a Mesa travel agent; Ted Ihrman is a Cornville rancher, and Bill Thompson is Wallace of the popular Phoenix children's television program, "Wallace & Ladmo." George McCormick works for Phoenix Indian Center, and Pete Kersten owns a Scottsdale greeting card company with brother Rick.

Several reenactors are students. David "Mac" Carter, thirteen, is ACWI's drummer, and Karl Weiss, sixteen, and Chris Mansfield, fifteen, are buglers. Matt Kersten, fifteen, Rick's son, just had his first Civil War outing in April and in July accompanied his uncle to Manassas, along with more than thirty other ACWI members. There some 10,000 devotees of Civil War history gather annually at the field where Stonewall Jackson earned his nickname.

After the battles and marches at Pioneer Arizona, the reenactors take time for wives and sweethearts, who become Scarlett O'Hara dress-alikes, joining their men for supper during the encampment weekends.

Richelle Muir, twenty, daughter of sculptor Muir, became involved with Civil War reenactment when she moved to Arizona from Indiana two years ago. She says the long romantic gowns she wears waltzing with her soldier boyfriend, Layne Hall, make her feel more feminine. And she has come to understand much more about that nineteenth century era from the structured playacting.

Her father agrees. "There's a commonality in the love of history we share. We want to re-create as accurately as possible a period in our country's past, if only for a bright, fleeting moment.

How do visitors react to this outdoor play at Pioneer Arizona? Some stare; some ask questions; a few heft rifles and canteens to help them imagine a time that's gone forever. But a ten-year-old Scottsdale youngster summed it up for her generation as Union soldiers soberly marched past her, rifles on shoulders.

"Awesome," she said.

Selected Reading

The Civil War in the Western Territories: Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah, by Ray Charles Colton. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1959.

Living History Sourcebook, by Jay Anderson. American Association for State and Local History, Nashville, Tennessee, 1985.

Time Machines: the World of Living History, by Jay Anderson. American Association for State and Local History, Nashville, Tennessee, 1984.

WHEN YOU GO

For the pioneers of Arizona to build communities on the frontier a century or so ago required a lot of guts, vision, and dedication. Movie Westerns and paperback books to the contrary notwithstanding, the frontier was not populated mainly by badmen and lawmen. The vast majority of the people who built the pioneer villages and ranches, businesses and enterprises of Arizona were incredibly hard workers devoted to a high ideal...."

So wrote historian Edward H. Peplow, Jr., in his Arizona Highways introduction to the Pioneer Arizona Museum in July, 1972, then just three years old. As now, this was a "village of either original or completely authentic historical re-creations of the structures where Arizonans of long ago lived, worked, prayed, and played...."

What makes Pioneer Arizona doubly interesting is the careful research behind each facet of the living-history museum. Take time to visit the ranch house, an original structure transplanted from Arizona's backcountry after careful study. The schoolhouse, originally located in the old settlement of Gordon near Payson, was moved log by log to its present site. Those logs that couldn't be transported were replicated, hand-adzed as in the past.

And more: see a re-creation of the first Maricopa County Jail, circa the late 1800s; and the Duppa stage station, a crude structure built of natural materials, exactly duplicating the habitation of "Lord" Darrel Duppa, who named the new cities of Phoenix and Tempe.

Volunteers are responsible for much of what you'll enjoy at Pioneer Arizona. But business firms, too, helped immeasurably: Ray Lumber Company built the lumberyard and carpentry shop; Valley National Bank reconstructed-accurate to the smallest detail-its first bank in Phoenix; Goettl Brothers Metal Products constructed the 1880s tin shop from an old photograph. The bar in "Whiskey, the Road to Ruin" saloon once supported the elbows of hard-drinking hard-rock miners of Mayer and Jerome. It was donated to the museum by A. J. Bayless Markets.

"One of our most important jobs," said Jo Ann Schmitt Graham, Pioneer Museum executive director when Highways first introduced the museum to its readers, "is to imbue our guests with a sense of the continuum of history. They understand the values of today's American way of life much better when they experience for themselves the sense of discovery...."

Pioneer Museum is open from 9 A.M. to 4 P.M. Wednesday through Sunday, October through June; and from 9 A.M. to 1:00 PM. the same days, July through August. It is closed during September.

General admission is $3; seniors and students thirteen through college, $2; children ages six through twelve, $1; those under five, free. Special admission price for groups of fifteen or more. School tours, 75 cents each, including adults. Admission includes free wagon tours on Saturday and Sunday.

Special events coming up at Pioneer Arizona Museum include:

For more information, write or call Pioneer Arizona Museum, Black Canyon Stage, Box 1677, Phoenix, AZ 85029; (602) 993-0210.