Historical reenactment festival to take place this weekend

Oct. 22—LIGONIER — Almost 300 students came to Stone's Trace Friday for student day at Five Medals at Stone Trace.

The gathering is the first of a weekend of historical reenactment in at the Ligonier-based historical site.

"These are just everyday activities of people that would be living out on the frontier or in small settlements and how they would conduct their lives as we would today, how they feed themselves and clothe themselves," said organizer Mike Judson.

Dozens of reenactors came out to educate and entertain from all across the Midwest. Demonstrations ranged from chocolatiering to beekeeping to watercolor painting to gunsmithing, reliving stories and life from the first settlements in the 1670s through statehood in 1816.

Chocolatier Michael Lester is one of the newer additions to the collection of reenactors at this year's gathering.

"When the conquistadors found the Natives, Natives had a very spicy chocolate," Lester said. "They added agave syrup to calm it down. They added cayenne pepper. When the conquistadors took it, they brought it to the spice trade in European. Long Pepper is an Indonesian spice. It was brought in 1519 and then the chocolate was brought back to America.

"When it was brought back to America, it took two weeks for it to reach anywhere in North or South America, while it took two months for it to reach Europe. Chocolate back then wasn't used in food. It was just a drink...It was brought into the military. George Washington's troupes used chocolate as a ration because it never spoiled and never went bad. They were also paid with chocolate."

Judson explained that despite not being epicenters of trading or production, the English settlers of Indiana were able to trade and create and build wealth.

"As you come west, we've still got some decent-sized settlements that have access to river traffic like Cincinnati or Louisville and of course, things spread north or northwest from there," Judson explained. "On the north side of the state of course you've got the river system up here as well.... Fort Wayne and South Bend were huge trade centers for American, British, Canadian, French, even Spanish."

Cheryl Daniel, who does natural fabric dying, uses many international products in her craft, but it's the same process early settlers would have used.

"They traded for it just like they did for spice," Daniel said. "They have documentation of one of the generals that had orange juice and lobster tails on the Mississippi, and his crystal glassware that he drank from."

Lower-class working populations used trade of all kinds, legal and illegal, to fund their daily lives. Frank and Carol Jarboe of Bowling Green, Kentucky, have a marquee at the museum at Stone's Trace of some of the jobs.

"People don't think about this but especially in the bigger urban areas, all these jobs were necessary for society to function," Judson said.

"Maggie and Ould Badger" portrayed by the Jarboes are the Resurrectionists.

"We supply fresh bodies to the medical schools because there's no other ways for them to get bodies," Jarboe explained of his character.

The field, he explained, became lucrative almost as soon as the first medical school popped up in 1765 at the College of Philadelphia. Medical students were required to provide their own specimens. They, and the entrepreneurs like Ould Badger, learned that working together worked better for everyone involved.

"It is not exactly legal," he continued. "The law looks the other way, but it becomes illegal about 1830."

During the time of Maggie and Ould Badger, Jarboe said, the field is technically not illegal, although graverobbing itself was a hangable offense. Then in the 1790s body snatching became illegal, and in the 1830s donating cadavers for science became legal, changing the industry forever, but the underground industry continued into the 20th century with the last large-scale operation found in Indiana in 1906.

Jarboe said the industry was so popular that some old cemeteries even today, when moved, don't actually contain a lot of bodies because they were all taken for the medical field.

"We have some interesting tales," Jarboe as Ould Badger said. "We have people that are hired to stay in the graveyard in our time and it's because of us."

To make matters more complicated for the law or people trying to protect the bodies of their late family members, Ould Badger's accomplice Maggie, played by his wife Carol, is a professional mourner, a career wherein people a hired by families to follow at a funeral acting sad over the deceased.

"The families at this time, it's very important that you have a large number of people that are crying like you really care that they're gone," Carol explained. "My job then is to follow the funeral, being paid for it, which means I'm standing right there when they put the body in the ground, and then at night we meet together for supper... and I say, 'Here's the graves you need to go to tonight.'"

In their story, Maggie doesn't charge Ould Badger money for his intel. Instead, she asks for the hair and the teeth of the bodies, which she then sells to wigmakers and dentists to make wigs and teeth.

"We are both retired teachers," Jarboe explained. "This history was discovered when my wife was doing a class and talking about what the lower class people did and she ran across the body snatchers and thought it to be an anomaly, so we went digging and found it was just widespread. In 1765 when the first medical school comes, it's a 50-mile radius around the school you go see bodies missing from graves and it just continues."

Many products such as traditional soaps, chocolate, metalwork, and more are also for sale at Five Medals at Stone's Trace. The event opens to the public today (Saturday) from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and continues from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $8, with children and under free.

The Five Medals gathering is at Stone's Trace, 5111 Lincolnway S., Ligonier. Parking is across the street at West Noble High School.

Dani Messick is the education and entertainment reporter for The Goshen News. She can be reached at dani.messick@goshennews.com or at 574-538-2065.