North Augusta Today

The pillory is no fun.

You wouldn't know that from the number of children lined up to have their pictures taken in it at Under the Crown at Living History Park on Saturday.

One by one, parents locked their offsprings' hands and heads in the wooden punishment device, while the young ones grinned for the camera.

My job usually requires me to be a silent observer, recording what I see and hear without participating myself. But the events at Living History Park are among my favorite North Augusta events. For this one, I threw out the rule book and got my hands dirty, starting with the pillory.

I'm not sure colonists used wooden boxes to keep 5-foot-5- inch offenders from being able to fully stand or fully kneel.

If they had, I'm sure the subsequent back and leg aches from lengthy confinements would have been more than enough to keep a petty criminal from offending again.

I commented to park chair Lynn Thompson about how hard it was to stand there.

"Especially if somebody was tickling your nose with a feather," she said, reminding me that in those days, the punishment included passersby heckling the imprisoned with feathers or rotten fruit.

Nearby Ken Bloom played a dulcimer he had built. He made it look easy, pulling a bow across the strings while he played a few songs. I asked if I could try.

He kindly obliged, retrieving a smaller dulcimer from his tent and played through a simple song as a small crowd watched.

After determining that I have no musical background whatsoever, he decided I should start by learning to make a noise that wasn't a screech.

I thought I did so successfully. Other camps may declare that a matter of opinion.

Next, demonstrator Jim Van Ness patiently repositioned my hands again and again so the metal piece would strike the flint rock at precisely the right angle to create a spark as I tried to start fire.

Once a spark was created, I put a piece of char cloth over the flint.

A few minutes later I learned that I should have asked what to do with a flaming bunch of wood fibers before I lit them on fire.

One spark is all it takes to ignite the char cloth, which we put inside of a nest of wood fibers to ignite it.

"I've never had anybody start a fire so quickly," Van Ness said.

It's a good skill to have if I ever need to cook some leather britches.

Up at the slave cabin Kitty Wilson-Evans showed me how to make those britches. Kitty also demonstrated cooking real food during Colonial times, as she played Kessie the slave.

In the days before freezers and canning, slaves such as her character Kessie would have picked green beans from their garden. Then they would snap them, string them and hang them to dry.

In the winter, Wilson-Evans said, the beans would be soaked and cooked in soup.

This, by far, was my easiest Colonial chore.

Re-enactors are interesting people. The best part of attending these events is listening to them talk about their characters and their relationship to them.

I met the man who portrays Daniel Boone, Steven Caudill. I missed his demonstration, which he did once each day at the event.

When I asked him how he got involved in becoming a re-enactor, he pulled out a photograph of himself as a boy in the 1960s, wearing a coonskin cap - which Boone never wore.

"I was appointed," he said.

He said he shares Boone's faith and love of nature, but said he doesn't see how Boone spent so much time alone in the woods.

"He spent a lot of time with his Creator," Caudill said.

Reach Lisa Kaylor at lisa.kaylor@northaugustatoday.com.