It’s like a great sporting event played out in a 37-acre arena with thousands watching and cheering from a gently sloping hillside.
It’s theater. It’s entertainment. It’s a family outing and a history lesson, full of sound and fury, the roar of the cannon, the smell of gunpowder and the dead littering the field.
It’s all that and more, not unlike the first battle of Bull Run in the Civil War when the city folks came down from the capital with their picnics and blankets, only to find to their horror that “war is hell,” as General Sherman said later in Chattanooga in 1863.
It’s the annual Battle of Tunnel Hill.
It’s not really real, and yet it’s “for real,” as one teenager told another.
Maybe a better term would be surreal.
Like “Alice Through The Looking Glass,” one has only to drive across an old, wood plank, “covered bridge” over a small creek to find themselves in another time, another place.
It’s almost 2 p.m., Sept. 10, 2000. But it could just as well be 1863.
Resting in the shade of some trees near the Clisby Austin House – General Sherman’s headquarters as he paused here during his “March To The Sea” – is a troop of Yankees.
Wink Bennett, of Dalton, a lean, wiry soldier with a scraggly beard, is standing with a couple of his reenactment buddies – Matthew Fortenberry of Adairsville, and Jeffrey “Tadpole” Baker of Cedartown.
“The colors kind of chaffs me,” says Bennett, but adds, “If there were no bad guys you couldn’t have any good guys.”
What makes a person dress up like that in the heat and play soldier?
“If they say we’re nuts, they’d be correct,” he answered.
“We’re making history come alive,” said Baker.
“One’s memory of history keeps them from repeating it,” said Bennett, looking serious.
“This lets ‘em know the horrors of it,” he added as the sound of cannon fire suddenly erupted in the distance and the trio hurried to join their outfit.
Out in the field, bordered on three sides by trees, the action begins. The thousands of spectators on the hillside quieten down, transfixed by the drama about to unfold.
The first thing that one notices are the beautiful horses with long flowing tails, ridden by scouts and aides-de-camp, apparently worked up and excited. Something’s about to happen.
At the left center of the field is a small log cabin with washing hanging on the line and females in hoop skirts standing in the door.
In front of the cabin, a short, thin line of Confederates are crouched behind a split rail fence.
A few hundred yards across from them a few union soldiers appear from out of the woods. Cannon batteries at both corners, aimed at the rebel position, have not fired yet.
The soldiers manning them appear almost unconcerned, as if it were none of their business.
Suddenly a blue line of infantrymen begin moving towards the split rail fence, moving slow at first and taking some hits.
Now they’re running, yelling and firing. The Rebs retreat into the woods as the Yanks take the fence.
The small victory is short lived as rebel reinforcements appear from out of the woods, flanked by cavalry – which mounts a charge, driving the Yankee cavalry back along with Yankee infantry.
It looks real. The whole drama is beginning to suck you in. The attacks and counter attacks go back and forth.
Suddenly the big booms from the larger canon on the Confederate hillside – dubbed “Ft. Keys” after an actual Civil War battery once positioned on the same spot – fill the air like thunder claps and echo over and over along the mountain side.
A long, thick line of Yankee infantrymen emerge from the woods on the right, like giant blue ants streaming from a hidden nest and mad as heck.
The Yankee battery on the right near edge of the field answer those of Ft. Keys. The first blast sends an enormous smoke ring into the air, drifting over the battlefield. It’s a picturesque spectacle, not only for the eyes but for the ears as the sound of bugles, rebel yells, cannon and musket fire fill the air.
The Yankees retreat. The dead and the dying hang over the fence and litter the field.
As you watch, you realize it is a history lesson being taught by about 1,200 re-enactors, and the battle is fairly typical of actual battles of the time.
This one is resulting in about 30 percent casualties and the Confederates appear to be outnumbered about four to one.
What’s going to happen?
Suddenly there is a time-out, as the battle stops and an ambulance moves in to retrieve a re-enactor who has suffered burns to his hand.
Eventually the action resumes and the Yankees chase the rebels from the field and take Ft. Keys.
What’s going on here!
“The Rebs are not going to win today,” said Rial Sloan, president of the Tunnel Hill Historical Foundation which presents the event.
“They won yesterday,” he explains.
As the soldiers leave the field, marching first to the tune of “Dixie” and then to “The Union Forever,” a plaintive, final call comes from the hillside.
“Hamburgers a dollar! Hot dogs, 50-cents!”
Naman Crowe
namancrowe@yahoo.com
(Writer’s Note: This piece, originally titled, “A journey back to Civil War times,” first appeared in the Dalton Daily Citizen on Sept. 11, 2000, the day after the annual Battle of Tunnel Hill. It won 1st Place for Feature Writing/Daily Division B in the 2001 Better Newspaper Contest conducted by the Georgia Press Association. The writer presents it again out of a sense of nostalgia in honor of the old newspaper reporters that have faded away and the old newspapers themselves that have been upstaged by the 60-second tape and sound bites presented to the public these days under the general heading of “I Witness News.”}
(This annual re-enactment is still an ongoing and thriving event. This year's event is set for Sept 8 and 9. You can go to:
TUNNEL HILL
for more information.
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I hope all the good people of Chattanooga and the surrounding area come to Tunnel Hill this weekend to see history re-lived.
This is a chance to see how men lived and died fighting for and protecting what they believed in.
The men and women re-enactors strive for authenticity. These people try to recreate the look and feel of a turbulent time in American history, a time no American should ever forget.
Dwayne Cales
Hixson
unscathed_corpse@yahoo.com