Field of missing shoes

On Friday, the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington will call a ghostly roll, stopping at the names of 10 boys who died 145 years ago in a muddy wheat field.
“When the names of those who died at New Market are called, a present-day cadet answers, ‘died on the field of honor, sir,” said Scott Harris, director of New Market Battlefield State Historical Park.

The Park has been owned by VMI since the 1960s, bequeathed because of the role of the young cadets in the South’s last Valley victory.

The ceremony began two years after the 1864 battle, Harris said, and honors the 257 cadets who marched, hauling two canons, through Steele’s Tavern to meet the Confederate army in Staunton, then down to the gap in the Valley’s spiny ridge, where they met the enemy. Forty of the cadets were wounded and recovered; of the 10 who died, six are buried at VMI.

It was no accident that the clash occurred at New Market that rainy May 15, Harris said.

“Breckenridge wanted to engage the northern army as far down the Valley as he could,” Harris said.

The general wanted to keep soldiers out of Staunton as much as possible, to spare the hospital, the rail connection with Richmond and the supply depots there, he said. Harris said history indicates that Breckenridge thought long and hard about sending for the VMI boys: They’d been trained on the school’s parade grounds but never tested in battle.

Once in Staunton, the cadets took the time for a meal cooked by a student’s mother and to pay their respects to the young women at Augusta Female Seminary, Harris said.

While VMI honors its long-ago warriors, 2,200 actors in gray and blue, a huge force of itinerant merchants and an army of horseflesh will converge on New Market, said Ron Paul, the event coordinator for the New Market reenactment this weekend. Paul makes sure each group of actors is supplied with water, firewood and straw for the horses remaining with the men in the encampments. While not engaged in battle, the soldiers stay in character, talking to the audience in New Market about the difficulties encountered in camp or purchasing supplies from the merchants, called “sutlers,” who followed the armies with spools of thread, uniforms and odds and ends useful to a 19th-century soldier, Paul said.

Modern-day sutlers are in period dress, but they’re real merchants, explained Bobby Anderson, an actor who at various times has portrayed a member of the militia, a Confederate soldier and a Federal soldier.

“If you need to buy something for your uniform, or your camp, you most likely will buy it from one of the sutlers during a re-enactment,” Anderson, of Staunton, said. A veteran actor, Anderson now has the rank of first lieutenant, which means he has some responsibilities for training new actors and planning strategy with the other officers in nightly meetings.

Like other re-enactors, Anderson began with a deep love of history.

“I’d read anything I could get my hands on,” he said. His real-life military experience was in the modern Army and he portrays a federal militiaman, a Confederate soldier from Virginia and a federal soldier from New Hampshire; not only on historic battlefields but for children in local schools.

“By giving them examples of different kinds of soldiers, we kind of get away from who was right or wrong,” Anderson said. The life of a man from New Hampshire camped out in a Southern pasture was “surprisingly similar” to the life of his Confederate opponent, Anderson said. He sees his job, both in the schools and on the battlefield, as presenting an accurate picture of what that life was like.

“With the [Standards of Learning], there’s just not a lot of time for anything extra. If we can give kids a picture that’s not just dates and places, we think they might grow up with a real interest in it,” Anderson said.

By the time Anderson and his colleagues finish talking with them, the kids know what those soldiers ate for breakfast (they ate pretty well if they were near home) and how they brushed their teeth (a wood or bone handle with pig whiskers for bristles and a little can of powder flavored with cinnamon), he said.

One of his duties as a first lieutenant in the 5th Virginia re-enactors is to make sure the accuracy carries through the day. “For instance, we don’t want any plastic to be visible,” he said. “Everyone has to stay in character and sometimes, if they’re new, they forget.”

New Market is traditionally a place where re-enactors bring their families, also dressed in the clothes of the day.

“Historically, the war had dragged on for so long that there probably weren’t that many outside people there,” Anderson said.

Scott Harris said that the presence of women and children at New Market adds to the historical picture.

“We like to tell the story of civilians, too, at New Market,” Harris said. “So much of the fighting went on around villages and towns, where everyone was affected, not just the soldiers.” He hopes for sunny skies this weekend, but Anderson suspects it will rain.
“If it’s the battle of New Market, it’s raining,” Anderson said, “just like it did 145 years ago for the real battle.”

Both men mentioned the touching story of the VMI cadets, unaccustomed to marching or fighting in wet fields torn up by horses, cannons and soldiers in combat.

“Those fields got pretty mucky,” Harris said. “The story is that the mud sucked the shoes right off the boys as they tried to make their way. It has been called ‘the field of lost shoes’ ever since.”

For a full schedule of the events in New Market this weekend, visit www4.vmi.edu/museum/nm/index.html.