I cannot recall exactly when my father told me the story of how he acquired his famous Civil War sword. He had collected junk and castoffs during his time peddling in western New York in the mid 1920’s and found the sword in a pile of debris from a household somewhere around Elmira, New York. My father lived on and off for several years in Elmira, near his brother, Sam, who was newly married and had established a small grocery store business there. My parents were not yet married at that time. I picture my father –a handsome, tall, robust youth of around 18, a recent immigrant to the U.S., driving a wagon with a raggedy old horse. He would later graduate to an early 1920’s Model T truck for his travels throughout upstate. My father relished that he had found this antique, valuable sword dated l864. He promised it to me as a child as I was the only one of my siblings to show any interest in it. My brother and sister perhaps knew better. Occasionally he would take me down to the root cellar of our home on Navarre Road in Rochester and show me the rusted metal scabbard in which the sword was encased. It was so rusted the sword could only be removed with some effort. The sword, later wrapped in an old blanket, has been with me since the old house was sold in the 1970s. It remained in the basement of our East Hampton home in a corner for years, still rusted and dusty. Then in 2018, when I was gathering “stuff” to send to my fishing camp in Maine, I packed it up along with my older fishing equipment, winter clothes, my Indian racer bike and numerous tchotchkes that would decorate the place that came to be called Camp Kabrook.
Now I come to the present. I am sitting in a barber chair in Minneapolis, awaiting a shave. We are visiting some of Patti’s college friends from Northwestern and I am getting ready to attend a “Beatles” concert in which one of the friend’s husbands plays the keyboards. I see a book on the counter of Civil War stories. I engage the barber and learn that he is a Civil War re-enactor in Battery H, 5th Regiment of Artillery. He participates in recreating the battle at Chickamauga that took place in southeastern Tennessee and northwestern Georgia in 1863. I told the barber my Civil War sword story and he asked me if it was an officer’s sword. No, it was a common calvary saber made of steel and brass, the handle wrapped in leather. He said he wished he had an original sword for his re-enactments as they use replicas. He related his passion for Civil War history and talked about how there were numerous volunteers from the Minneapolis area who sympathized with the North and meandered down the Mississippi River to join Union forces. He said children visiting his reenactment camp query him and his fellow soldiers on the history of the Civil War and said few people these days realize the human cost of that conflict. Most of the volunteers from the era were youngsters no more than 18 years old. I told my new friend about a recent column I had written –“July 4, 2022”– on Stephen Crane’s The Red Bag of Courage, and how the narrator is also an adolescent Civil War volunteer. I asked what keeps him continually interested in doing the re-enactments and he said, “I want the young people to understand that war is not a fun game of shooting off cannons but violent and devastating. The re-enactments keep history alive for new generations.” It was a terrific shave.
