Life in Early Ohio-- This Weekend

This coming weekend Fort Meigs is hosting an event called "Life in Early Ohio." It showcases the lost arts and trades that were commonplace in the early Republic, such as blacksmithing, tinsmithing, leather work, laundry, cooking, farming, woodcraft, and more. These trades were not only essential for life in the settled, agrarian areas in the young United States (even urban areas like New York City were close to the country-- Greenwich Village was still actually a outlying farm village) and the frontiers of the West (meaning everything "over the mountains" from the eastern seaboard); at Fort Meigs itself, for a time the largest population center in Ohio, skilled trades and crafts were essential for preserving the army. 

You can find more information, including a schedule of events here. As usual, the Fort's garrison will give demonstrations of musketry, rifles, and artillery as well as camp life.

I'll be there too, probably keeping an eye on the stores in the Quartermaster's storehouse and handing out receipts for things like boxes of musket cartridges, a delivery of tomahawks and "scalping knives" for the army, and the paid services of volunteer express riders.