Kids Get Sense of Battle of Aiken at School Days Event
Aiken Standard, February 18, 2019
About 2,000 students are pre-registered for the Battle of Aiken's School Days event today, but organizers expect significantly more than that.
"We had nearly 4,000 come last year," said School Days coordinator Wayne Jones. "The pre-registration gives us a feel for what to expect, but we're not going to turn anybody away when we open the gates. We want to give the students the experience of a lifetime."
The Battle of Aiken's re-enactment programs are scheduled Saturday and Sunday. The School Days event provides another opportunity for kids to learn through hands-on activities about the Civil War.
School Days is scheduled today from 8:30 a.m. to about 2:30 p.m. The event and the weekend activities will take place off Powell Pond Road off U.S. Highway 19, about one mile from Interstate 20.
Jones served as the overall coordinator and is enjoying the opportunity to work with the School Days program.
"This is dream come true," he said, "a great opportunity to continue to teach and educate young people. They can see, feel, hear and touch history in the making."
Jones will portray Gen. Jeb Stuart during re-enactment activities. Chairman David Davis will serve as captain of the 26th Georgia Volunteer Battalion.
The students will get a chance to see what a Civil War camp looked like nearly 150 years ago.
"We really see it as an educational opportunity to teacher kids American history, a sense of having lived in the early 19th century," Davis said. "There were a lot of limitations then - field sanitation, the availability of food and munitions. The logistics were huge, especially for the Confederate armies. The kids will get to see a medical contingent, including an 1860s hearse for a coffin drawn by horses."
At the School Days event in 2009, re-enactor Matthew Ebersole of New Jersey portrayed a Civil War doctor and discussed the challenges he faced. Dylan Hunt, then a fourth-grader at East Aiken Elementary School, was especially interested in the mannequin that Ebersole used to discuss amputations. After battles, soldiers lost limbs all too often.
"It's interesting how he was cutting bones with that knife," said Dylan, who expressed aspirations of becoming a doctor himself some day. "That's pretty neat."
Out There … Somewhere
To mark the 145th anniversary of the Battle of Aiken, George Eskola of WJBF News Channel 6 show the sights and sounds in a classic “Out There … Somewhere.”
Play video » |
