When he?s all decked out in his replica Civil War-era uniform, with the brass buttons and the leather waist band, it?s clear that 14-year-old Tyler Mink is serious about playing the fife.
The Silver Spring high school student was getting antsy Sunday afternoon, eager for a performance to get under way with the other boys from the Patapsco Patriots Fife and Drum Corps at Fort McHenry?s Civil War weekend.
“It?s fun,” said Tyler, picking up and modeling a replica of a formal hat he might have worn to play the fife, a flute-like instrument, if he had been born 160 years before. “I like the music.”
Scores of Civil War re-enactors, tourists, total Civil War buffs and even Helen Diksa ? for whom history “was one of my worst subjects” ? gathered in the park as drizzly weather gave way to sunnier skies and 19th-century Baltimore came to life.
Men walked about in infantry uniforms, women wore period dresses and a little girl ran around with a bonnet tied across her chin and a rag doll clutched in her arms.
Helen Diksa and her husband, Terry, came to the city from Elkton to celebrate their sixth wedding anniversary. World War II is Terry?s preferred subject, but he had never been to Fort McHenry. So, setting aside Helen?s misgivings about history, they came.
“I?m liking it more since I?ve been with him,” Helen Diksa said with a smile.
Partly, the event commemorated the Pratt Street riots, which happened 145 years ago last week. A pro-Southern mob and Union soldiers passing through the city had a violent confrontation downtown, leading to the deaths of both soldiers and civilians, according to a park ranger.
From a pair of Boy Scouts heading home to Pennsylvania after a camping trip to the costumed kids from the Patapsco Patriots, dozens of children were among the visitors.
“This is escalated Cub Scouts,” Patapsco Patriots leader Tim Ertel said of his troop. And where better to teach Civil War lessons than Maryland, he said. “I mean, this is where it all happened.”
