Annual Heritage Days at Paynetown offer a look back in time

[Kevin]

Annual Heritage Days at Paynetown offer a look back in time

PAYNETOWN — If you talk to any of the people who don the costumes and demonstrate the lifestyles on display at the Monroe Reservoir Heritage Days weekend, they’ll tell you that they thoroughly enjoy becoming the characters they represent.

But if you could climb into a time machine and go back?

“No way!” huffed Darrin Sprouse, a pre-Revoluntionary War fur trader. “Starvation would be a terrible way to die. So would hypothermia. Or being scalped to death.”

Those might be the grim realities of frontier life, but the mood at the annual gathering Saturday was decidedly happy, despite on-and-off rain showers that dampened the attendance and wetted the campfire smoke.

“There are normally three to four times more people here,” said reservoir wildlife specialist Rex Watters, who was just beginning to cook up his famous Friendship Stew at about 3 p.m. “Still, there’s a lot going on. And lots of young people are getting to see and try things they probably have never seen or tried before.”

Take that stew that the longtime Department of Natural Resources employee was putting together in a large vat suspended over an open fire. “I start with sausage, because that gives you the grease you need to brown the other stuff,” he explained.

That other stuff would include venison, buffalo, beaver, duck and squirrel — all taken from the wild — in addition to mushrooms, potatoes, onions, corn, celery and tomatoes — conveniently purchased from the grocery store.

Re-enactors at the Paynetown event typically come from central and southern Indiana and represent people from periods ranging from 1760 to about 1890. Some go to great lengths to accurately represent their time period, and some are content to come close. Both types of re-enactors mix easily at this event.

“We don’t do everything exactly the way it would have been, but we come close,” acknowledged Denise Durant, as she stood in front of her tiny, frontier cabin.

“We’re the people who, say, right after the Civil War, came home to find our land gone, and decided to pack up and head west, out into the frontier,” said her husband, Richard. “We get goods from the wagon trains, hunt a little bit, trade with the Indians.”

A fellow re-enactor stopped by and gave Denise a hug, explaining that he had taken note of the prostitute license she had nailed to the wall, and was looking to check out the goods. Everyone, including her husband, laughed.

Denise had explained earlier that frontier people regularly got together for what they would call a rendezvous, typically after trapping season for example.

“They’d sell furs, drink whiskey, bring in prostitutes,” she said.

Not that any of that activity was going on at Paynetown, except, possibly, a nip or two of whiskey that night.

Ron Vandenbark was the tomahawk man, who urged everyone within hearing distance to come over and try their hands at hurling a tomahawk and sticking it in the open face of a log target. The main function of the tomahawk was for hand-to-hand combat, he said. “A frontiersman would have a rifle, and then a pistol. So that’s two shots and then you had to rely on this. This was your extra hand.”

Vandenbark was expectably skilled with the tomahawk and able to stick the target with authority with his right arm, then left, one after the other. Visitor Traci Dufore of Bedford took seven throws before sticking the ’hawk. “I have a really bad arm,” she said with a laugh.

Her 14-year-old niece, Brittany Howard, nailed the target with her first throw, and danced a little victory dance to taunt her aunt. “This is a lot cooler than I thought it was going to be,” the teenager from South Carolina said.