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Pioneer Festival Brings 19th-Century Florida To Life

Tribune photo by ANDY JONES

As Jake Carreiro of Bellaire looks on, his son Chris Carreiro, 10, learns about guns used in the 1800s from Don Cox of Florida Cracker Living History, an organization based in Inverness, on Sunday.

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By KEVIN WIATROWSKI | The Tampa Tribune

Published: August 31, 2008

DADE CITY - Beneath a small canvas lean-to Sunday afternoon, Ross Lamoreaux of Brandon hand-stitched a blue sailor's tunic while historical reenactors and modern-day tourists mixed nearby.

Sunday was the first day of the two-day Pioneer Florida Days Festival at the Pioneer Florida Village and Museum, just north of Dade City. The festival continues today.

Pioneer Florida Days kicks off a busy season for people such as Lamoreaux, who follow their love of American history down paths that lead them back to the Civil War, Seminole Wars or the American Revolution.

"The more you study both sides," Lamoreaux said of the Civil War, "the more you admire both sides."

On Sunday, Lamoreaux portrayed a civilian on the Union side of the war – one of many Union sympathizers who lived in Florida at the time, he said. The reason was simple: Then, as now, Florida was a magnet for Yankees fleeing harsh winters.

Lamoreaux is part of a Tampa Bay-area reenactment group dedicated to the USS Fort Henry, a New York ferryboat that spent the war blockading important ports along Florida's Big Bend.

The ferry was pressed into service – and heavily armed – because it could maneuver in Florida's reef-riddled shallow coastal waters, said Dave Eckardt of Tampa, a Vietnam veteran who portrays a Fort Henry sergeant.

Like many people wandering the festival, Eckhardt was decked out in period clothes and toted a muzzle-loading rifle. Over his white cotton shirt and white wool pants, he wore a blue wool jacket.

From their outpost on a hillside, Eckardt and Lamoreaux watched as a small group of blue-coated soldiers led one of their own, hands bound in front of him, to a split-rail fence at the front of the museum property.

The procession came at the end of a mock court martial. The condemned man stood with his back to the fence as his comrades raised their weapons. Rifle shots split the air, and the prisoner collapsed to the ground.

"He dies really well," Eckardt said with smile.

Despite the threat of blustery weather, the day's schedule included a Civil War battle demonstration and a variety of other events that showed off life in Florida during the mid-19th Century.

Near a smoky wood fire, Rod Miner of Citrus County displayed the spurs, whips and saddles commonly used by Florida's cracker cowboys – named for the sound of their whips, which they used to hunt wild cattle.

Miner is quick to correct a visitor who suggests cattle might not have presented much of a challenge to a hunter.

Those cattle were descended from longhorns left behind by exploring Spaniards, Miner said. Before the crackers came, many of the cattle had seen few if any people and proved challenge enough to people trying to flush them out of the Florida scrub, brand them and domesticate them, he said.

"'Wild cattle' was a true term," Miner said. "These cattle were wild."

Over at the food tent, Jason Davis of Lakeland was finishing lunch when he was asked what his visit to the festival had taught him. Davis, a recent transplant from Maine, pondered the wood-clad reenactors sweating in the heat of late August.

"I'm appreciative of the comforts we have," Davis said.

Reporter Kevin Wiatrowski can be reached at (813) 948-4201 or kwiatrowski@tampatrib.com.

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