Allan Appel Photo
At 8 a.m., Rosalie McAllen was poring over an exam to get certified as a Connecticut state high school history teacher.
By noon she was stepping into history, bearing not a pencil but an officer’s sword no less. She was transformed into Lt. Rosalie McAllen of Peck’s Company Revolutionary War-era militia.
McAllen took part in a festive reopening of the storied Soldiers and Sailors Monument atop East Rock on Saturday. The monument was partially reopened Saturday after a major restoration project. The base of the monument was opened to the public; the city plans to reopen the iconic tower’s inner staircase in time for July 4.
The monument honors the dead of four wars – Revolutionary, 1812, Mexican, and Civil. McAllen joined one of four groups, one from each of those conflicts, firing and loading, cooking and strolling, and generally staying in character and in period to amuse and to edify.
More than 200 visitors came up Saturday and Sunday for the day-long activities, including history-curious bicyclists who rode up from the Rock to Rock festival down below.
“I like the idea of bringing history alive. It instills passion,” said McAllen. Said she just might bring her future students to such reenactments. Peck’s Company is based in Milford and formed only weeks ago. So this was its and her first engagement.
In addition to Lt. McAllen, the company boasts nine members including Tim Chaucer and Jim Santa Barbara (at right in photo), who was being supervised by reenactment organizer Bill MacMullen make sure light (not heavy) gunpowder went into the pan of his musket.
McAllen took her teaching certification exam Saturday morning at Milford’s John Law High School. After the exam ended, she went into the school’s bathroom to change. Like a Revolutionary War Clark Kent, she emerged in her white breeches (adapted from Levis jeans), tunic, and tri-cornered hat.
“My friends just looked at me!” she said.
All that was missing from her outfit was the coat, which Bill MacMullen, the organizer of the event, provided when she joined her fellow soldiers from Peck’s Company atop East Rock on a perfect, golden, sunny afternoon.
MacMullen is the president of Fort Nathan Hale Restoration Project (in addition to his day job as chief of the city’s capital projects program). He was wearing his deep blue outfit portraying an 1846 colonel and surgeon from the little-known Mexican War.
“It was the first time we invaded another country,” said MacMullen, who studies up for each reenactment. Like McAllen, he feels history is being taught in the schools neither passionately nor thoroughly enough.
“Re-creation keeps it alive,” he said.
As for the coat the lieutenant was wearing: “It weighs about 25 pounds,” she said, lifting it in adjustment, examining the stitches, and vowing to sew her own. “I’m going to take off the buttons too,” she added, because the buttons connoted higher rank than lieutenant and even a touch of the royal style, which was anathema to the colonists, of course.
A long-time lover of history, McAllen said she first studied modern political history, got charged up about the Kennedy clan, but she switched to colonial history after a visit to the Colonial Williamsburg restoration in Virginia. She’s studying at Southern, where she hopes to graduate with both her degree and teaching certification.
She said what intrigued her was how the colonists, after the Revolution, made concerted efforts to display their new identity, as Americans. It was this new political creation that for the first time in (then) modern memory required no royalty. Hence the concern about all that gold braid and buttons.
Such attention to detail characterized all the reenactors’ outfits and equipment including, MacMullen’s Colt Walker revolver, the innovative weapon of the Mexican War, because its cylinder enabled six shots to be fired without reloading.
Ten thousand were ordered by the army for the 1848 conflict, all made in Connecticut.
With such concern about verisimilitude, was the presence of a 25 year-old female lieutenant, uh, kosher?
MacMullen replied that while a few of the many reenactment units in his experience were finicky to perfectionist and might object, generally there was no problem. There were several women in bonnets and stiff hoop skirts strolling about like mobile upside down cones, complete with parasols to protect their more sensitive constitutions and skin from the rays.
But only one female Revolutionary War soldier.
Yet Lt. McAllen seemed to be fully accepted by both gruff and tough Sgt. Mark Nickerson of the 12th Massachusetts Infantry, who was busy with his chums cooking up their rice, beans, and sausages, after having spent the night sleeping beneath their great coats atop East Rock.
She also took command of Sgt. Matt McGrath (right) and Corporal Jim Murphy of the Marines, circa 1812, down from their usual patrol, aboard the U.S.S. Constitution in Boston. There was yet a fourth group of shifty-looking reenactors, privateers who raided British ships in the War of 1812, but they were off acting like pirates and could not be reached to be asked questions about women in the ranks.
When a friend on a bicycle hailed McAllen, the lieutenant turned and asked how he recognized her, as she’d taken off all her makeup.
At 2 p.m. McAllen, under the tutelage of Colonel MacMullen, organized a full musket and cannon salute to mark the reopening of the monument.
Actually, only the gates to the monument’s completely refurbished surrounding base were opened, and the public strolled on the splendid new platform, lined with benches and beds of flowers.
The interior and the stairs leading to the Angel of Peace, who stands in a kind of lost, ironic glory above the sculptural depictions of war and the rosters of the dead, will not be ready for the public to tour and ascend until July 4th.
Between now and then, a series of events from picnics to lectures are scheduled; check here, on the city parks department’s web site.
How did McAllen think she did on the exam, which also featured social studies and economics? She adjusted that heavy coat and then said she believed she aced the history.