Declan Claffey’s fate as a war re-enactor was sealed long before he was born.
His father, Oliver, was, and still is, an active re-enactment participant, a love of history fuelling his passion.
After his son was born, Oliver never missed a beat. He took the wee lad with him to events here, there and everywhere.
Like a duck to water, Declan embraced the lifestyle and offered his services from a tender age, first as a drummer boy, then a flag-bearer and, finally, after reaching the age of 16, a musket-firing soldier.
“I’ve been doing this for 25 years,” said Declan, who hails from Newmarket, said during an interview at the Festival at Fort Willow at the Historic Fort Willow Conservation Area, located west of Barrie, where he was among the men representing the 22nd U.S. Infantry Regiment.
“I’m second generation and got involved because of my dad," he added. “It’s always been a part of my life."
The Claffeys’ experience is not unusual in the world of war re-enactors — many of the folks who donned the fashions from 200 years ago to take part in the Festival at Fort Willow have been doing it regularly for many years.
According to many of the "actors," they attend anywhere from six to 12 reenactment festivals every year, both in Canada and the United States.
Phil Conklin is a retired elementary school teacher from Grimsby. He’s a member of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, his regimental colours on full display.
Speaking with Conklin is like talking to a method actor in mid-role. He talks about “his” experiences with the Royal Newfoundland Regiment and what “he and his mates” have been through.
He describes with great passion how the Royal Newfoundlanders, while stationed at Fort Willow, built 29 batteaux, a type of flat-bottomed cargo boat used to carry supplies down the Nottawasaga River and across Georgian Bay to British posts in the northwest.
It’s thoroughly convincing.
“Five-year-olds have no trouble imagining me as a 200-year-old veteran,” Conklin said, his round glasses and white hair and sideburns adding to the illusion.
Over the course of the two-day festival — which continues Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. — organizers are hoping 1,000 to 1,200 people to pass through the gates. All of the money raised — admission is $10 a person or $35 for a family of four — will go to support the activities at Fort Willow.
“Today (Friday) is education day and we’ll have about 400 students plus some home-schooled groups and seniors’ groups,” said Elise Barr-Klouman, community engagement facilitator with the Nottawasaga Valley Conservation Authority (NVCA), the event’s host. “Tomorrow, if the weather is nice, we could get another 600 or so.”
An annual event that takes about six months to organize, Barr-Klouman said one of the primary attractions of the festival is the opportunity folks have to go back 200 years in time and experience a slice of what life then may have been like.
“Two hundred years ago, the landscape would have looked pretty much the same, maybe more trees,” Barr-Klouman said. “You get a real sense of the isolation these people would have experienced at the time — out here in what would have been the middle of nowhere.
“I think they may have been a lot tougher than we are today."
