Stones River National Battlefield

On Sunday, we traveled to Stones River National Battlefield in Murfreesboro, TN. As part of the town's 200th anniversary, they had a Civil War living history event at the battlefield.

They gave several presentations during the day. At this demonstration we learned about the Rutherford Rifles, a militia group from Murfreesboro that joined the Conferedate Army.

Then they gave a Rifle demonstration!

They had a little camp set up. This was a display of drawings that depicted crimes soldiers might commit and the punishments given for those crimes.

This is a communications tent. They would run wire (on the spool) from one command center to another.

Communication would then be transmitted from this box to a similar box on the other end. This box could code & decode messages quickly.

They might also use a standard teletype machine but it was more work as you had to manually code & decode messages.

If they didn't have time to run wire, communication was done using signal flags.

This was a display of tools used to fix wagons & cannons as well as for other things.

This is a tent that 2 soldiers would share as they fought their way across the country.

One of the highlights of the day was the firing of the cannons. Here the union soldiers just fired the cannons.

Then the Confederate soldiers fired the cannons. It was at this point that the kids finally figured out that they were the same men both times.

Jamie & David are working on filling out their Stones River Junior Ranger Books.

Jessica filled a book out too. They have these books at several of the national parks. Your age determines how much of the book you have to fill out.

When you fill out a Junior Ranger book, which has questions about what you see at that park, you get a pin. When you fill out 3 from different battlefields, you get a Junior Civil War Historian patch & get sworn in as a Junior Ranger.