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(ARCHIVE PHOTO | THE GRAHAM LEADER) Living history reenactors share a laugh before the flag ceremony at the Fort Belknap Days education event in 2023. The living history event is split up into an education day for students and a public day open to everyone. -
(ARCHIVE PHOTO | THE GRAHAM LEADER) A living history reenactor speaks with students from Olney ISD during the 2023 Fort Belknap Days event. The pubic event this year will be held Saturday Oct. 26, with a flag raising ceremony kicking off the day at 9:30 a.m. -
(ARCHIVE PHOTO | THE GRAHAM LEADER) A fur trader reenactor speaks with students from Olney ISD during the education day for Fort Belknap Days in 2023. The living history event features reenactors, vendors and more available on-site for the public day which will be held Saturday, Oct. 26.
Celebrating its 10th anniversary as a living history event, Fort Belknap Days will return to the fort in Newcastle with reenactors and more on display for both students and the public.
The event is sponsored by the Friends of Fort Belknap, Young County Historical Commission and the Fort Belknap Living History Association. The public day for the event will be held Saturday, Oct. 26, starting with a flag ceremony at 9:30 a.m. and ending with a retreat at 4:30 p.m.
“The idea is to present history in a different way than you typically see, like when you go into a museum, by having people there demonstrating historical skills, blacksmithing (and) with the chuck wagons and stuff like that,” Fort Belknap Director Jim Hammond said. “You get to smell, you get to see, hear and feel different aspects of things so that you can just learn in a better way by being immersed in it.”
At the event will be 19th century demonstrations with soldiers, artillery and other frontier life stations. Represented at the event will be Native American tribes, fur traders, Texas Rangers, federal and confederate military, chuckwagons and more.
“We’ll have more reenactors than we normally do, more living historians. Ray Johnson, the guy that does the artillery battery for Crawfish and Cannons, he’s heading up the reenactment part this year,” Hammond said. “We’ll have a couple more chuckwagons, and we’ve got some Native Americans coming out... setting up tepees. We’ll have a mountain men group set up. ...Mountain men is prior to the fort’s time, but it’s still frontier history.”
The day before the public event, the fort annually hosts an educational day for students. With over 200 students showing up each year, the fort serves as a field trip for many area schools.
“We do that (day) for the schools so they can come out and that way it’s uninterrupted. That way our attention can be focused on the kids to teach them and let them ask questions,” Hammond said. “Saturday is open to the public, where anybody can come out on that day. And it’s the same thing, you can still ask everybody questions.”
A charity auction and pancake breakfast will also be held for fellow living historian Kevin Theis.
The charity auction will be held at 6:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 25 and the pancake breakfast will be held at 8 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 26.
From the Texas Revolution through the Civil War and Indian Wars to the Spanish-American War and the turn of the century, the event is sure to offer history first-hand for all who attend.
“Everybody can come out,” Hammond said. “...If you’ve been to the fort before, that’s one thing, but coming out for this, it’s a little bit different because it just feels like the frontier, it feels like fort history whenever you’re out here. There’s a different ambiance to it.”
For more information regarding the event, see the Fort Belknap Facebook page.
