And you thought you had a rough time
getting to the reenactment...
How is an old broken wooden airplane propeller connected to reenacting the American Civil War, you ask? Jonah will explain.
Back in the 1920's the U.S. armed forces occasionally reenacted Civil War battles on the original battlefields, with (then)current equipment and weapons. It was a sort of tactical exercise, to see how strategy might have changed from the 1860's.
This propeller and the fragment of a strut are from a Marine Corps bi-plane, and are currently displayed in the Marine Corps Air/Ground Museum in Quantico, Virginia. It seems that an intrepid Marine aviator was on his way to a reenactment of the battle of New Market (I don't know if he was planning to take part or merely fly overhead to observe) when he developed problems with his plane and crash landed. He was okay, but his plane was damaged beyond repair. So it was towed off to a local barn. Marine Corps officials traveled out to take a look, and decided the plane wasn't worth salvaging. So they returned with this propeller and this strut as museum pieces.
And there you have an unbeatable story about somebody not making it to a Civil War reenactment.
