Huzzah, and welcome! We are a company of about thirty men, women and young people from York County, South Carolina, and the country round about, who give our weekends to remembering the ordinary farmers, millers, blacksmiths and boys who turned out with their own rifles and muskets in the dark years of 1780 and 1781, and helped to win the war in the South.

I am Anthony Beall, sergeant of the company and its scribe. On weekdays I teach United States history to high school juniors in Rock Hill, where I have found that nothing quiets a classroom like a flintlock musket carried in the door (unloaded, inspected, and with the principal's written permission). I first saw reenactors at the two hundredth anniversary of Kings Mountain in 1980, and I have been at it in one way or another ever since.

They were not an army. They were neighbors. In the Carolina backcountry, every free man of military age was expected to turn out with his company when called, bring his own gun, powder and food, and serve for a few weeks before going home to his crops. They elected many of their own officers. They wore no uniform but their own clothes, which for a great many of them meant a hunting shirt, the loose linen frock of the frontier. They were often poorly trained for a stand-up fight against British regulars, and they knew it. But they knew the country, they could shoot, and when they were well led they could be very hard to beat.

It is worth remembering, too, that the war in the backcountry was in good part a civil war. Many of the men our militia fought at Kings Mountain were their own neighbors, enlisted as Loyalist militia. Families were split. We try to portray that honestly.

Class is in session. I'll be brief, which my students will tell you is not my habit.

1780: the low point. In May of 1780 Charleston surrendered to the British, and with it most of the American army in the South. British and Loyalist posts spread across South Carolina, and many people took the oath to the King, some willingly and some not. In August, General Gates's new army was routed at Camden. For a time it looked as if the Carolinas were lost. What kept the war alive that summer were the partisan bands, under leaders like Thomas Sumter, Francis Marion and others, and the backcountry militia. Right here in York County, in July, militia surprised and routed a Loyalist force at Williamson's Plantation, in what we call Huck's Defeat.

Kings Mountain, October 7, 1780. Major Patrick Ferguson, the British officer charged with raising the Loyalist militia, camped on a long, steep ridge just south of the North Carolina line. Militia from the Carolinas, Virginia and the settlements over the mountains surrounded the ridge and fought their way up it from tree to tree. In about an hour it was over. Ferguson was killed, and nearly his whole force was killed, wounded or taken. Almost every man on that mountain, on both sides, was an American. The victory changed the war in the South.

Cowpens, January 17, 1781. General Daniel Morgan, with Continentals, militia and cavalry, met Banastre Tarleton's force in an open pasture near the Broad River. Morgan put his militia in front and asked them for just two volleys before falling back, and they gave them. When the British pressed on, they ran into the Continental line, and then into the cavalry, and Tarleton's command was nearly destroyed.

Guilford Courthouse, March 15, 1781. General Nathanael Greene drew up his army in three lines in North Carolina, the militia in front, and met Lord Cornwallis. Cornwallis held the field at the end of the day, but he lost about a quarter of his army doing it. He marched to the coast, and then north into Virginia, and in October of 1781 he surrendered at Yorktown.

Those are the big three. There were dozens of smaller fights in our part of the world, and our members can tell you about every one of them, at length, around a fire.

Friday, October 8, through Sunday, October 10: Kings Mountain anniversary encampment. Our biggest weekend of the year, marking the 219th anniversary of the battle, on a farm near Kings Mountain. Friday is school day, with about four hundred students coming through camp. Saturday the camp is open to the public from 9 to 5, with a skirmish at 2:00. Sunday morning there is a service in camp, and we strike tents at noon. All members in camp by Friday at 7:00 a.m.

School programs, October and November. Four booked so far, at elementary and middle schools in York and Chester counties, Thursday, October 21; Tuesday, November 2; Wednesday, November 10; and Thursday, November 18. We need three or four members at each, with weekday time off. A morning at a school is the most important work this company does. If you can get away, please sign up.

Saturday, December 11: Christmas by candlelight. A restored farmhouse of the 1780s in York County opens one evening a year for a candlelight Christmas, and our company keeps a fire in the yard and tells the visitors how the backcountry kept Christmas in wartime, which was quietly. Civilians in wool and cloaks. Hot cider.

Saturday and Sunday, January 15 and 16: Cowpens winter encampment. Cold. Bring two blankets.

We carry real firearms and real black powder, around the public and around children. We have never had an injury on the field, and that is not luck. Every member, without exception, follows these rules, and a member who breaks one is off the field for the day:

1. Blanks only. We fire paper cartridges of black powder, rolled at home from a measured charge. No ball, no shot, no wadding, nothing that could leave the barrel but smoke and flame. Ever.
2. No ramrods on the field. Ramrods stay in their pipes under the barrel. A blank is poured, never rammed. A ramrod forgotten in a barrel becomes a spear.
3. Musket inspection before every event. Corporal Willie Staten inspects every firearm before it goes on the field: lock, frizzen, flint, touchhole, barrel. If it isn't clean and sound, it doesn't go.
4. Cartridges only on the field. Powder horns stay stoppered during a battle. Nobody pours from a horn into a hot barrel.
5. Muskets elevated when firing toward the other line, aimed well over their heads, and no firing at all at anyone closer than the distance the captain sets. Never point a musket at anyone, loaded or not.
6. Misfires: hold your musket up and pointed safely away, wait, re-prime, and try again or fall out and tell the corporal. Never look down the barrel.
7. Ear plugs for everyone on the line, and a bucket of water by every fire in camp.
8. Nobody under 16 carries a firearm. Our younger members serve as fifer and drummer, and very fine they are.

No experience necessary. Most of us knew nothing when we started. We welcome men and women, families, and young people with a parent in the company. Men in the ranks, women as civilians or, if you wish, in the ranks (some women did serve, quietly, and we don't turn anyone away for wanting to carry a musket).

Your first season: come to a drill or an event and talk to us. If you'd like to join, we'll lend you a hunting shirt, hat, haversack and canteen for the first season, while you build your own kit (and please don't buy anything until you read the kit list for recruits). Recruits 16 and over go through musket training with the corporal before they carry a loaner musket on the field.

Dues: $25 a year, or $40 for a family. That covers powder for the company, our insurance and the newsletter.

Drill: the third Saturday of the month, March through November, at the captain's farm. We drill from Baron von Steuben's regulations of 1779, simplified, as militia companies of the time often did.

Company officers: Captain Eugene Kuhns; Lieutenant Fredrick Saunders; Sergeant Anthony Beall; Corporal Willie Staten.

If you want to see what a really big reenactment looks like, from a later war, a fellow reenactor on this service has put up an album of four days in wool at the 135th anniversary of Gettysburg, heat and all: Gettysburg 135th - My Reenactment Album, July 1998. Ours are smaller, and the wool is the same.