Seven men costumed as Confederate riflemen drill next to a row of white canvas tents, preparing for the curious onlookers who already are starting to wander past.
A man in a 19th-century soldier's tunic and decidedly more modern pajama pants steps out of a Porta John.
And the Rev. Allen Farley, whose chaplaincy to Civil War re-enactors has lasted about five times as long as the actual conflict did, officially begins his Sunday by walking across the grass in a long black coat, ringing a bell and hollering, "Church call!"
This was the final morning of Buchanan's annual Civil War Weekend, held in late April, and the latest opportunity for Farley and other scholars of the war's clergy to bring a bit more of their story to light.
Much bigger plans are afoot; Farley and a group that includes noted historian and Virginia Tech professor James I. "Bud" Robertson Jr. are struggling to launch the National Civil War Chaplains Museum at Liberty University. But before Farley could talk about the museum, he had a measure of fire and brimstone to deliver to the costumed soldiers who later in the day would re-create the cannon blasts and rifle volleys of Hunter's Raid on Buchanan.
Drawn by Farley's bell, or maybe by the sounds of a portable pump organ, more than 100 people, most in Civil War-era garb, gathered in and around a picnic shelter. The minister joked that his impromptu church had a heated side in the bright morning sun and an air-conditioned side in the still-chilly shade.
Then Farley, a pioneer in the portrayal of Civil War chaplains who has preached for 25 years to re-enactors and to noncostumed congregations as well, got down to business. He warned that a death considerably more final than those about to be acted out in Buchanan's Town Park awaits everyone, and that for the unsaved, an eternity of torment will follow.
He based his message on an 1862 sermon by J.H. Martin, a Confederate chaplain. But present-day time constraints -- only an hour was allotted for the service -- kept Farley from delivering all of Martin's words.
"His sermon was an hour and a half long," Farley said after the service. "I hit the high points."
Those included descriptions of fiery torment with sinners "gnawing on their tongues and crying out for mercy they will never receive," questions of whether listeners were "ready to cry for mercy from that savior who you've so long rejected" and an exhortation to "awake from this fearful state you're in before it becomes a sleep of death."
It was a message as fitting today as 147 years ago, Farley said later. His call for listeners to come forward and be saved drew one young man attired not in a uniform but in very 21st-century casual wear.
"Hell is as real now as it was then. Heaven is as real," Farley said.
Other listeners seemed impressed, too. "He hit it," said Kathy Walters of Buchanan, who with her husband was starting what both expected to be a day of watching the re-enactors, camcorder in hand.
The story of Civil War chaplains is one that Farley tells at Civil War events across the country. An Appomattox County, Va., resident who builds and sells furniture in his scant time at home (he specializes in portable lecterns), Farley travels an estimated 35,000 miles each year with his wife and their two children.
He hopes to reach a larger audience with the chaplains museum in Lynchburg, an effort that began about five years ago and presently exists as a Web site and a limited display in the office of its director, Liberty University English professor and longtime re-enactor Kenny Rowlette.
Rowlette, clad in the blue of the 105th Pennsylvania Volunteers, said the plan is to move the museum soon into much larger quarters at the university. By 2011, when commemorations of the Civil War's 150th anniversary begin, Rowlette hopes to have a permanent home for the museum's collection of research and artifacts.
That collection includes uniforms, Bibles, photographs, and the originals of the Civil War-era religious tracts that Farley reproduces and distributes by the tens of thousands at re-enactments.
Rowlette stressed the museum's emphasis on inclusiveness, with directors drawn from scholars outside Liberty's Southern Baptist focus, and with coverage for Jewish and Catholic chaplains as well as the Protestants who made up the majority of the Civil War's ministerial corps.
The museum's goal is to explore what Rowlette calls "really the last untold story of the Civil War," which is the social and philosophical currents that informed the era's political and military struggles.
