WINSLOW — This weekend, a section of Winslow will appear almost as it did in the 1700s.

Some original structures will be missing, but Fort Halifax Park will be populated by people dressed in period clothing, participating in Colonial-era activities and eating the local fare of days gone by. Saturday marks the fifth annual Fort Halifax Days celebration, which honors the historic site along the Kennebec and Sebasticook rivers.

“It gets bigger and bigger every year,” said Karen Rancourt-Thomas, who helped plan the event. Over 200 people stopped by last June, she said. This year boasts a new musical act, La Famille LeBlanc, which plays traditional Franco-American folk tunes.

The festival is family-friendly, Rancourt-Thomas said, and will last from noon to 4 p.m. at the park off U.S. 201 in Winslow. Though admission is free, visitors can buy a Fort Halifax tote bag or contribute a paver near the granite monument to support ongoing improvements at the park. The land is home to the nation’s oldest remaining blockhouse, a watch tower used to “secure the frontier” from 1745 to 1763.

“For me, growing up, I always used to think of the frontier as being the West — you know, the cowboys and all — but that was later,” said Winslow Town Manager Michael Heavener, who also is on the committee that organizes Fort Halifax Days. “When this fort was built, this was the frontier. This was it.”

Rancourt-Thomas said the day “brings history alive.”

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“When we open the event, the American flag comes down and the British flag goes up; so for that four hours, you’re on British territory in the United States,” she said. “It’s kind of a neat thing.”

Members of Fort Western’s James Howard Company will re-enact “camp life” and fire a cannon just before 2 p.m. Then they will recruit children to participate in a military drill using wooden rifles, Heavener said. Ken Hamilton, a Native American historian, will educate the community about the site’s significance for Native American groups — and the skirmishes that took place there leading up to the French and Indian War. The Ancient Ones of Maine will perform demonstrations of old weaponry.

Several food and craft vendors will be stationed throughout the park, ranging from The Crafter’s Cottage, which sells wooden toys, to JRTJR Custom Knives and Blacksmithing, which sells leather goods in addition to its namesake items. Guests are encouraged to dress up in Colonial-era clothing, said one of the organizers, Virginia Sturies.

“I dress up in the period clothing, and it’s interesting to interact with the kids because they interact with me as though I was from that time period,” Heavener joked. “I had one kid ask, you know, ‘Gee, how old are you?’ and I just looked at him and said, ‘I’m very old.'”

Members of the Fort Halifax Days committee, from left, W. Elery Keene, Fred Clark, Michael Heavener, Virginia Sturies and Karen Rancourt-Thomas, gather on Thursday near the blockhouse to promote the annual event scheduled for Saturday at Fort Halifax Park in Winslow. Morning Sentinel photo by David Leaming

The Fort Halifax Park Planning Committee and landscape architect put together a concept master plan for the site in 2011, which led to an estimated project cost of $187,839. Since then, the group has raised $157,300, including $94,000 in grant funding, according to Heavener. Suggested improvements include creating boat access and river views, installing educational signage and interpretive objects, incorporating walking trails and enhancing the landscaping. The town already paved a new parking lot to provide better access to the facility, Heavener said.

“We would eventually like to put up granite markers to show where the fort was,” said W. Elery Keene, who helped plan the festivities and owns a model of the original campus that he will display Saturday.

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The blockhouse is the only historic structure that remains on the site — and even that is a partial replacement of the original, which washed down the river during a 1987 flood, Keene said. During the fort’s early days, there was a second blockhouse in addition to barracks, a trading post and a larger building that housed both the officers’ quarters and a blacksmith shop.

Paul Revere, Aaron Burr, Chief Joseph Orono and Benedict Arnold all passed through the northern outpost for the Massachusetts Bay Colony at some point, Heavener said. Archaeological digs by the Maine Historic Preservation Commission “found evidence of Indian encampments (at Fort Halifax) dating between 1,500 B.C. and 500 A.D.,” according to the 2011 master plan.

Keene said he hopes that Saturday’s event will help more people appreciate the Winslow site.

“(The goal is) to get as many people as possible to remember the history and how our settlement here evolved,” Keene said.

 

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