MANSFIELD — Marie Tepe’s husband wanted her to stay home and manage his shop when he enlisted into the U.S. Army.
She didn’t listen.
Tepe instead followed her husband’s unit in the Civil War and became a vivandiere, selling spirits and tobacco to soldiers.
Many women participated in camp life, supporting the soldiers by cooking, laundering clothes and nursing the sick.
Tepe cemented her legacy by tending to wounded soldiers on and off the battlefield.
She took a bullet to the ankle during the Battle of Fredericksburg. She returned to camp after the Battle of Chancellorsville with several bullet holes in her skirt.
Tepe finished the war with her regiment, surviving brutal fights including the Battle of Gettysburg.
Tepe died almost 125 years ago, but historians and reenactors like Shelly Schoen continue to tell her story — as they did on Saturday at South Park in Mansfield during the second annual Civil War Living History Days.
“For lack of a better term, she was kind of a badass,” said Schoen, a historical reenactor who sometimes portrays Tepe at living history events.
Schoen and her husband, Carl, came to Mansfield from their home just north of Dayton to participate in the free event hosted by the Richland Early American Center for History.
Reenactors like the Schoens spent Friday and Saturday in South Park, wearing period costume, sleeping in a tent and cooking their meals over a small fire.
The event will continue Sunday with presentations by Schoen and other reenactors, a mock skirmish and occasional cannon fire.
Reenactors chatted with visitors as they passed through the park, sharing historical narratives about life in the 1860s.
Doug Gill stood behind a table of medical supplies. Laid out before him were knives for amputating fingers, toes and legs; scalpels, a trephine, files, horsehair thread and a tin of (presumably fake) chloroform.
The Newark man began reenacting 35 years ago when a friend who portrayed a Civil War doctor asked him to fill in for a last minute “patient” who couldn’t make it.
After that, he was hooked. He joined his friend’s unit and eventually inherited the equipment.
“(My friend) went to Revolutionary War doctoring and I took over his hospital,” Gill explained.
Gill shared, with encyclopedic knowledge and harrowing detail, how battlefield ailments were treated.
When a group of children came up, his voice slowed and his descriptions became a bit less gruesome.
“This is what it looked like before it was fired,” he said, holding a bullet in one hand and shattered bone in the other. “Then if you got hit in the bone, this is what it would do.”
One girl pointed to a photo of a 10-year-old soldier.
“He got hit with a bullet. They had to amputate his right arm,” Gill said.
“Could they put it back on?” a young boy asked.
“No, they put him back in uniform and took his picture,” Gill replied.
Reenactors like Gill and Schoen said it’s the people that keeps them coming back, whether that’s their fellow reenactors, or the children they get to teach.
“If we learn a bit of history, maybe we can handle today better,” Schoen said.
