We went to a local Civil War Reinactment last weekend and arrived just in time to see the two battles.  The first was a fight that occurred just west of town on Kingston Pike (a road I drive often).  The second was a battle for Fort Sanders (a hospital here in Knoxville).

Union troops marching to the fort on what was Kingston Pike.

The Confederates caught up to them.  It was interesting trying to explain this to Isaac and Olivia. 

This man is the son of an actual Confederate soldier!!! They announced his name, etc.  There aren't many sons and daughters of Civil War soldiers still around!!! Cool stuff!!!

This was cool just b/c I happened to get the fire coming out of one of the cannons.  There were a few people around me with several thousand dollar cameras trying to get this shot (shooting in rapid-fire mode) and none of them got it.  Haha!  Oh, forgot to mention that all I had was my point and shoot. 

This was the beginning of the second battle we watched that occurred at the actual Fort.  Apparently, before the Confederates attacked the Fort, they shot cannons for several minutes.  Didn't help much in the end; they still lost....bad.

Here are the Confederates trying to get into the fort.  According to history, there was a BIG ditch in front of the fort that really slowed the attacking soldiers and you can see what happened to them in the below picture.  Yikes!  To signal the end of the fight, one of the soldiers played taps.  It was pretty cool.  A local farmer agreed for some historical preservation group to build a replica of the actual fort on his land a bit east of Knoxville and then for the past 4 years has agreed to have the reinactment there too.  Pretty neat.  Most reinactments don't have neat forts/structures like this.

If I remember right, there were something like 2,000 Confederates VS. a few hundred Union soldiers during the 'real' battle.  The Union side won.  There were only around 500 total reinactors at this event.

The reinactors were all very thankful for the spectators coming to watch.  I had several thank me for coming.  If you've never been, they're pretty cool.  The only downside for us this time was that we didn't get a lot of time to walk the event site to talk to the reinactors, see demonstrations, do the wagon ride, and explore the Union/Confederate campsites.  Maybe next time.