The $45 Baker Tent
(Continued from yesterday)

Turning again to Harbor Freight, I found their Number 38109, 9’ x 12’ canvas drop cloth (times three), to be the ideal starting point for a home made Baker Tent. The list price is $16.99 each, but they happened to be on sale for $14.99 on the day I visited the store. The 10 oz. cotton canvas has a bit of a coarse weave and likely won’t acquit itself too well in even a moderate rain storm, but since I won’t be camping in the tent, that’s of little concern to me. The material is light enough to sew using a typical home sewing machine equipped with a heavy duty needle to handle heavy thread.

The factory-finished edges of the drop cloths are well done; I plan on retaining as many of these edges as possible. With three 9’ x 12’ drop cloths, it is possible to construct a 9’ x 8’5” tent with a 6’ high opening and still have a few extra pieces left (for hand lettered banners advertising the studio). Here are my patterns for cutting the three drop cloths (#1 will remain uncut, creating the back and the roof of the tent; the top of #3 will become a painted artistic backdrop that will hang inside the tent):

The $45 Baker Tent
(the first of several Penny-pinching Outfitting Stories)


You can't be around the reenacting scene for very long before you start to realize, "Dang! This stuff can get awful expensive!" $250 for a uniform, $500+ for a long gun, $100 for a pair of stiff, pain-inflicting, blister-inducing brogans (you can buy a pair of nice, ergonomically pleasant Clarks for that kind of money!); and that's just the beginning. There's personal gear, camp gear, battle gear, and various and sundry accessories that no self-respecting reenactor could possibly do without.

As was the case in the middle 1800s, the sutlers pretty much have us by the short ones. To be fair, they generally produce a good product at a somewhat reasonable Twenty-first Century price (except the brogans!). But for anyone inclined to make some of his or her own gear, it's kinda irritating that only the sutlers seem to know how to get their hands on period-correct 'raw' materials needed to produce the things reenactors need (and want).

The $45 Baker Tent has its origins in the $8 Infantry Blanket Incident. Let me explain. A post to one of the reenactor mailing lists pointed out that a cheap, mostly wool gray blanket sold by Harbor Freight makes a reasonably good stand-in for the cheap, mostly wool gray blanket once issued by the U.S. Army. Better still, if $8 was still too rich for the blood, one need only wait for the inevitable sale that would knock a couple of bucks off the price.

The $8 Infantry Blanket Incident reminded me that acceptable, non-traditional, inexpensive options occasionally do turn up; it’s just a matter of being observant and remaining alert to the possibilities.

Once I realized it would be handy and somewhat plausible to have a portable portrait ‘studio’ to take into the wilderness, my thoughts immediately turned to the versatile Baker Tent. As you can see from the illustration above, this type of tent has a large entrance covered by a draping flap that, with the addition of a pair of poles and two lines, doubles as an awning. Sutler prices for an ‘authentic’ Baker start at around $400 and go up from there.

A short historical interlude about the Baker Tent: Some folks believe that the design has its roots in World War I and the name stems from its supposed use as a shelter in which army cooks baked bread. But knowledgeable researchers generally agree that the design is much older than that; from written descriptions it appears that the Baker Tent goes back to at least the time of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815). As for the name, it seems generally accepted that ‘baker’ refers to the tent’s similarity in shape to the traditional reflector oven, used to bake bread goods next to the cooking fire using reflected heat.

More in the next post....

petites Cartes de Visite

Along with taking photos at C.W. events and posting them somewhere for all to see, I became inspired to offer something unique to local C.W. reenactors. The inspiration came while learning about Carte de Visite. I wrote about CDV a couple of days ago.

As I have no wish to reenact the tedious camera, darkroom, and scrapbooking processes required to exactly duplicate an authentic CDV (and few likely would want to sit perfectly still for the minutes required to capture an image), I have come up with a simplified version using a modern camera (disguised as a wooden box camera), photo editing software (Corel PhotoPaint) to crop and sepia-tone the images, and sheets of ivory colored business card computer paper.

Since the resulting product is a bit smaller than the original CDV, I have dubbed these petites Cartes de Visite. I make them for the cost of materials (about $2.00 for ten cards).

About...James Gardner (1829-??)

I'm not sure how widespread the practice, but occasionally one will come across a reenactor who has selected a specific, once-living person upon which to base his or her impression. After studying various aspects of Civil War era photography, I thought it might be interesting to do something similar by introducing myself as "Mr. so-and-so, photographer."

James Gardner and his more famous elder brother Alexander (in the photo shown here), were among the dozens of photographers employed by Matthew Brady, probably the most well-known of Civil War shutterbugs. The Gardner brothers were immigrants from Scotland who were in the proverbial right place at the right time when photography exploded on the scene.

By the middle of the War, Alexander, and possibly James as well, left Brady's employ. Alexander's life is reasonably well documented - his eulogy is in the Library of Congress - but it is not precisely known what happened to James. Interestingly, the 1880 Census does list a James Gardner, fifty-one years of age, of Scottish birth, widowed, living in California, and working as a herder. Could this be our fellow?

I chose to base my impression on James Gardner because his brother Alexander looks a lot like my brother Kirk, and because the relative lack of documentation about his life and exploits does not definitively rule out his possible presence at the Battles of Valverde and Glorieta, does it?

Victorian Era Photography

With the development and diffusion of glass-plate photography around the middle of the Nineteenth-century, came the first real opportunity for the average citizen to be a consumer of this revolutionary new technology.

Earlier photographic systems, including the famous Daguerreotype, produced their image directly on the final medium. This meant that only one "print" could be obtained from each captured image. Glass-plate negatives allowed multiple prints to be made on specially-prepared paper using a second photographic process.

An early form of consumer-oriented photography was the "Carte de Visite" (CDV), a photo calling card which became so popular in both the United States and Europe that purpose-designed cameras were built to record multiples of the small images on a single glass plate negative. The typical CDV was around two and one-half inches wide and four inches high. It consisted of a piece of stiff cardstock upon which was glued a slightly smaller albumen photo print. Occasionally, the cardstock base was decorated with a printed border or some other embellishment.

A CDV sent by mail proved to be a easy and inexpensive way for people to "show their face" to friends and family living in a distant city or town. Before long, collecting CDV became a hobby unto itself and albums for storing and displaying these little cards were produced commercially. It is reported that even Britain's Queen Victoria was an avid CDV collector.

About...my Clothing:

From the inside out (skipping the 'delicate unmentionables'), I wear a bib-front cotton shirt, striped wool trousers and a brocade vest made by my wife (with a little help from me) following historical patterns, and calf-length leather boots. In the evening and on a cloudy day, I wear a brown derby; in the sun, a straw 'Sam Houston.' A pocket watch with chain, a pair of Pince Nez reading glasses, and a glass flask of my favorite elixer (Coca-Cola) complete the ensemble.

While 'in the field' I wear a brown leather cross-draw shoulder rig (I made it myself!) to hold my 1836-design Colt Paterson .36 cal revolver; you never know when a rattler (or a 'Johnny Reb') might slither out of the bushes lookin' to do ya' harm!

For winter, I have an old "make do" wool blanket capote; perhaps I'll be able to afford something more modern before the first snows set in!

...my Equipment:

Blatant anachronisms trouble me. At a Civil War event at El Rancho de las Golondrinas, I spent the day furtively shooting photos with my Pentax digital SLR while dressed in my 1840s infantry uniform. It occurred to me that if I were dressed as a civilian of the period and equipped with a primitive-looking box camera, I would fit right in. This got the wheels turning.

I purchased an old, somewhat rustic-looking wooden tripod on ebay for about thirty bucks. Scouring the craft stores, I found a plain pine box large enough to enclose my digital SLR. I've stained the box and cut a hole through which the lens protrudes; I'm still experimenting with ways to mount the camera in the box so that it's easy to switch over from horizontal to vertical format. To camouflage the modern lens, I've built a press-on tubular lens shield from sheet brass.

The whole kit looks passably fine, if I might say so myself!

Preface:

Just last week, I created a set of web pages to document my evolving interest in Victorian era photography. I've been dancing on the fringes of the Civil War reenacting community for a couple of years and have just recently decided to take a more active role. Inasmuch as this 'effort' is transformational (and slow paced) it dawned on me that a blog was an ideal vehicle for logging activity (dare we say 'progress'?) on this sort of thing. I've got a lot of plans for the future, but I will take some time at first to write about the important (and hopefully interesting) steps I've taken up to this point.

About...me:

My interest in reenacting stems from an interest in acting that goes back many years: in junior high school I played a member of the River City band in a professional production of "The Music Man" starring Bert Parks, I'm a big fan of Halloween costuming, and living as I do along the El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, I became interested in the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848).

In 2008, I joined the 1st New Mexico Volunteer Infantry because some of the members occasionally effect a U.S.-Mexican War impression. After attending a couple of Civil War events, I decided to participate in that era as an itinerant photographer.