Nicholas Veeder is kind of a big deal.

At least in the small sphere of rural New York Fourth of July parades.

The first time I saw him, Veeder was sitting outside his home in Scotia, NY, called the “Old Fort.” In his old age Veeder turned his home into something of a museum—it’s full of curios ranging from 17th century Dutch mirrors to antique guns from the Seven Years’ War and the War of 1812, but most of the collection is Revolutionary War era muskets. It’s a big collection, stashed in piles in corners of the attic and at least one pistol lying casually on the floor.

The Old Fort itself is pretty rundown, and so is Veeder himself. The foundation of the house was built in 1745 and has been added to over time. Part of the house is wood frame, part is local stone that looks like it’s going to fall over any minute and some of the shingles are coming off the house. Upstairs there’s piles of swords, muskets, and other odds and ends stacked every which where. Veeder himself is a skinny guy who looks like he’s lived a hard life; he’s in his late 90s and he doesn’t have many of his teeth left.

Veeder has kind of a checkered reputation. Although local governments invite Veeder to march in the local July 4 parades every year, he’s been taken to court well into his 80s for hosting large parties at the Old Fort and providing alcohol to minors. During Independence Day parades, he carries the famous Schenectady Liberty flag that was first raised in 1771 to protest British taxes. One year Veeder got drunk before the Schenectady Independence parade and waved around the flag singing Soldier’s Joy while his son played the fiddle.

Part of what makes Veeder sort of a big deal is his uniform. He’s wearing a Continental Army uniform, tricorn hat, and polished boots, which he wears when he gives shooting demonstrations with his antique gun collection. People say his boots were issued to Washington’s troops at Valley Forge.

Veeder has been dead since 1862. I came across him as a photograph; he’s sort of a big deal because he’s one of a small handful of Revolutionary War veterans who were photographed before they died, and the only one so far as I know who was pictured wearing his uniform. Photographed 84 years after he enlisted at age 15, he’s probably not wearing his original uniform. There's several other photos of Continental veterans during the 19th century wearing essentially re-created versions of their uniforms when they went on speaking tours, and Veeder is probably not wearing a Continental Army uniform—for one thing, he served in a militia and not the regular Army. For another, Dr. Matt Keagle, the curator of the largest American military uniform collection in the world, tells me that Veeder’s coat most closely resembles early 19th century uniforms if it’s even a uniform coat at all. Whatever Veeder’s wearing in his photo, it was probably made after the Revolution.

Nicholas Veeder, age 99 circa 1861 at the “Old Fort” in Scotia, NY with the Schenectady Liberty flag. Courtesy Schenectady County Historical Society.

The flag is also complicated. The Liberty flag behind Veeder now hangs in the Museum of the American Revolution, as an example of one of the few surviving Revolutionary era flags. The flag is the real deal, but Veeder’s relationship to it is complicated. Local legend is that Veeder carried it into battle at the famous Battle of Saratoga that turned the tide of the war, but Veeder only enlisted six months after Saratoga. The earliest histories of Veeder’s militia unit say that they carried a “Liberty or Death” flag into battle, not a Liberty flag.

Veeder definitely served during the Revolution; he filed for and received a pension in 1832. He served at the battles of Oriskany and Johnstown as well as on the Sullivan-Clinton campaign against the Haudenosaunee. I’m not sure exactly when he started collecting guns, giving shooting demonstrations in uniform, and giving tours of the Old Fort (or calling it the Old Fort). Veeder bought the Old Fort immediately after the Revolution for its farm acreage, not its French and Indian War era “fort,” and as an aging, possibly disabled veteran he appears to have had a hard time with farming. On census records, his farm was valued far below his neighbors’ and like many Revolutionary veterans, he claimed poverty in the pension claim he filed soon after his wife’s death.

He seems to have begun giving shooting demonstrations around that time. He would have been about 68, when the last of the Revolutionary generation began to pass away in large numbers and left him as one of the few remaining Continental veterans. Although Veeder doesn’t mention it in his pension claim, the shooting demonstrations that supplemented his meager income were well known enough that regional guidebooks noted where to find him and directed travellers from as far away as New York City how to find him. By the 1860s, Veeder was one of only a small handful of Revolutionary War veterans still alive and he was well known enough to be briefly nationally known. The single photograph we have of Veeder was taken on the occasion of his 100th birthday for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in the early days of the Civil War, as part of a series on elderly Northern Revolutionary War veterans to make a point about the frailty of the Union, much like its aging and impoverished veterans.

Veeder consciously or unconsciously deployed a mix of his own and others’ Revolutionary era symbols and experiences to construct a seemingly authentic representation of the Revolutionary past. In his own lifetime, people traveled to hear him recount an authentic soldier’s witness of the Revolution, a supplement to what seems to have been a pretty poor income from his farm. In the 21st century, Veeder is iconic as one of only a few Revolutionary War veterans who lived long enough to be photographed. His fame then and now depend on an acceptance of his proximity to the Revolution, created and bolstered through the mix of clothing, objects, and stories he deployed.

Was Nicholas Veeder a reenactor?

Reenacting exists in an odd public history space because it exists at the intersection of official institutional mission and hobbyist interest. Museums and historic sites host events, set interpretive standards and narratives, and invite reenactment groups that meet those standards to interpret to the public. Reenactment groups are often as much social clubs as they are educational organizations. They are connected, grew from many of the same historical foundations, and yet they have often conflicting goals that have shaped American memory of the Revolution in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. That memory, in turn, shapes public ideas of what and more importantly who the nation is.

Whether Nicholas Veeder was a reenactor depends on what you think reenacting is. Other scholars of historical memory-marking have defined reenacting as something done by those who did not directly participate, done after the fact with historical and personal distance. I think the boundary between participating and reenacting is more porous than that. In seeking out reenactors of the American Revolution to interview for this project, I also met reenactors of the First and Second Gulf Wars, the American occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Vietnam War. The vast majority of the Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq reenactors I met were themselves veterans of those conflicts. Fewer of the Vietnam reenactors were Vietnam veterans, but there were some and others were the sons or grandsons of Vietnam veterans or veterans of other conflicts. Like Nicholas Veeder, they mostly represented their own military service with some of their own uniforms mixed with military surplus items.

The line between reenacting and other forms of historical commemoration are also muddy. In a way, your grandma with her hideous 70s plaid couch was a reenactor, and so was her mother before her with her 1930s saltbox house. In the early 20th century, Colonial Revival gardens and houses attempted to inscribe the fantasy of a white Anglo past on a country in the midst of major demographic shifts and anxieties about rising urbanization and industrialization.[1] Early America and colonial revival interior decorating was high fashion again for the 1976 bicentennial and it made dark wood paneling, fake copper, and constipated-looking eagles synonymous with cozy Americana while the US was reeling from high inflation, the oil crisis, pollution, and a quickly heating cold war. The 2020s, for better or worse, look a lot the same. Cottagecore, tradwife fashion, and “simple” farmhouse homes are in as Americans grasp towards an Authentic experience in the shadow of covid, rising global and domestic fascism, and the climate crisis. Reenacting isn’t directly connected to these, but many Americans have always engaged a spectrum of participatory historical memory-marking, and modern reenacting just one of its most visible forms.

Reenacting is a silly hobby. In one of my first conversations about this book, one reenactor told me that to truly understand the real ethos of the hobby, I had to entirely hand-sew my clothing and sleep on the cold ground in a brush hut. (This is exactly what it sounds like—a lean-to or tent-like structure constructed from cut branches). I have now hand-sewed several pieces of reproduction, revolutionary-era men’s and women’s clothing, but several thousand handstitches later and I don’t truly understand it. I haven’t slept in a brush hut yet, so maybe that’s why.

By my estimate, there’s about 1-2,000 Revolutionary era reenactors in the US right now, down from a high of about 7,000 in 1976 with the bicentennial. Numerically, the average American museum goer is much more likely to encounter and speak with a volunteer reenactor than a paid member of a professional museum staff with a graduate degree in the field. Reenactors spend hundreds to thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours recreating the material culture of the 18th century to basically play dress up. No reenactor who I’ve spoken to really feels that they can live in the past and no one really wants to. For one thing, it’s impossible to exactly recreate the past because many of the materials and much of the skilled knowledge no longer exist; people tend to be taller, heavier, and healthier; people have day jobs to go back to and assistive medical devices like glasses and hearing aids to bring with them. No one wants dysentery or smallpox or even heatstroke for the sake of authenticity.