CARTHAGE, Mo. — Carthage is transporting residents back to 1861.
This weekend was the 160th anniversary of the Battle of Carthage.
To remember the battle more than 500 reenactors held their annual reenactment at Civil War Ranch.
The Battle of Carthage was the first Civil War battle that lasted an entire day.
On the field reenactors approached each other while shooting blanks out of guns and cannons.
“It was a very intense and scary thing for the folks around here to experience this. What you had was 1,100 union troops that suddenly ran into 6,000 of their foes on what we now call Civil War road, which is right out here. we are doing this on part of the actual battlefield. It didn’t take long for the battlefield to become a huge foggy field and you frequently couldn’t even see the enemy,” said Steve Cottrell, Reenactor, the Battle of Carthage Civil War Museum employee.
Cottrell says nearly 4,000 spectators came out to watch the two days of reenactments.
