Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society
History Quarterly Digital Archives

Source: October 1985 Volume 23 Number 4, Pages 159–160

Notes and Comments

• Music Fair Marks 30th Anniversary
• Mocking the Militia Laws

Page 159

Music Fair Marks 30th Anniversary

The Valley Forge Music Fair, located in Tredyffrin township near the intersection of Swedesford and Devon State roads, marked its 30th anniversary this summer. The enterprise was started as a summer theater-in-the-round, in an orange and red striped tent, by Lee Gruber, Frank Ford and Shelly Gross.

The first production, "Guys and Dolls", opened on June 23, 1955. Its cast included seven members who re-created the roles they had played in either the original production or in road companies of the Damon Runyon classic, but also included "Two Ton" Tony Galento and Ed McMahon, at that time still a local television personality.

Other musicals presented during the first summer season were "Brigadoon", "Annie Get Your Gun", "Desert Song", "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes", "Kiss Me Kate", "Carousel", "Wonderful Town", "Showboat", and "South Pacific". Wilbur Evans was the director for all ten productions.

The summer tent was replaced with a year-round permanent theater in July of 1972. Since then the range of programs - "a little bit of everything," as Gruber described it, "to appeal to a lot of people" - has been broadened to include classical, jazz, pop rock, country and western, and gospel music; rhythm and, blues; Broadway shows; ethnic festivals; night club personalities and singers; and comedy.

Page 160

Mocking the Militia Laws

In the January 1982 issue of the Quarterly (Vol. XX, No. l), in the article on recreation in the nineteenth century, it wan noted that "the drill on militia days was not always taken too seriously" and sometimes degenerated into a farce, with the troops "often armed with cornstalks" and under the command of a "Colonel ... who knew nothing of military matters".

An article in last April's The Pennsylvania Magazine, published by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, provides additional perspective on these shenanigans. In her "The Career of Colonel Pluck", Susan G. Davis notes

"Parades parodying militia musters opposed the militia system and laws as well as the formal participation in the public militia companies, A widely felt hostility toward the militia laws and officers from the 1820s through the 1840s found its expression in political platforms, literature, the theatre, and humor - as well as in street parades. . . . The universal service requirement mandated in federal law in 1792 asserted that defense duty was the right of all eligible men (white, between eighteen and forty-five years), but Congress left the implementation of local preparedness to the states.

"In Pennsylvania, ... militia duty weighed unevenly on rich and poor. The state required all eligible men to attend two annual training days and used roll keeping and fines to enforce participation. Every man had to supply his own uniform and weapon or risk a fine for improper appearance, Workingmen found militia duty an onerous, expensive burden, because uniforms and shoulder weapons were expensive, and because fines often exceeded a dollar a day. ...

"Opposition to the militia system persisted through the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s, ending only with the abolition of public musters in 1858. The burlesques helped keep opposition alive and visible. Corntoppers became familiar at battalion drills in rural Pennsylvania, New York, and New England. ..." (Similar "burlesque parades", she also noted, were found "from Maine to Georgia, and for later dates in the Midwest".)

Easttown's cornstalk militia, it appears, was actually a part of a popular protest against the militia system - a protest that expressed itself in the form of a "folk drama" - that contributed to an end to the system.