The 5th Connecticut Regiment will be reenacting The Battle of Ridgefield

RIDGEFIELD, CT —For most people, organizing and playing in a foursome for golf is more than enough leisure time logistics for a weekend.

But for Doug Crawford, commander of The 5th Connecticut Regiment, a group of historical military reenactors who will be recreating the Battle of Ridgefield at the end of April, a weekend best-spent involves artillery and flanking maneuvers.

Crawford, a Tolland resident, will be leading the reenactment of the famous fight as part of the weekend-long celebration of the battle's 245th anniversary. He told Patch he was bitten by the living history bug in 2015, after visiting Old Sturbridge Village with his son.

Maps, military uniforms, explosions, powdered wigs… seriously, what's not to love?

"You get to learn history, you get to teach history," Crawford summed it up. The group's most recent gig was a reenactment of the American Colonial Army's escape from Ft. Lee, New Jersey

The hobby can get expensive, if you let it. Premium gear, such as a completely hand-stitched uniform, will set the reenactor back several thousand dollars. Most of the weekend warriors will kit themselves out with off-the shelf uniform and equipment available through specialist websites.

"But if you love it, it's no different than golf," Crawford said. "You begin with a starter set, and then you go out and buy a top of the line set."

Crawford said the regiment attends between 15 and 20 events a year. Their event schedule is so full they only have to drill a few times a year at the start of the season. The mock battles are a mix of paid and donated events. The paid gigs are necessary to offset some of the non-profit group's expenses, such as insurance, and gunpowder.

As for the Battle of Ridgefield, Crawford described it as more of a "street action." The British had just destroyed a cache of Continental Army supplies in Danbury and were making their way westward.

"General (Benedict) Arnold and (Major General David) Wooster and (Brigadier General Gold Selleck) Silliman gathered the militia and some regimental units that were still in the area and tried to confront them," Crawford explained. "Obviously, being vastly outnumbered, and the British being a professional army, it was very difficult for them. So we ended up attacking their flanks, and mostly their rear guard, and harassed them all the way back to the shore."

Military historians count The Battle of Ridgefield as a tactical loss for Colonial troops, but place it strategically in the "W" column.

"It was a victory for us because it led to so much propaganda for the American side. It was a rallying call, especially in Connecticut," Crawford explained.

The Redcoats outnumbered our boys about three-to-one in that first battle, but don't expect to see a wave of crimson rolling down Main Street in April 2022 the way it did in April 1777.

"Sadly, there's not as many British reenactors, as everybody wants to be 'the good guy.'" Crawford said The 5th Connecticut is "going to try and do the battle as authentic as we can with the numbers that we have," but anticipates some special reenactment choreography will be needed to make the more numerous Continental Army players appear as the underdogs they were.

Some of the smoke and mirrors will involve barricades, props new to the regiment. The Colonial forces erected three separate sets of barricades to foil the British advance through town. The ploy was ambitious, but ultimately didn't work. Crawford charged his artisans to create "break through" barricades for the reenactment, to aid the British in their escape.

For the town's celebration of the battle, the military reenactors' jobs won't be all bayonets and musket balls. The day after their replay of the battle, The 5th Connecticut Regiment will be joined by The Brigade of the American Revolution to conduct a funeral procession and ceremony for the Revolutionary War soldiers found in Ridgefield in 2019.

Researchers believe the skeletal remains, discovered as the result of construction work in a Ridgefield basement, had been Colonial combatants in the original dust-up.

"We are going to have hundreds of reenactors parading down the street, a funeral procession with wagons carrying the wooden caskets holding of the skeletal remains of the Revolutionary War soldiers, and we're going to bury them at this old cemetery with pomp and circumstance," Crawford said. "It's going to be a once in a lifetime opportunity to see something like that."

See the Ridgefield Historical Society's website for the complete schedule of 245th Anniversary of The Battle of Ridgefield events.