By Keith Alexander

If you are walking along German Street this July and see someone dressed in old-fashioned clothes leading a tour, you probably aren’t hallucinating. You’re seeing a summer living history tour, a new initiative of Shepherd University’s historic preservation program.

Two Shepherd University students lead the tours, which they researched and wrote themselves. The students were chosen based on their excellent performance in a living history class offered at Shepherd during spring semester 2010. The program gives tourists and town residents alike new insights into the stories and structures of the town formerly known as Mecklenburg. The students benefit, too, gaining additional experience planning and leading living history programs.

Held to coincide with the Contemporary American Theater Festival, the walking tours begin and end at the Entler Hotel. The tours are an outgrowth of Shepherd’s popular Halloween living history tours, presented during the past two years in the Shepherd family cemetery on New Street. An anonymous benefactor liked the tours so much that they donated funds to expand the historic preservation program’s public education and outreach activities. The result was the summer historic walking tours. The Arts and Humanities Alliance of Jefferson County, the Historic Shepherdstown Commission, and the Friends of the Shepherdstown Riverfront contributed additional financial and material support for the program.

The historic costumes are an important touch: Dr. Kathleen Corpus, Visiting Assistant Professor of Family and Consumer Science, contributed her knowledge of the history of fashion to ensure that the guides’ clothing is as authentic as possible. The result is unique and attention-grabbing, and helps participants imagine what it was like to live in Shepherdstown a 100 years ago or more.

The tours are unusual not only because they are conducted by guides in historical costume, but because the docents are portraying actual historical individuals from Shepherdstown’s past. As a result, even though the guides follow virtually the same route, the stories they tell and the insights they provide are very different. Heidi Carbaugh, a senior majoring in history and minoring in historic preservation, is portraying Mary “Minnie” Bedinger. Minnie Bedinger spent time in Denmark as a child while her father was serving as the U.S. resident minister to Denmark. She also experienced Shepherdstown during the Civil War, and her recollections of the battles of Antietam and Shepherdstown are both vibrant and harrowing. Claudia Paycheff, a sophomore majoring in historic preservation, plays Mary Schroeder, the daughter of a C&O canalboat captain. Her stories give insights into a rougher, more working-class Shepherdstown of the early 1900s.

Kyle Pfalzer of the Gettysburg Foundation contributed his expertise in first-person interpretation for the tours. Pfalzer, a 2009 graduate of Shepherd University’s history and historic preservation programs, notes that the tours are different from the usual historical tour. “This is a unique approach because the guides are portraying actual historical figures who are telling about their own eras, but the guides also interpret the Shepherdstown of today,” Pfalzer notes. “The result is unusual, very effective.”

Shepherdstown is the perfect venue for such a program. Not only is it full of historic structures, but there are historical objects everywhere that people walk past every day without noticing them. One of the goals of the program is to teach people about the historical treasures that surround them, thereby making them more likely to preserve them.

The tours, which last about an hour, are free and open to the public. They run from July 7 to August 1, and will be given Wednesdays and Thursdays at 11am, Fridays at 3pm, Saturdays at 10:30am, and Sundays at 3pm. Tours begin at the Shepherdstown Visitor Center in the Entler Hotel at 129 East German Street. For more information, contact Keith Alexander at kalexand@shepherd.edu. Facebook users can find out more by searching for Shepherdstown Living History.