The Salem Trayned Band

After a six-year hiatus, the Salem Trayned Band will demonstrate pike drill at Arisia ’20, on Saturday, January 18, 2020 at 11:00 am, in Grand Ballroom A.  You can also find our demonstration’s time and location on Arisia’s on-line schedule.  We hope to see you there!

We will participate in America’s Hometown Thanksgiving Celebration in Plymouth, Massachusetts, on Saturday 23 November 2019.  We’ll march in the parade, which steps off at 11:00 am, and we’ll give a drill demonstration in the Portal to the Past Historic Village at 1:00 pm (or shortly after we return from the parade, whichever comes later).  We’ll have our tent set up in the historic village, on the green in Brewster Gardens park (park location number 6 on the linked map, in the upper left-hand section; you may want to look using maximum magnification, as the park is very small on the map’s scale) for the rest of the day (which runs this year until 4:00 pm).  Come visit us!

The Salem Trayned Band will demonstrate c. 1630 English pike drill and seventeenth-century camp life at the Strawbery Banke Museum’s American Lives:  A Timeline of Historical Reenactors on Saturday 29 June 2019 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.  The museum has very kindly given the historical re-enactors their own day, rather than putting them alongside the naturalization ceremony on Independence Day.  (But we’ll miss the fireworks on the way home.)  Come and see us!

The Salem Trayned Band will march in the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts’ June Day parade on Monday 3 June 2019, in downtown Boston.  This annual event, held on the first Monday in June, recreates the Ancient and Honorables’ drumhead election.  It also closes Tremont Street, and other central streets, in the middle of a work day.  And they fire artillery salutes on Boston Common.  The parade steps off at noon.  It’s an event not to be missed.

We will participate in the National Guard and Second Corps Cadets Veterans Association’s 382nd-anniversary commemoration of the first regimental muster in North America, in Salem, Massachusetts, on Saturday 13 April 2019.  The schedule includes ceremonies at Armory Park (in front of the National Park Service Visitor Center at 2 New Liberty Street) at 10:00 am, and on Salem Common at 11:30, with a short parade between the two.  The First Muster is one of the two impressions in our original brief (the 1630 first militia is the other).  Come see it!

The Salem Trayned Band will demonstrate pike drill and offer a pike-drill workshop at Smith College’s ConBust ’19, on Saturday 30 March 2019 at 2:00 pm on Seelye Lawn.  In addition, we have members involved in programming throughout the weekend, including speaking at the Writing Believable Fight Scenes panel at 9:00 am Saturday and discussing more seventeenth-century goodness in the Swordswomen You Should Know About presentation at 1:00 Sunday afternoon.  And we’ll appear as our nineteenth-century selves at 11:00 am Saturday.  We hope to see you there!

We will participate in America’s Hometown Thanksgiving Celebration in Plymouth, Massachusetts, on Saturday 17 November 2018.  We’ll march in the parade, which steps off at 11:00 am, and we’ll give a drill demonstration in the Portal to the Past Historic Village at 1:00 pm (or shortly after we return from the parade, whichever comes later).  We’ll have our tent set up in the historic village, on the green in Brewster Gardens park (park location number 6 on the linked map, in the upper left-hand section; you may want to look using maximum magnification, as the park is very small on the map’s scale) for the rest of the day (which runs this year until 4:00 pm).  Come visit us!

The Salem Trayned Band will participate in the Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center‘s 17th Century Encampment event on Friday 21 and Saturday 22 September 2018 at the museum’s Mashantucket, Connecticut, location (warning:  the museum’s site says that “GPS directions to the Museum are not always reliable”).   We’ll be doing pike drill with audience participation, probably some musket drill, and perhaps some fencing.  As usual, we’ll have our giant tent and all of our gear.  And the nowadays rarely seen Blackwell’s Regiment will be there, too!  (In fact, they told the museum’s organizational staff about us.)  We hope to see you there.

The Salem Trayned Band will demonstrate c. 1630 English pike drill and seventeenth-century camp life at the National Park Service’s Salem Maritime Festival on Saturday 4 and Sunday 5 August 2018 in Salem, Massachusetts.  (The Festival is back to being a full-weekend event, and we’ll be there both days this  year.)  Look for a photo of us that the NPS has put on the event page.  We look forward to seeing all of our friends and fans at our tent by Derby Wharf.

The Saugus Public Library and the Saugus Iron Works will reprise Massachusetts Heroes and History, a program given in connection with a summer reading program for elementary-school children about Massachusetts and the Revolutionary War (missing an opportunity, given Saugus’ excellent position to encourage reading about the seventeenth century . . . but we’ll limit the editorializing here) on Thursday 12 July 2018.  We will be part of the day’s programming, as will the Lexington Minutemen.  The library’s program runs from 3:30 to 4:30 pm, but we’ll be at the park from 11:00 am until the park closes at 5:00 pm.  (The library’s splash page for the event hasn’t yet been updated and still refers to last year’s event.)  If you have free time during the day, come see us; and if you haven’t seen the park yet, you absolutely should:  it’s great.