The Salem Trayned Band

We will participate in the National Guard and Second Corps Cadets Veterans Association’s 381st-anniversary commemoration of the first regimental muster in North America, in Salem, Massachusetts, on Saturday 14 April 2018.  The schedule includes ceremonies at Armory Park (in front of the National Park Service Visitor Center at 2 New Liberty Street) at 10:30 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 ’18, on Sunday, March 25 , 2018 (short notice, I know) at 10:00 am 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 demonstrating more seventeenth-century goodness in the Swordswomen through the Ages demonstration at 11:00 Saturday morning.  And we’ll appear as our nineteenth-century selves at 12:00 noon Sunday.  We hope to see you there!

We will participate in America’s Hometown Thanksgiving Celebration in Plymouth, Massachusetts, on Saturday 18 November 2017.  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 Massachusetts National Guard’s Open House at Camp Edwards, Joint Base Cape Cod (formerly the Massachusetts Military Reservation), on Saturday 23 September 2017 (it’s an all-weekend event, on Saturday and Sunday, but we’ll only be there on Saturday).  We look forward to seeing all of our friends and fans at our giant tent.

Update:  This event has been cancelled by the organizer, as one of the groups that had planned to participate turned out to be unable to attend (waaah!), which would have resulted in an unsatisfactory program.  The organizer plans to try to reschedule for next year, with a longer lead time and more groups involved.

Original post:
We will be part of a timeline of three centuries of pikemen at Salem Pioneer Village 1630 on Saturday 12 August 2017.  This will be the first time in several years that we’ll be at Pioneer Village, which is a terrific site originally built for Massachusetts’ tercentenary.  We’ll be there with The Company of the Wolfe Argent (to which Paul and Andy also belong), who represent a bande d’ordonnance of Charles the Bold from 1474, and with The Guild of St. Maurice, also known as Das Geld Fähnlein, who represent a Bavarian Landsknecht company of the early sixteenth century.  This should be a fantastic event for late-medieval and early-modern military re-enactors.  Come see it!

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 5 August 2017 in Salem, Massachusetts.  (The Festival is back to being a full-weekend event, but we won’t be there on Sunday 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 has arranged for the Lexington Minutemen to appear at the Saugus Iron Works, apparently 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 Wednesday 12 July 2017 (the rain date is the following Wednesday 19 July) (and apologies for the very short notice).  We will be part of the day’s programming; 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 refers to us as “Iron Works Reenactors”, but their calendar listing and the Salem events calendar both mention us by name–ahead of the Lexington Minutemen, in fact, so there’s some consolation.)  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.

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 1 July 2017 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 participate in the Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center‘s 17th Century Encampment event on Friday 23 and Saturday 24 June 2017 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 march in the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts’ June Day parade on Monday 5 June 2017, 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.