By Jim Fulmer | Past President, NMLRA
“Take your pills! Take your pills!” was a cry that rang through the 2016 Living History and Rendezvous Association’s 40th Anniversary Eastern Primitive Rendezvous each morning. I had to laugh at myself because I hadn’t taken mine. Actually about half the people in camp hadn’t taken theirs either by the way everybody went searching for the pills that were in safe keeping. Every day the cry would go out and every day I did need that reminder. Whoever that was, thank you! It probably needs to become a tradition.
Bev Heister’s haversack says it all.
The 40th Annual Eastern Primitive Rendezvous (EPR) was held Sept. 24 – Oct. 1, 2016, at Cooper’s Lake Campground near Slippery Rock, PA. This was a beautiful site for the EPR, in fact there was even little to no ground preparation to be done. There were no roads to be bulldozed in, no culvert pipes needed, bridges built, or tons of gravel needed to make this event happen. Coopers Lake is a huge complex that can handle any size event. The Pennsic Wars are held at the site and usually there are over 10,000 people coming together to do the medieval event. The name Pennsic War was created by a combination of Punic Wars and Pennsylvania. The Punic Wars were a series of three wars fought between Rome and the Phoenician City of Carthage between 264 BC and 146 BC. I am told they do a vast series of time periods at the Pennsic Wars and it is a lot of fun.
The Eastern Primitive Rendezvous is the largest of the National Rendezvous Living History Foundation, Inc. (NRLHF) events. At the present time, the NRLHF run four other events all over the country: the Old Northwest, Southeastern, Northeastern, and Corps of Discovery. These are all great events and are pre-1840 style living history encampments. Here they camp, compete with muzzleloading firearms, knife, tomahawk, and primitive bow. There are the Scottish Highland games, music at night, and a lot of sutlers or vendors selling items related to this time period. It is living history at its best. The sites move around from year to year and are voted on by the attendees.
The target that was shot during the Scribes Match.
The NRLHF was started in 1998 and incorporated March 1999. If this is the Eastern Primitive Rendezvous 40th Anniversary how does that add up? That is easy. The Eastern was first sanctioned and run by the National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association. The Eastern Primitive Rendezvous was the first of its kind to recreate the pre-1840 time period with live fire muzzleloading shooting matches. It was a get-together of people of the same ideas with a spirit of independence that that time period instills in your spirit and heart. There were several events held before the one that was to become known as the first child of all these events and that was the 1977 Brookville, PA, event. The Eastern Primitive Rendezvous slowly grew through the years under the NMLRA banner with many other national rendezvous spinning off from it. Seed money from the Eastern was given to some of the other events for start-up money.
Left to right: Alan Kraft past NEPR Booshway, Jim Penland Chairman NRLHF, author Jim Fulmer, and Lynn Cowell, newly elected 2018 EPR Booshway
I attended my first Eastern in 1982 at McDowell in Virginia. What a great event! I met many terrific people with whom I became good friends, even to this day. Thanks to Wally Hart who couldn’t go to the Eastern that year. He hooked me up with his friend Earl Folk. I had a great time at that event. But shooting was not a mainstay of the rendezvous at that time and still isn’t. I can still remember coming home from the my first Eastern and saying to people that I shot only 7 shots out of my muzzleloading rifle in 5 days, and that I was lucky and was in two shoot-offs.
The events all kept growing and I would say the Booshway at the 1988 EPR changed everything forever when it came to the sutlers and vendors who attended the events. The Booshway, elected to be in charge of these events, can make them great events or not. Dave Mantz was the Booshway at this EPR and it was the first time where all the sutlers had to have a primitive store to attend – there was no modern sutlers row. Always before this people selling their merchandise had an option of being just outside the gate of the event, set up in modern travel trailers and would sell their wares almost like a flea market – actually, just like a flea market. But by moving all the vendors into camp and requiring them to be in pre-1840 tents and only selling pre-1840 period items, it changed the face of rendezvous forever. There was now a true trader’s row inside the event and rendezvous participants didn’t have to walk all the way down and out the front gate that could be a mile away to purchase items.
The author, Jim Fulmer and Ed Stout who served as the Booshway for the 2016 EPR.
The Eastern kept growing and by 1993 at Tioga, PA, in some of the worst weather of any event up until this time, the number of attendees broke 3,000.
By 1995, the EPR and the whole NMLRA Rendezvous program had gotten so big that the “Grey Pages” were added to the Muzzle Blasts magazine just for rendezvous news and events. By 1995 the EPR and the rendezvous program was so big it was like the tail wagging the dog of the NMLRA.
By 1998 there were nine NMLRA sanctioned rendezvous around the country. The NMLRA Board of Directors in September of 1998 decided that the NMLRA Rendezvous program needed to be spun off into a separate entity, so the National Rendezvous and Living History Foundation, Inc. was created. The last NMLRA Eastern Primitive Rendezvous was held in 1998 at Raccoon State Park, PA. It was nicknamed “Stone Gate 98.” So the 22nd Eastern was the last NMLRA Eastern Primitive Rendezvous.
That was 18 years ago. Currently there are five national rendezvous. These are fun events and I encourage you to attend. Go to www.nrlhf.org to find one in your area. Every rendezvous has “public days” when you can attend in regular street clothes, but period dress is always allowed.
