Bentonville Battlefield and RV park picnic

This morning we drove to Bentonville Battlefield, about 10 miles away.  This was the site of one of the last battles of the Civil War.

We first went into the visitors center, where they had some artifacts, and we watched a short film about the battle, and the Civil War in general.

Then we were given a tour of the Harper House, which was used by the Union as a hospital during the 3 day battle.

The house was a basic square, with four rooms downstairs and four more upstairs, divided in the middle by a staircase.  Two of the rooms downstairs were used for surgeries.

This fireplace was in one of the surgery rooms.  It was painted by the Harpers to look like marble, but it was actually wood.

The inside of the front door also had faux painting, to look like wood grain.  Some things, like faux painting, never change!

While the downstairs of the house was being used as a hospital, the Harper family, all 11 of them, lived in the 4 rooms upstairs.  All of the rooms had fireplaces, so it was fairly easy to convert this one room into a kitchen.  The table has a lazy susan built right into it!

Another upstairs room... More faux painting!

During "normal" times, this building was the family's kitchen, built away from the house to protect the family from fire danger and the heat.  There were doors on three sides of it to provide a cross-breeze.

Much bigger fireplace in here.

To keep busy when not cooking.

The family had 3 slaves who would have lived here.  These slaves were to help with the cooking and cleaning.  The family owned a very large acreage of land, but Mr Harper leased out his land for others to farm.

This afternoon our RV park had a Memorial Day hot dog cookout.

Ladder ball and corn hole games were set up.  Brad and I played cornhole, and he whooped me 2 games to nothing.

Brad brought his guitar over and played a few songs.

And we had a little human limbo going on for a side show.

A fun day!

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I guess every Saturday night at this park, they show an outdoor movie.  We had been told it was going to be Forrest Gump, which I thought was cool, since we had just seen several places where it was filmed when we were in South Carolina... But they decided to show Max instead, since it's about a military dog.  They thought that would go well with Memorial Day weekend.  And I think the kids got out there first and chose a dog movie.  It was a really good movie.  Check it out if you've never seen it!