Portland residents were in reenactment

Thirty-five years ago this week, a couple of Portland residents took part in a “war.”

“It wasn’t really a war,” wrote Dave Marchand in the Dec. 5, 1985, edition of The Commercial Review, recounting the experience Mike McBride and Dave Boyd had participating in a Civil War reenactment for the made-for-TV movie “North and South: Part II.”

Though it wasn’t really a war, McBride still had scars from a bayonet cut and a gunpowder burn. Boyd still had a wound behind his ear where he had been hit by a rifle butt.

McBride and Boyd lived for a week as if they were Union soldiers in 1865.

That included wearing only Civil War-era clothing and sleeping in tents.

“It was really too warm,” said McBride, referencing temperatures in the 80s at the filming site in Natchez, Mississippi.

Each soldier earned $50 per day and expenses for taking part in the filming.

McBride, who said he had always wanted to be on TV, and Boyd represented members of the 5th Kentucky Volunteer Infantry.

“We spent the first day filming in front of the McClean House, where (Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee) surrendered at Appomattox,” McBride said. “We were lined up on both sides of a fence in front of the house and when Lee rode his horse down the road between the fences, the camera panned right over us.”

McBride added that he and Boyd had been approached about appearing in another movie, “Gen. Grant and the Battle of Gettysburg.”