The Context of History, a Conversation with Frank Jarboe
Today we're talking with Frank Jarboe, a Kentucky boy turn theologian turned character demonstrator about his passion for history, research, and the context of history both then and now.
Frank has been dedicated to living history for 20 years, but before that, he was a passionate learner and lover of history. His family has been in the United States since the 1600s, so there is a personal motive to his study of history and he hopes to bring a similar connection to the public as he and his wife Carol share their many character demonstrations at 40+ events each year.
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“Hello I'm my name is Frank Jarboe I've been interested in in history for a number of years back when I was in I was in I was in college I was in pre-theology I was going to study to be a minister and I did get sidetracked. I became interested in history about all the mid 1980s. We live about about 25 miles from the site of the beginning of the Second Great Awakening and being a person that that has studied Theology and Doctrine and all that all my life that that peaked an interest with me so I started doing some reading and some some research and uh really that just kind of that just kind of percolated for uh for quite a while and then uh we get to about the year 2003 and I had an idea that I wanted to take the history that I've been studying concerning the First Great Awakening and the Second Great Awakening of 1800 and I want to go to churches and tell them the history of the Revival.
In order to do that I needed to get the proper clothing so I went and started attending some 18th century trade fairs and the first person that I met was Jack Garesh from St Louis, I think Heritage products was his store, and he asked me, he said, “What do you want to do?”, and I said well I think I want to be an 18th century minister and he said, “Oh that would be great!”. Then the second person I ran into ,I'm not going to name because they asked the same question and and I answered the same way and they said, “Oh are you going to do come out here and spoil our fun.”, But it was it was an introduction into the reenacting world and you know my focus changed almost immediately.
Carol and I were doing these things and I saw not just an opportunity but I saw some really neat people doing some really neat stuff, it's more than just crazy people dressing up in funny clothes it was people that were talking about buttons and fabric and guns and all of all of these things in a historic context. It kind of dawned on me really you know I'm kind of slow on the uptake sometimes, but if I wanted to know what was surrounding that First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening what better way to know that to put it into a historic context. So over the last nearly 20 years now I've only gone and spoken in maybe two or three churches but we're out 42 weekends out of the year at living history events and that's where we are now which of course we started out kind of slow but I'm still very impressed with the quality of people that we meet the quality of their their historic research and realizing that while I don't know anything about guns and shooting and things like that, I don't know enough today but there are other people that are asking the same questions about my expertise or my wife's expertise and when we put all those things together we build a context of history.”
Like many of his contemporaries, Frank is adapting and using new tools to share his research and enthusiasm. In recent years, Frank has taken his demonstrations online to reach anyone, anywhere. With his Youtube channel, Frank is able to host a weekly period sermon for his followers. This venture came with a new stage of learning for Frank, not only was he researching the past, he is now keeping pace with the future as technology changes and with it, the audience for his work. It’s this same drive to learn, no matter the era, that lead Frank down the path of starting “ReenactingSchedule.org”, a website dedicated to hosting a year long calendar of reenacting events, no matter the location, period, or size.
Reenacting Schedule is free for event organizers and fans of events to use. Simply fill out the required information for a specific event and it will be listed on the site for the public, demonstrators, and other history enthusiasts to find and attend. “The previous version of this was Smoke & Fire, a newspaper published for the living history community. When the organizers retired, there wasn’t a place for us to go and find events. It just made sense that the next iteration of the schedule would be online.”
View some of the Jarboe's work on their youtube channel