One might sympathize with Jessica Henry McClements on the day after her wedding, when she and her husband couldn’t get out of their Johnstown driveway to leave for their honeymoon because a battle raged in the street.

It was inconvenient, but kind of cool.

It was a re-enactment; Johnstown was the site of an October 1781 battle between U.S. militia and British soldiers, loyalist militia and Mohawk fighters.

The wedding was in 2014, and the re-enactors stopped by Henry McClements’ house to take photos with her in her wedding dress. How many people can say their wedding photos include guests carrying a Brown Bess or maybe a Charleville musket?

Today, Henry McClements is the president of the Johnstown Historical Society, which plans a variety of events next year — with other historical groups in Fulton County — around the nation’s semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Henry McClements doesn’t claim to be an historian, but she thinks like one. She’s not about simply archiving and preserving a community’s past; she wants to delve into it and find the forgotten details and tell new stories.

It’s an attitude that warms my heart, because journalists think much the same way: that every new detail informs a perspective, and changes it, even if just a little bit. And some of her plans got me thinking.

I was a fifth-grader during the nation’s bicentennial in 1976. We studied the revolution, took a five-day field trip to Boston (major cool), saw a Conestoga wagon and took part in the festivities.

We were taught that the U.S. revolutionaries were patriots, that their opponents were bad guys and that the indigenous people were “Indians” and we actually didn’t learn anything about their role in the war that would lead to the decline or fall of a number of indigenous nations.

We didn’t hear all the stories or consider all the perspectives; but that was how history was taught. “Our perspective on history has changed since then,” Henry McClements said. And you need go no farther than downtown Johnstown to see.

Both sides included militia — amateur soldiers (or more politely, citizen soldiers) — 2 who had day jobs living and working across the Mohawk Valley and what became the Capital Region.

“History is constantly evolving as we get new information,” Henry McClements said.

Do you know another word for “British loyalist?” Try “neighbor.” Many of the loyalists in Johnstown, if not at the battle, were Scottish immigrants brought here by Sir William Johnson. After the war, many moved to Canada. I wonder how many remained and how they interacted with their neighbors.

What’s the difference between........

© The Leader Herald