^{By Tish Osborne}

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^{Each January, Union raiders and Confederate pickets square off for the reenactment of the Brooksville Raid at the Sand Hill Scout Reservation on State Road 50, west of Brooksville, Fla.}

Former co-chairmen Jan Knowles and Virginia Jackson, both of the Hernando (County) Historical Museum Association (HHMA) said an estimated 20,000 spectators have attended the event with over 1,500 reenactors, 17 cannon and 70 cavalry..

"We have become the largest Florida reenactment," Knowles said. The festival kicks off with a Living History for area school children and the public.

Jackson's dedication to the county's history is well known in Hernando County. She received the area's 1998 Humanitarian of the Year Award. She was a contributor to "A Millennial History of Hernando County," in 2000, along with other local historians and the Hernando Today newspaper that published it. She wrote the chapter on the Civil War history for the area.

In the book, Jackson explains that Florida's fight pitted brother against brother and father against son as much as in the bordering states. Many of the veterans of the Seminole Wars who fought under Andrew Jackson joined the Union.

They didn't have to cross Confederate territory to join the federal forces as four forts in Florida stayed in Union hands throughout the war -- Fort Taylor at Key West, Fort Jefferson on the Dry Tortugas, Fort Pickens near Pensacola Bay and Fort Myers in South Florida.

However, men and boys who joined the Confederate cause from the state were shipped north, and they fought in all the major battles from Perryville, Ky. onward.

Those left on the farms of the Florida interior fended off raids while they supplied they Confederate Army. Those on the coast fought the Union blockade.

Florida's major contribution to the Confederate war effort was the supplying of much-needed beef, pork, corn and molasses to feed the Southern armies, according to the official state history.

The other commodity that Floridians produced was salt, which was necessary to preserve meat. Salt making along Florida's Gulf coast involved boiling seawater in large kettles or containers to evaporate the water and collect the salt. Union navy raids were launched against these saltworks, including one at Bayport in Hernando County.

Southern economic targets in Florida were attacked in small Union military operations, such as the Brooksville Raid and cavalry raids in south Florida to seize cattle and burn farmhouses. To protect cattle in South Florida, Confederate authorities formed small military units called the "cow cavalry."

T. B. Ellis served in an independent cavalry company from October 1863 to April 1864. He gives a good account of the Brooksville raid of July 1864 in his diary. From a copy of "Confederate Diary of Thomas Benton Ellis, Sr., 1842-1926," at the P. K. Yonge Library of Florida History, University of Florida, Gainesville, provided courtesy of Kyle S. VanLandingham is this description:

"At one time [July 1864] they landed at the mouth of the Ancloate River with a force of 400 men, one Company of Yankee soldiers, one Company [U.S. 2nd Fla. Cavalry] of deserters, and one negro [U.S. Colored Troops] company, and began a raid through the County to Brooksville," Ellis writes.

"They surprised and captured eleven of our pickets composed of boys, some old men and their horses."

Ellis tells of how he and another picket retreated and fired, retreated and fired at the oncoming Yanks, some riding captured horses, while word was sent to the closest reinforcements, who were 50 miles away in Tampa. They would not arrive in time.

Ellis was fighting to defend his own farm.

"We kept as near them as we could, firing at them and they firing at us," he reported. "They burned all the houses on the route until they got to my father's house.

"They spent several hours at our place and fed the men from our smokehouse, pantry and barns, then took our wagons and loaded them, then set fire to every house on the place.

"As they were leaving, one of the deserters, a Methodist preacher, slipped back, stopped the fire which was underway at the back of the house. Mother and the small children were in the house.

"That Methodist preacher was kind to Mother and told her that nothing in her room would be disturbed, and he secretly slipped other articles from other rooms.

"We afterwards captured this man with other deserters and put them in jail at Brooksville. My mother went to the jail and took him something to eat," Ellis writes in his diary.

"After the Yankee Command left my father's place, they proceeded to Bay Port and went aboard their boats and returned to Fort Myers."

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