Category Archives: Activities and Performers

Nanticoke River Jamboree is coming on October 12, 2024. Join us for the Mid-shore’s largest living history event!

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Nanticoke River Jamboree

As a designated Heritage Area in Dorchester County, Maryland, the volunteers and Trustees at Handsell are pleased to announce:

The Nanticoke River Jamboree at Handsell

Saturday, October 12, 2024

10 a.m. – 5 p.m.

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Please support out 2023  and 2024 Sponsors!

For a Full List of the 2024 Exhibitors and Sponsors click here: 

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Every year at this all-day family-friendly event, you can learn from and be entertained by our outstanding Living History Performers.   In 2024 we planned an exciting schedule:

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This years participants include:

Jerome Bias and Janice Canaday

Returning in 2024 in the restored Handsell Kitchen:  Jerome Bias and Janice Canaday, outstanding living history interpreters portraying enslaved plantation cooks.  Jerome and Janice will discuss how African traditions and food preparation influenced early American cooking and talk about the life of enslaved people and what the idea of Emancipation means to them. Jerome is a professional wood worker and interpretive living history present while Janice Canaday, is a Director of Interpretation from Colonial Williamsburg.

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AND  Janice Green as “Harriet Tubman”

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Laurie Toms as activist, author and abolitionist “Frances Watkins Harper”

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plus new this year period music by Ampersand:

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and Indigenous Naturalist Lucia Lucas

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and author Chris Slavens with this new book “1742”

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In the spring of 1742, a Shawnee war party journeyed hundreds of miles to the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay to recruit allies for a war against the English colonists. The once-mighty but diminished Nanticokes, whose great-grandparents had greeted Captain John Smith with arrows, invited several other tribes — the Choptank, Assateague, Pocomoke, and Askecksy Indians — to meet at a place called Wimbesocom. A daring plan was proposed: With the help of hundreds of fierce northern warriors, the Eastern Shore tribes would carry out a surprise raid against their English neighbors and slaughter everyone — men, women, and children. Meanwhile, French forces would land on the coast and help them drive the white man off the peninsula, splitting the English colonies.
 
If they succeeded, they would remake the destiny of North America. If they failed, they might lose their lands forever.
 
‘1742’ traces the history of the Nanticoke Indians and other Eastern Shore tribes from their first contact with English colonists through decades of bloody conflict and bitter concessions, revealing a simmering resistance which boiled over during what historian C.A. Weslager called “the most important single event in Indian history on the Delmarva Peninsula.”

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The Chesapeake Independent Blues Living History Interpreters are returning to teach ius about Revolutionary time period and attacks that occurred along the Nanticoke River!

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Chesapeake Independent Blues Militia returning to the 2021 Jamboree, this year as Revolutionary soldiers (pictured here in 1812 dress).

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