Don’t call it a celebration.

Although Lawrence takes on a festival-like atmosphere when Civil War on the Western Frontier begins each August, the time is meant to educate and honor.

After all, events center around the Aug. 21 anniversary of William Quantrill’s bloody raid of Lawrence. Two hundred men died during the 1863 attack, and the city sustained $1.5 million in damages.

“It’s a horrible event. We’re not glorifying it at all but trying to understand how, when the tensions between groups build up, sometimes very terrible things can happen,” says Katie Armitage, a local historian who will lead a walking tour of raid sites.

“This is really a commemoration, and it’s just part of the extraordinary history of Kansas and Missouri and our whole region.”

Events, which begin Monday and run through Aug. 22, include guided tours of Quantrill’s path of destruction — via horse-drawn trolley, air-conditioned bus and, the old standby, walking.

The ever-popular Union Civil War encampment will return to South Park, complete with cannon fire loud enough to set off car alarms.

Civil War on the Western Frontier, now in its ninth year, continues to draw several hundred people each year, some of whom travel from outside Lawrence for the events, says Susan Henderson, marketing director for the Lawrence Convention and Visitors Bureau.

“Two years ago I went on the walking tour on the morning of the raid, and I was walking with people from Illinois, a couple from Washington state,” she recalls. “There’s strong interest in the subject matter, and there are people who would go a long way to see quality programming about this topic.”

Tasman Grout, Lawrence, hides her eyes while Christine Reinhard, dressed in period garb, helps children play hide-and-seek during a previous Civil War on the Western Frontier. The week and a half of activities focus on historic Lawrence and Douglas County during the early territorial days and the Civil War.

Playing in mud

There are even activities for children, most notably Armitage’s “Kids, Let’s Build a Mud Fort!” workshop.

To beat Wednesday’s early start at Lawrence schools, the “water-mud-history sling” for children ages 7 through 12 will be Monday and Tuesday.

On the first day, participants will learn the history of the first structures in fledgling 1855 Lawrence — mud forts the early settlers used as defensive measures against pro-slavery Missouri farmers who were threatening to overtake the settlement.

“The biggest mud fort was 100 feet in diameter, and that was at Sixth and Massachusetts,” Armitage says. “We do have photographs of that. Everything we do is really based upon good historical material.”

By the end of the first day, children will have built a model fort from sticks and mud. It’s all in preparation for the main event: erecting a real fort on the Kansas River’s bank.

“Just the combination of being outdoors and playing in water and mud, it gets to be pretty fun,” Armitage says. “I have found that if you can really motivate and focus kids, they love to work.”

Black heritage

New to this year’s Civil War on the Western Frontier will be an African-American Heritage bus tour, led by Judy Sweets and Wayne and Tolly Wildcat.

On an air-conditioned bus, participants will begin at the homesite of fervent abolitionist John Doy, who was famously captured while attempting to conduct slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad and then rescued from a St. Joseph, Mo., jail.

Other topics will include Lawrence’s so-called “contraband camps,” where, during the Civil War, escaped slaves who had filtered into Union camps pleading for freedom were safeguarded. Confederate Gen. Benjamin Butler called the blacks “contraband of war,” Sweets explains, and several hundred of them holed up in camps in North Lawrence and elsewhere in the city.

Participants also will learn about famous vaudevillians — such as George Nash Walker and the Whitman sisters — who once lived in Lawrence; a lynching that took place near the present-day Kansas River bridge; historically significant black churches; and more than 30 documented Underground Railroad sites in the county.

“We (Sweets and the Wildcats) think … the activities of the Underground Railroad directly tie into Quantrill’s Raid,” Sweets says. “We think the fact that the town was raided was because of the abolitionist activity that happened a few years before that.”

Momentum building

A majority of the activities planned for Civil War on the Western Frontier will take place at the Watkins Community Museum of History.

Museum director Rebecca Phipps says all of this year’s museum programs are new, and consciously so. After nearly a decade, the annual commemoration risks getting stale.

Starting with next year’s Civil War on the Western Frontier — which until now has been loosely marshaled by the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau — the museum will take over as the organizational leader of events.

“I will be developing committees and doing some evaluations and various things to look at the schedules and to look where we want to go with it and what we want it to be,” Phipps says.

For now, Civil War on the Western Frontier activities — just like those of June’s chautauqua — seem tailor-made for the weeks leading up to the city’s 150th anniversary in September.

“There’s some momentum building in terms of people becoming increasingly educated about this era and the important role that Lawrence played and that Kansas played,” Henderson says.