Dayton, Tenn. ? It’s been 80 Julys since Jim Sullivan witnessed the Scopes Monkey Trial and the spectacle that surrounded it: Bible-toting preachers, monkeys on leashes, people fighting each other and mimicking primates.

“They had fights on all these corners and people all over the place,” Sullivan, 85, said Friday as he stood outside the Rhea County Courthouse where a three-day Scopes Play and Festival starts next Friday.

The hubbub he recalls occurred in July 1925, and a furor over teaching evolution in public schools lives on.

The director of the National Center for Science Education said Friday that creationists, intelligent design advocates and other alternative life origin theorists were interfering with the freedom to teach American students the basics of evolution.

“We have been facing more anti-evolution activity in the last six months than we have ever faced in a comparable period before,” Eugenie Scott, director of the Oakland, Calif.-based center, said in a telephone hookup with reporters. “Just in 2005 we have had 12 states in which anti-evolution or co-creationism legislation has been introduced. That’s more than we have ever had in any single year.”

In Kansas, the state school board could change science standards to include criticism of evolution. In Cobb County, Ga., before a court overturned the order, warning labels describing evolution as a “theory, not a fact” were required in some textbooks.

Scott said 31 states this year have “had some kind of incident, such as efforts to get creationism taught or limit teaching of evolution. This issue is definitely accelerating.”

Professor John Thomas Scopes, the central figure in the evolution trial of 1925, on July 3, 1950, in Shreveport, La.

While such sparring has prompted changes in some communities, residents in Dayton, a town of about 6,100 people 35 miles north of Chattanooga, are sprucing up the historic courthouse for the annual re-enactment of the trial where John Scopes was convicted of violating a state law against teaching evolution.

At the trial, orator and presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan prosecuted and lawyer Clarence Darrow defended Scopes in a courtroom fight that pitted evolution against the biblical story of creation.

Sullivan said Rhea County, where public schools had Bible classes for 51 years until a federal judge ordered them stopped in 2002, has always been very attuned to religious influences.

“There is a church on every corner,” Sullivan said. “People are either going to church or the bank all the time.”

The Scopes Festival is expected to draw about 1,100 people, some from other countries and some who attend every year, said Tom Davis, the organizing chairman.

The Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton, Tenn., is shown Friday. A group of science teachers said Friday that creationists, intelligent design advocates and other alternative life origin theorists are interfering with the freedom to teach U.S. schoolchildren the basics of evolution. While such sparring has prompted some states to curtail the teaching of evolution, this rural community is sprucing up the Rhea County Courthouse for the annual re-enactment of the 1925 trial where John Scopes was convicted of violating a state law against teaching evolution.

“One of the reasons we do the re-enactment is to give people a common ground for discussion,” said Davis, a spokesman for Bryan College, a religious college named for the trial’s prosecutor.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment’s provision for separation of church and state doesn’t permit religious accounts of life’s creation to be taught in public schools.

Congress in 2001 said students should be allowed to “understand the full range of scientific views” about biological evolution but also should be taught to differentiate testable theories from religious or philosophical claims.

Wes McCoy, chairman of the North Cobb High School science department in Kennesaw, Ga., said Friday that his students have 135 hours in a science class each semester and there is not time to discuss religion.

“We need to teach them the best science we know,” McCoy said. “Science is quite different from faith.”