Saturday night lantern tours illuminate Fort Vancouver

The candlelight seems to draw you back in time. The shadows contain secrets. And, of course, the rangers and guides are there to help you discover it all.

Nighttime tours of the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site provide glimpses of a different world than the daylight one you usually see. The National Park Service staff there has just added a second series of holiday-oriented lantern tours of the East Barracks to the popular guided explorations of the fort that have been underway for years now.

Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day and even the anniversary of the Kaiser Shipyards will be the subjects of thematic Saturday night lantern tours this fall and winter.

It’s all “based on a program I did years ago at Fort Point (National Historic Site) at the Golden Gate Bridge,” said Greg Shine, park ranger and historian. “It was very popular to take visitors on a nighttime tour where they carried lanterns around. It’s the same physical place, but settings change so dramatically at night, it really makes these places super special.”

At Fort Vancouver, he added, the history is so rich and storied — and the staff so motivated to research and share — that nighttime tours took on a life of their own. With the East Barracks (in the center of the reserve area, east of Fort Vancouver Way) under renovation right now, “There are a lot of questions and a lot of interest, but there aren’t places where we can go in,” Shine said. “So we thought, how can we do something similar but different?”

The ongoing “Evening at the Fort” lantern tours feature re-enactors in period costumes who welcome you inside such sites as the Chief Factor’s house, the counting house and the fur store, and demonstrate what those characters might have been doing on an average evening in the 1840s.

The new “Walking Vacouver Barracks” tours are more thematic. You’ll walk around with a park ranger who’ll relate tales of special occasions during the “military era” of the park, which began with the establishment of a U.S. Army post there in 1849. These are expected to be smaller, more personal tours where storytelling itself is center stage.

These barracks tours will stay outdoors in all weather, so be prepared for rain, mud and uneven surfaces. All tours last about 90 minutes. Lantern holders must be at least 10 years old.

Runaway turkey

Thanksgiving was an informal custom for decades — celebrates on various dates in various locations — before it was designated a national holiday by Abraham Lincoln in 1863. After that, military offices were closed, and so were most businesses in town on that day, according to park guide Justine Hanrahan, as people attended duck-hunting parties, church services and even a masquerade ball.

Yes, that appears to have been a tradition in the late 1800s in Vancouver and Portland. According to historical artifacts and documents that the Park Service has, masquerade balls were held in downtown venues with names like Marsh’s Hall and Brant’s Hall, as well as at the brand-new National Guard Armory in Portland; rules about drinking and reveling would have been looser in these places than at the barracks, Hanrahan said. Hanrahan even has a list of the costumes in attendance at one 1880 affair; the real show stealers were several human dominos — one of them pink — and an Almighty Dollar.

A Mrs. Trope of Vancouver wanted to host such a feast, according to one newspaper clipping, but her turkey had other plans. Hanrahan summarized the news alert of the day this way: “Mrs. Trope’s turkey has gotten away. If you spot it, please return her turkey before Thanksgiving.”

“It’s gone way beyond just carrying a lantern around,” Shine said with satisfaction.