This is serious business.
“When you’ve got this outfit on, you’ve got to be proper, and make sure you don’t do anything that would take away from Abraham Lincoln,” said Tom Wright, 71, from Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Indeed, when it comes to historical second skins, the attitude is as important as the accruements. “To me, this guy was important to the country because he saved the Union. I have to make sure that I don’t do anything that’s going to take away from that.”
Mr. Wright and his wife Sue joined some fifty other people this weekend at the Amicalola State Falls Lodge in Dawsonville Georgia for the twenty-fifth annual Association of Lincoln Presenters, a conference of reenactors, amateur historians, and Lincoln era enthusiasts.
There were twenty-two Abrahams, twelve Mary Todds, one Robert Todd, one Jefferson Davis, and one George Perkins Marsh (for the unknowing, Lincoln’s ambassador to Italy) gathered at Amicalola State Falls Lodge in Dawsonville, Georgia, for the 25th annual Association of Lincoln Presenters, which first met 1990 as a network of Lincoln era re-creators from across the country.
Photographed for TIME Magazine