Battle of Germantown is Philly's 'loudest block party'

WHEN 200 re-enactors fight the 1777 Battle of Germantown on Saturday, Alex DiCesare, 20, will be firing his musket on the front lines while pondering the mystique of enemy British troops.

"The British usually get all the hot women as camp followers," DiCesare confided to the Daily News. "Their girls are eating salt pork and split-pea soup, yet they look like supermodels. I've never seen girls wear chemises like that.

"I can't wrap my head around it," DiCesare said drily. "To be honest, it's put the idea of defection into some people's heads more than once."

The Battle of Germantown will be re-enacted at noon and at 3 p.m. at historic Cliveden, Germantown Avenue near Cliveden Street, where it actually happened on Oct. 4, 1777.

"It's Philadelphia's loudest block party," said David Young, Cliveden's executive director.

The battle highlights the Revolutionary Germantown Festival, a free-admission day of food, drink, bagpipes and children's activities, including a kids' brigade armed with wooden muskets.

Jack Asher, the 80-year-old patriarch of Asher's Chocolates, has sponsored the battle for decades and still gets excited as another one approaches.

"You see the action!" he exclaimed. "You hear the noise! You see the colonials chase the British back into Chew House [at Cliveden]! You really get into the swing of things!

"What you're seeing is something that actually took place on this site," Asher said. "You're not looking at make-believe. This is it, baby!"

Young said Asher always worries about staging a great battle. "He tells me, 'We don't have enough British' or 'There's not enough meat in the sandwiches,' Young said. "Back in March, he was already breathing down my neck."

Asher said: "We pay for all the lunches and give stipends to the troops, and I present each re-enactor with a 1-pound bar of chocolate inscribed, 'Battle of Germantown, October 4, 1777.' If I ran out of those chocolate bars, I'd have to run out of town because they'd be chasing me."

Noah Lewis, who fights in the battle as African-American soldier Ned Hector, said that before he researched his genealogy, "my presuppositions about black culture during the colonial period were that black people were all slaves, all poor and only served in the military as manual laborers."

Lewis said that when he discovered he was related by marriage to Hector, "My mouth hung open. I was amazed. Ned Hector was a free man and a soldier who fought in the artillery, an elite unit, in the Battle of Brandywine and the Battle of Germantown."

When Lewis began portraying Hector in 1996, he said, "I threw together an outfit that I'm still being teased about to this day. I wore blue hospital scrubs, white knee socks, a woman's blouse with the collar tucked in and a mustard-yellow linen jacket. I thought it looked colonial.

"I still can't believe I had the stones to go to a reenactment dressed like that," Lewis said, laughing. "It was bad, man. I had no clue. A guy came up to me and said, 'You need to get some breeches, some stockings, some blah blah blah.' "

Lewis did. When he portrays Ned Hector, he said, "it frees me up to talk about the 3,000 to 5,000 people of color who fought in the American Revolution."

"I don't want people of color who paid the ultimate price with their lives to be forgotten by the people whose freedom they fought for," Lewis said. "If you are an American, you share an American history with people of color because these people helped you to be free."